YouTube Adventures

I continued reading and dabbling and kept my radar open for opportunities.  I purchased a small / cheap course on creating profitable YouTube channels.  Everything was simple and easy enough to understand.  

I noticed a small channel with videos of top songs every year. But it had horrible thumbnails and I knew I could do better. I downloaded the top 30 songs of every year from Billboard and took 20 second clips to stay under copyright. I taught myself basic video editing with Adobe Premiere.  I started stitching these clips together. The first few videos were pretty anemic, but I committed to creating 50 videos. After about 15-20 things started to snowball and engagements went through the roof. At the peak, the channel was getting 1-2M views/month resulting in $5-10k revenue.

It was a great start and really boosted my confidence. Unfortunately there wasn't a great way to continue to scale and grow the channel.

Black Friday Aftermath

Games were getting tight and more and more reg-infested when Black Friday hit.  April 15, 2011 is a date that forever changed poker.  That day, the US Government shutdown PokerStars and Full Tilt poker and seized their funds.

Overnight I was pretty broke and unemployed.  I had approximately $100K locked up between both sites.  I got my PokerStars funds within months, but it would take a few years before I got my Full Tilt money back.  

I knew a good number of people that moved overseas to play, but I was locked down with a house.  I'm not sure how I got by but it took me almost 6 months to find a job.  It's a real big hit to your identity and confidence to keep sending resumes and applications down black holes.  Eventually I started working as a Financial Analyst for a small Wealth Management firm.

The work was interesting at times, but when it came down to it, it just felt like babysitting for rich folks.  There wasn't much that you could do that was too brilliant or smart and was mostly managing people's emotions.  The boss and I were a bad personality fit, but ultimately I just had a HUGE chip on my shoulder that I was meant for more and needed to do my own thing.

I'm Alive !!!

Wow, can't believe it's been 16 years.  I've been taking steps back into the poker world over the past year.  A lot has happened since then, will most likely have to catch up over multiple posts.  But to tide you over, a nice little spicy hand from this past week.

$1/3 NL, $300 stack effective

UTG raises to 10, and villain solid-reg calls behind.  I'm on the BTN and raise it to 65 with AKo.  Blinds and UTG fold, and villain tank calls.

Flop is JJT rainbow.  Villain checks, and I check behind.  I can't rep much, and I don't want him to blow me off my equity.

Turn is 5.  Villain checks, and I check again for pot-control and figure he's calling any bet with mid pocket pairs that are beating me.

River is T.  Villain bombs it for $200 and I snap-call.  He says I'm good, and I table the A-high to the amazement of the whole table.  Pretty easy call imo.  My pre-flop raise strongly defined his range and he's never calling with any hand that has a J or T unless it's specifically JJ or TT.  I put him on counterfeited mid pocket pair and his river bet was just super bluffy.