Guten Morgen! I’m writing now from Vienna, Austria where Mickey and I have called the district of Gasometer City our home for the past week! We have been here for WPT Baden where Mickey did very well, winning the High Roller event for 50,000 Euro$. I’ve mainly been hanging out and exploring Vienna and Baden. It’s been alternately snowing, raining, and slushing so it has been difficult to do much sightseeing, but yesterday we did get a chance to check out the Max Ernst exhibit at the Albertina museum. With all the live poker we haven’t had much of an opportunity to grind online this week, but we are heading back to London today and I’m looking forward to getting back to my usual tournament schedule.
Now that I have relocated to London, I have been grinding Pokerstars like a fiend, playing every MTT I can within my waking hours. I have a simple yet very effective setup with a 27″ monitor, my laptop, and a wireless mouse and keyboard. It’s been amazing being back online. After dealing with the utterly dismal US-facing sites for the last year and a half, playing on a real poker platform with a real player pool and huge tournaments is incredible. I still need to adjust to the huge fields in Pokerstars tournaments, since I became accustomed to grinding on sites where there is a lot less traffic. It’s an added bonus that Pokerstars even has Womens tournaments that are becoming very popular, and I hop in these whenever I see a pink title in the lobby :)
So I just saw that WBCOOP was about to begin, and I thought I’d submit an entry in the hope of playing the series! In 2011, WBCOOP was one of my last memories playing on Pokerstars before Black Friday and the demise of online poker in the USA. When the DOJ allowed Pokerstars to refund US player balances, the only thing in my account was a $215 tournament ticket I won in a WBCOOP event. It was converted to cash and wired to my bank. Unfortunately, the same thing did not occur with Full Tilt, where nearly all the money I’d made from poker until that point was (and still is) stuck.
I never imagined that it would be 2013 and the US would still be no closer to having legal online poker, but I’m fortunate that my online teaching job allows me to work from anywhere in the world. In 2012 I was able to rebuild my bankroll on the US-facing sites, but nothing compares to playing on a real site like Pokerstars with a wide variety of tournaments running all day and substantial guarantees (even on the weekdays)! My best poker moment has to be the moment I regained access to my account, and every moment since! I’ve already had some crazy swings, but 2013 has been great so far and it’s just awesome to be back to work. I’m excited to play some WBCOOP events and hopefully improve on my 2011 performance!
XO,
thegroupie
