A lot has gone on in my life the this year so far. First off, I have switched to a vegan diet on the recommendation of my doctors. While this sounded like an awful idea to me at first, after having been on it for over 3 weeks now, I am actually loving it and can’t imagine going back to my old diet. It turns out a diet rich with meat (for me anyway) is really not a good thing for my body. My body doesn’t process meat well and was not working well for me and my heart. Before going vegan, I experienced palpitations in my heart 50-100 times a day that always made me feel uncomfortable. Over the last 3 weeks I barely even notice my heart anymore as it beats regularly now. I also feel much better. I have shed 25 pounds since November of last year to drop to 182 pounds. I usually gain weight in the winter (since the weather sucks here in Oregon) and lose weight in the summer as I play lots of golf. So I am excited to see what I can get down to by next November after playing a bit of golf.

Speaking of Oregon, I am back here now after spending a good deal of time down in California playing golf tournaments. I announced at the start of the year that I was going to focus on golf this year but unfortunately that didn’t end up happening the way I had envisioned. I could not work it out with my family to move down to southern California which caused a lot of tension, but fortunately things are going well now. My golf aspirations are likely never going to come to fruition, but I have my family in tact and that is a good thing.

Golf went pretty good considering I hadn’t played competitively in forever. I didn’t shoot above 74 in any individual competitive round and won one event on the Pepsi tour. I consider that pretty good given I hadn’t played in forever and was excited to see how things would go after a few years of playing full time. But I am back and focusing on poker once more now and am having some fun with that.

Getting my game back in good multi tabling shape has been a challenge. I am working hard on getting my game in shape for the mass multi tabling stress that is associated with playing your best over many tables. When I review hands and talk about hands, I feel my game is better than ever. And over 3-4 tables, I am playing VERY good for me at the moment. But I am not handling mass tabling well. I am making far too many mistakes. Namely calling down too light trying to find a few combos of hands that I beat and also running bluffs that just aren’t going to be successful often enough to show a profit. I have been making a little bit of money overall in the past few weeks while running 40 buy ins below EV according to HEM, but I still know I am making way too many mistakes and that is costing me big at the tables.

It is going to be a process to get back into it. The games are much more intellectually challenging than they were several years ago and success won’t happen overnight. Just like a break from golf is going to cost me strokes, a break from poker will do the same. The two sports aren’t really that different. I expect within the next 2-3 months at most that I will be playing some very good poker and am excited to see what kind of win rates I can attain. Right now I would guess I am making 500 big blinds a day in mistakes over a full days play and that is quite a lot. I am excited to reduce those mistakes in game time play and see what happens from there.

Funny story. Back when I was a 2/4 limit holdem grinder trying to make ends meet back in 2005 and 2006 on America’scardroom.com (which then was a part of the ongame network) a guy named Phil who worked for the site used to call me quite a bit and hook me up with bonuses to encourage me to continue grinding on that site. We would chat on the phone and I always found him to be absolutely hilarious. When I moved to Poker Stars to play the no limit, we lost touch. But a couple of years ago we connected again and I have got to hang out with him in Vegas and the Dominican Republic. He is a great guy and recently he got me pumped to play some MTT events over on America’s Card Room. I was amazed to learn that they have a $250k guarantee event on the first anniversary of Black Friday (April 15 NEVER FORGET). I say that like it is 9/11 since it kinda was in our world. Anyway, if you are looking for a big event with a soft field, come join me in that event. <a href=”http://www.americascardroom.eu“>Americas Cardroom</a> is where the event is at. Soft fields and $250k guaranteed seems like a nice way to spend the day instead of mourning the day that will live in infamy for us online grinders.

I am hoping to get in there and blog more. To be honest I was going through a tumultuous time in my life and I just kind of retreated from doing a lot of the things I normally do. I even took a little break from making videos for about 6 weeks, but I made about 5 in the last 2 weeks that will be out soon. I wanted to be sure my head was clear enough to make a video with my best stuff and just didn’t feel I was in a position mentally to do that. I feel solid now and I hope you guys enjoy the content that will come out in the near future.

Until next time, may all your cards be live and your pots be monsters. OK I completely robbed that from Mike Sexton, but seriously though, run good!

I started off the week playing a practice round on Monday for a 3 day event in Oceanside, CA. The course was bizarre and pretty bad to be honest. The course was called Arrow Wood Golf Club and it was a shortish course (only 6,800 yards) with fairly wide fairways. The only rub was that on about 75% of the holes if you did miss the fairway by more than 5-10 yards, you were going to either be in a hazard or OB. As long as you were hitting it decently, you should tear it up. But if you got a little wild off the tee, you were going to be in for a very long day.

Fortunately for me I was striping it off the tee. I only missed 4 fairways the whole tournament and they were mostly just a few yards off the short grass. I also hit some really nice iron shots and put myself in a great position to shoot some low scores. Unfortunately my chipping and putting (which is usually the best part of my game) was abysmal and that cost me a chance to win the golf tournament.

On day 1 I shot 74 and it was the best tee to green 74 I have ever shot. If I had any clue what I was doing around the greens, I would have shot 65. I think I missed 6 putts inside of 5 feet and missed a boatload of putts aside from those short ones that I could have made. I had one stretch where I 3 putted 3 holes in a row from inside 12 feet for birdie. Let’s just say I wasn’t a happy camper after that!

After such a poor putting performance, I spent 2 hours before the round on day 2 working on my putting. That meant an early wake up call for a poker player, but you gotta do what you gotta do. The work paid off quite nicely and by the time I got to the 15th tee, I was 5 under par for the round. I hit a 5 iron in the bunker and chunked my bunker shot some 50 feet away and 3 putted. I made some routine pars on 16 and 17 and then hit my tee shot down the middle on 18. The hole location was cur right over the water but I wasn’t too concerned about that. Maybe I should have been. I hit my 9 iron right at the flag but didn’t completely flush it and it landed about 6 feet from the pin and spun back into the water and I made a 6! So I gave back a potentially good round and finished with a 70.

Day 3 was more of the same. I missed 1 fairway and 4 greens (3 of which were on the fringe) and made nothing and shot 71. That should have gotten me a small paycheck of $500, but I learned that I was penalized 2 strokes for something that happened on day 1. On day 1 I hit it into the fairway bunker on 18 and it had a big lip on it. I played the shot out of the bunker and went for the green which was right over the lake. I thought I hit a pretty good shot, but when I ran out of the bunker to see where it went, I saw a splash so I thought it went in the lake somehow. I wasn’t sure though because I thought I hit a good shot so I decided to play a provisional ball in case it went in the water. I figured I could play a provisional ball and then go up to the green to see if my ball cleared the hazard and save the group some time. As I had just dropped the ball, a player in my group said that my ball was on the green about 20 feet from the hole. I went to pick up my provisional ball and the guy told me not to and he thought I might have to accept the penalty by virtue of dropping the ball.

I decided to play 2 balls which is allowed under the rules in these cases and take it up with a rules official. When I got into the clubhouse he told me that there was no penalty. Later on the rules official called the USGA and they said the official made the wrong ruling and I ended up having to add 2 strokes and that cost me a paycheck unfortunately. It is obviously a stupid rule and I thought a lot about it and I have no idea how it makes logical sense to penalize a player in that spot. I hit the ball on the green 20 feet away and somehow by virtue of dropping a ball on the ground I somehow get 2 strokes added! Oh well, it is a stupid rule, but I need to know them all since there is nothing I can do to change them so you live and you learn.

I had a great lesson yesterday with a guy named John Ray Leary who is someone I grew up playing junior golf with. He has some PGA tour experience and is now doing some coaching. I have been working with Michael Neff in Portland, but needed someone to keep an eye on me while I am in California so it is great to get to work a little with John since they both have similar beliefs on the golf swing. It is great to have great coaches whether I am in Oregon or California so I am pretty excited about that.

It has been fun trying to work on the game of golf the way I work on my poker game. Looking back, I didn’t know how to practice golf anywhere near as good as I do now. I feel now like I understand the formula for how to work on things whether it be golf, poker or anything truthfully. It is important to practice and prepare for everything you do in the most efficient and sensible manner possible. The work I have done with poker is undoubtedly going to be huge for my golf game. It has been a lot like working on poker to be honest. Especially when I get into the swing labs and I can see that for example a PGA tour player might have there shoulders tilted at 42 degrees (I am making these numbers up) and I am at 47 degrees, then I need to obviously adjust that. Just like in HEM where I might see that a great player check raises 15% in certain spots, if I am only doing it 7%, I might want to work on increasing that number. So it has been quite fun to work on my golf game in a way that I can easily relate to with poker.

Next week I have an event on Monday at El Camino CC and I might play one on Wednesday at Brookside golf club next to the Rose Bowl. I love that golf course, but I need to look for a place to live down here so I may have to take that day to find a place.

So to wrap it up, I have shot 74-74-70-71 in my 4 tournament rounds so far to start my journey. All in all, I am already seeing improvement and while I am not setting the world on fire, all in all it is not a terrible start given where I am coming from.

The clock is really ticking before Cardoza takes over the rights to my books. We are approaching “last call” for original versions of my books. If you are interested in my books, please go to http://dustyschmidt.net and enter code DUSTY to receive 50% off the already reduced price. I think you can get both of my books for something like $25 once you apply the discount, so please take advantage of these cheap prices before they go up substantially when Cardoza takes over.

Today I played my first tournament of the year at Temecula Creek golf club on the Golden State tour. It was great to be back playing. It felt “right” being out there. The weather was fantastic as was the condition of the course. Unfortunately my golf game left something to be desired as a struggled to a 74 to finish in the middle of the pack.

I had a lot of things working against me today. First off, I haven’t even played a single round of golf in over 2 months. I have hit less than 500 balls the last 2 months as well. I also am not used to waking up as early as I have to for golf, so I need to adjust my body clock. It was also hard for me to achieve the laser focus I often have on the golf course. It has been awhile since I have played of course, so I guess this is all to be expected.

It felt very weird playing a golf tournament having not played golf in awhile. Normally when I am playing golf tournaments, I play and practice every day and so when I go out there, I have a good idea what to expect and I am in the groove of playing, and more importantly, in the groove of getting the ball in the hole. One of my best attributes in golf is the ability to turn a 74 into a 70 or 69. And turn a 69 into a 65. Today I turned a 69 into a 74. I didn’t strike the ball great, but I didn’t hit any foul balls and the course was easy enough where I should be able to shoot in the 60s nearly every time I tee it up when I am in the groove of playing. But it’s just going to take some time, no question.

I had a choice between taking a month to prepare to compete and just throwing myself in with the wolves right off the bat, even though I knew I wasn’t playing a lot. I chose to just go for it and play golf tournaments A. because I am anxious to play and B. because I really think if you are not someone who is afraid to play with less than your best stuff, it is optimal to just play and compete right away because it will just help you get better quicker. For example, if I am working on things on the range and putting and chipping greens for a month, then I also need to test it out in competition and get comfortable with things.

That process can take awhile. But if I just work on things while I compete, then I don’t have to worry about seeing if the changes will make their way to the course. I think it is best to go out there and do what Nike tells you to do and “Just do it!” Heck, I am a 30 year old who hasn’t competed in 7 years on a regular basis. There is no time to waste anymore. It is now or never! :) That might mean I struggle at the outset, but I am not afraid to post some bad rounds if it means it makes me better quicker.

The next few days I am going to work with some students in the morning on poker and then work on my golf game in the afternoons. I may play a few hands at night if I get bored as well. My next event is a Golden State Tour event at Arrowood and it is a 3 day event. The event is on the 10-12 of January and I am really excited about that because that means I can prepare for a few days and also get 3 more tournament rounds under my belt which should be very helpful.

Prior to this summer, I hadn’t played much in years and this summer I found a pretty good groove after about 20 rounds and was able to play some good rounds after about 6-7 rounds actually. I hope things come back that soon this time. That would be pretty cool and should set up some good opportunities to grab a win in February. I definitely want my game to be sound by then because the first week of February I play in a 3 day event at Pebble Beach. You definitely need your A game out there because obviously that is a US open course and it will expose you pretty hard if you aren’t up to the challenge. God I love that place. I am already getting anxious to get out there and play. An argument can be made that there is no other place I would rather be on this earth than Pebble Beach.

For those that aren’t familiar with my background, I basically lived, breathed and slept golf from ages 8-23. It was literally all I cared about outside of friends and family of course. At one point I believed so strongly that golf was my only way to happiness that I once told my parents that, “If I had a crystal ball right now and it told me I would never play on the PGA tour, I would rather just die now than endure a life without a career on the PGA tour.” It meant that much to me.

I was very inconsistent with how I played. At times it seemed I was a can’t miss for the PGA tour, and at other times, no one would have given me even a fraction of a chance to make it. My golf game just never showed up day in and day out. Most of this was due to a lack of proper instruction and opportunity that other kids had. While they were getting lessons from folks who knew what it took to make it, I was often left observing their lessons from a distance and trying to apply it to my own game. And while my peers were playing in the most prestigious events in the country, I was often left at home despite being eligible to play due to a lack of funds. I simply lacked the opportunity. And unlike poker where the barrier to entry is small and literally anyone with an internet connection and a few hundred bucks can receive the very best poker instruction in the world, golf requires a lot of funding to really do it right.

At this point in my life, I am 30 years old and the chances of having a career on the PGA tour are fading fast, but it isn’t over yet. My chances are infinitesimally small of making the big time, but I have overcome far longer odds before in my life. I won’t let that intimidate me.

At 23 years old, I was finally getting some momentum in the game of golf. I was leading the money list on the Golden State golf tour (which is basically the equivalent of single A minor league baseball) when I suffered a heart attack that abruptly ended my career, at least for the time being. I remember distinctly laying on the hospital bed with my heart feeling like it was jumping out of my chest and thinking, “This can’t be it for me. I can’t die having achieved virtually nothing I wanted to achieve. This can’t be the end of my story.” Luckily I was able to survive.

I then channeled my energies towards poker. I couldn’t believe that I was able to find something that could satisfy my competitive cravings from the comfort of my own home. Having competed virtually every single day at golf for 15 years, it was miserable having nowhere to channel that energy. Then along came poker and wow was I hooked. It took me a couple million hands to really get the hang of how to play at a high level, but in less than 4 years from the date of my heart attack, was able to look at a bank balance north of a million dollars and that was when the wheels started turning again about taking the game of golf seriously again.

Over the past several years, I haven’t taken golf super seriously of course. But every summer I have been chipping away at making changes in my swing that would enable me to play at my desired level. I sought out the best instruction possible. I worked with 2 time PGA tour winner Brian Henninger for almost a year and that really opened my eyes to what I needed to be doing in my golf swing. It was like a light bulb went off in my head and while the swing changes are far from being completely ingrained, I was able to play a lot of golf this summer and found that while my best stuff was only marginally better, my worse stuff was miles better. I used to literally hit the ball crooked when I was struggling to the point where I just had no chance. But now my worst stuff is almost as good as my old B game used to be. Bad swings are now usually 10 yards off the fairway rather than 50. It feels like I have a chance now.

My short game has always been strong. In fact my good friend and PGA tour winner Kevin Na once told me that he wished he could be as good around the greens as I was. Kevin is now a perennial top 10 leader in up and down percentage on tour, so I took that as quite a compliment coming from him. While I do think he was probably being overly nice, there is a lot of truth to that. I have always been able to get the ball in the hole very well. I got so used to hitting the ball all over the planet (relative to PGA tour players anyway) that I simply had to be good around the greens to have any chance. Now that I can keep the ball in play much more frequently, I am excited to see if I can capitalize on that with my short game.

I did play 2 golf tournaments this past summer after a 7 year absence and was able to shoot rounds of 74-72-71 to win my club championship at Pumpkin Ridge golf club (site of Tiger’s 3rs straight US amateur win) and then shocked myself and nearly everyone I know when I was tied for the lead with 13 holes to play in the Idaho State Open this summer. I shot rounds of 65-67 to reach the penultimate pairing and then birdied 3 holes in a row early in the round to grab a share of the lead. I struggled home to a 73 from that point, but I found out that I could play this game again, which was very exciting to me.

On January 3rd I am going to hop in the car and drive down from Portland, OR to southern California to start my journey. On the 5th I am entered in my first event back, which is the Golden State tour event at Temecula Creek. I have 14 tournament days in January alone, and 18 in February. I simply could not be more excited. While I am down there I am going to look for a place to rent a house and my family will eventually come down to join me down here while I am pursuing my dream of playing golf competitively day in and day out. I am not sure how long I will do it for since a lot depends on what transpires with poker and what kind of progress I am making with my golf game. Honestly, I actually hope this is the end of the road for me with taking poker as seriously as I have for the past 6 years, but it probably won’t be.

I would obviously love nothing more than to make it to the PGA or Nationwide tour in golf. And if I do that, playing poker full time will be just a distant memory. But in all likelihood this will just be a break from poker. While I am pursuing golf, I will still be making videos as well as playing 20-25k hands a month of poker so that I be sure not to let my skills diminish. At the end of the day, golf is a long shot for me to really make a career out of it, and poker is what is going to pay the bills for me. More importantly, should my kids decide to take the game seriously some day, nothing will be more important to me than being sure that they don’t lack opportunity the way I did. It would obviously break my heart if I couldn’t support them in golf or anything else they may decide to do. I don’t want them to struggle the way I did.

I honestly have no expectations for now with golf other than to practice and prepare as well as I can, and to give it my best each and every day. I guess you could say my goals are all process oriented right now. Even though I have practiced very little the past 3 months, I felt it was important to throw myself in with the wolves right off the bat and see where my game is at. Tournament golf will expose you like nothing else. So I should have a good idea by the end of January what I need to work on. And those experiences will go a long way towards figuring out how to keep getting better and better. My only expectation is that my leaks will quickly become exposed and then I can get to the real work.

The only thing that really matters throughout the year is how you play at PGA tour school. You can win every tournament and have a bad week at qualifying school (which will be staged in the Fall) and most players will consider their year a failure. Quite honestly, I am chasing the experience of playing golf competitively day in and day out with no financial barriers for instruction or opportunity, as much as I will be chasing a PGA tour card. I definitely won’t consider 2012 a failure if I don’t make it on the tour. The only way I fail is if I don’t give it my best. And for those that know me, that means that my chances of failure are very low.

I will be keeping my eye on the pulse of the poker games by playing and of course the pending licensing and regulating of online poker here in the US will be of particular interest to me as well. My hope is that poker comes back as soon as possible, of course. Although, part of me deep down inside hopes it just comes back with a huge bang in about 5 years so I am not torn between big $ and my dream of playing golf. I really don’t want to be in a position where I am making a ton of progress in golf, but yet the poker games online are good enough to make 7 figures a year. That would obviously be a an amazingly good problem to have, but wow, if I were in that position, Holy Shit I don’t know what I would do! But of course, wow do I hope I am in that position!

For all those who have supported me in poker throughout the years and want to keep a passive interest in my golf game, I am still keeping my blog and will likely update it much more frequently. It will be a mixture of golf and poker, with maybe a slight emphasis on golf now since I will be doing more of that than golf. I will be sure to keep everyone posted on my progress as always.

I am also proud to announce that Scott Brown and I are making some wonderful progress on Treat Your Poker Like A Business 2. We have all of the publishing options sorted out, and we expect (and this time we mean it haha) a Spring 2012 release. Since it gets dark early in the winter months which means I can’t play golf after 5 or 6 o clock, and the fact that I will be away from my family quite a bit for the next 5-6 weeks, I have committed to banging out the rest of the book in the evenings. We are about 50% done as of this exact moment, and our expectation is to complete the book and release it at least temporarily this Spring on my website. At this point I have literally received 1,000 messages from folks who have read Treat Your Poker Like A Business asking when part 2 was coming out. That has been inspiring, no question. Thanks to everyone for writing!

We have only 30 days at this point to sell the remaining copies of Treat Your Poker Like A Business and Don’t Listen To Phil Hellmuth at my website before they go out of print temporarily. Cardoza Publishing, the same group that did Super System, among others, will take over the rights in 30 days and then they will release them in bookstores nationwide later in the year. So please take advantage of the last opportunity to get these books. In fact, you can get them for 50% the already reduced price by entering code DUSTY at DustySchmidt.net

Well, I am off to the driving range to get ready for the season. You can’t ever practice this crazy game enough….

On the flip side, I can honestly say I have never run worse at poker than I have this month on Black Chip. After my epic start building $200 into $18,000, I have only about $12,000 in there now. I have run 25 buy ins behind EV on the month, and it has been incredibly frustrating. Even though I knew I was running bad, anytime that happens, I always get an insatiable desire to improve because I guess I feel like I want to have better control over my results. So I watched about 25 videos this month and took over 8,000 words of notes. I broke down my opponents games, and just grinded on it very hard. I also drastically reduced the number of tables I was playing because I realized that I basically suck at multi tabling more than 6-7 tables. I bet some of my opponents were scratching their heads at some of the laughably bad decisions I was making from time to time when I was on 12 tables.

After a few bad decisions and once I realized I was missing some great bluffing spots and not correctly interpreting my opponents lines as well as I wanted, I dropped down in tables and felt much more confident and spotted a lot of opportunities that I was missing. It sucks that the only way to really make a lot of money in poker over the long haul is to play so many tables, because I much, much prefer to take my time with each and every decision. Mass multi tabling 100BB poker kinda sucks imo, especially since everyone has gotten so much better, mostly thanks to the HUD. I have said it before but I can’t say it enough, the HUD is the worst thing to happen to poker and I really wish they would get rid of it through basically eliminating the hand history. But I have talked about that plenty, so I am not going to rant on anymore about that! If nothing else, I hope 200BB + poker is something we can look forward to in the future someday. I think the HUD will become much less useful in a game like that and I really hope we can see more of that stuff, although I think it is somewhat unlikely.

Yesterday was honestly one of the hardest days of my life. I was playing some tables and I heard a big thud downstairs followed by hysterical screaming. My wife ran upstairs and said our daughter needed to go to the hospital. I was in a bunch of hands, but my opponents got a little gift because I instantly logged out and through some street clothes on and took my daughter to the hospital. She spun around on the couch and landed on the edge of the end table and cut her lip wide open and injured her nose as well. She was a bloody mess.

I got her and put her in the car seat and went to the nearest hospital. On the way there, she was just staring at me and crying very hard. Her tears were running down her bloody face and she was saying, “Dada, it huwwwts.” I tried to comfort her the best that I could while driving and mostly having to look away from her since her car seat is in the back. But there wasn’t much I could do other than assure her she was going to be OK.

We got to the hospital and they were able to take care of everything thankfully. She was bouncing around and having a good time later that day, but man, it was really hard on me all day. I had nightmares all night and didn’t get a lot of sleep. It is amazing how much you love your kids. I know almost every parent reading this probably knows exactly what I am talking about.

I want to also let everyone know that we only have about 1 month left before my books will temporarily be out of print. You can get some of the last remaining original copies of Treat Your Poker Like A Business and Don’t Listen To Phil Hellmuth at http://www.dustyschmidt.net at 50% off the already reduced price by entering code DUSTY. Since the feds recently said the wire act no longer applies to online poker and it looks pretty good us Americans will be playing fairly soon, now is as good a time as ever to get a copy!

Much has been made in the recent deliberations in congress about the concept of a rating system. What some consumer protection people (as good as their intentions may be) seem to be advocating is for a rating system for poker players much in the same way online chess rates players. An analogy that I feel is flawed was recently used saying something to the effect of recreational online poker players will be logging in with no information available to them which would be the equivalent of a guy looking to play a pickup basketball game and not realizing he is playing a bunch of NBA players.
Another point that was made was that in poker, the consumer has no idea what they are spending (in terms of EV) on their entertainment. For example, if you know a slot machine pays back 90% and you make $1,000 worth of bets, then your entertainment costs you $100. The fear is that in poker, the consumer has no idea what their entertainment costs. Since it is impossible to quantify how bad they will get their money in, this presents an unknown in terms of what their entertainment costs. That is their case anyway.

I will detail below my response to these analogies that are flying around.

Here are my concerns:

• The first concern that I have is how do you create a fair and equitable rating system? Poker has a tremendous amount of variance associated with it. I have perhaps one of the largest sample sizes of hands played of anyone. I have played nearly 10 million hands in my career. At identical stakes, I have had periods in the prime of my career where I have played 100,000 hands of breakeven poker and 100,000 hand stretches where I have won close to $200,000. If I were to start my career on the new licensed and regulated poker platforms losing money in my first 100,000 hands what is that doing to help the average consumer? On the flip side, if I were to be very lucky for my first 100,000 hands, how does this benefit the consumer?

While I think it is a huge unknown how a strong rating might affect a good player’s ability to play against weaker opponents, it is reasonable to expect that some with high ratings might not want that to be known publicly. Might that encourage some to commit fraud and create accounts in the names of friends or relatives so that they can obtain a fresh account? Obviously the aim of licensed and regulated poker should not be to incentivize players to engage in fraud. The opposite result is what we all crave.

I think that it is also very difficult to determine how exactly we are rating players over time. What if someone’s skill deteriorates? Are we just rating the last 10,000 hands? 100,000 hands? 1M hands? The life of the account? I think it is very tough to come up with a fair way to do this. If it is for the life of the account, then we run into the same problem of how to rate people in the first place. If it is for the last 10k or 100k hands, once someone’s rating got very good, then they are just going to play 24 tables at once at micro stakes and in a matter of days or weeks, turn their rating to something horrible and then rinse and repeat.

I think it is also important to look at the situation from the perspective of the weaker player as well. After all, that is who a consumer protection agency is mostly protecting anyway. How will a weaker player feel if they want to go to a table and play for $500 or $1,000 dollars and the first thing everyone sees is how awful their rating is? Many people like online poker for the anonymity of the whole experience. Many do not like to play at a live table where they might make an embarrassing play and feel ridicule. With a rating system, they are going to feel embarrassed the moment they sit down. In fact, seeing such a poor rating is going to cause everyone with a good rating to immediately flock to the table to try and sit with the poor player. Now the poor player is actually going to spend EVEN MORE money on their entertainment because they are now competing against competition that would far exceed how strong the table they sat at might have been if his results were unknown and the better players hadn’t been so wise to prey upon them!

This is of course the opposite of what we want to achieve. I see a rating system in this case to have essentially the same effect as the “fish finding programs” many pros use to find weaker players. With a rating system, this information is now made immediately available to everyone scanning the poker lobby which I think is counterproductive to the cause.

• I strongly believe that online poker should aim to emulate the experience of brick and mortar poker as much as possible. When I walk into a poker room, I do not have any information on my opponents unless I personally recognize them. Why should I be automatically given a wealth of information about my opponents when I play online in the form of a rating system? If I know I am sitting with someone who has a top level rating, I will know literally hundreds of things about that opponents game right off the bat. I know that almost all great players check raise the flop between 14-20% of the time. I know that they will almost always play approximately 25% of their starting hands and raise approximately 20% of the time. I know that after they raise before the flop, they will bet the flop between 60-75% of the time. They will also follow through with a bet on the turn approximately 45-50% of the time. I will stop there because I think you get my point. A rating system does not achieve emulating actual poker.

One of my big points with disallowing HUDS is that I want to emulate the experience of playing actual poker as much as possible. In live poker, I am not spoon fed information on all of my opponents through the form of a heads up display like I am online. Which is why I would like to see HUDS completely outlawed (which will also mean that the only way to effectively enforce this is to eliminate the ability for players to retrieve their hand histories in the manner they do now) or as a 2nd best option, HUDS provided to each and every customer upon signing up for an online poker room. I think a rating system brings with it many of the same problems that a HUD does.

• How can we effectively create a rating system? Is it from total money won? Or is it from your win rate? If it is from your win rate, then what is to prevent someone from simply losing purposely at low stakes games to artificially lower their win rate and rating? If it is from total money won, then it could possibly unfairly penalize consumers who happen to be lucky the times they feel like playing higher stakes games and give them high ratings undeservedly. One MAJOR point is that if someone is rated highly, then why should their income essentially become public knowledge? If we are basing it on money won, then people will know what they make. I don’t think that poker rooms should be making this information public. Publicizing how much a consumer wins seems counterproductive to wanting to protect the consumer.

• How will a rating system protect the consumer anymore than they are already protected through being able to choose what stakes games they play? I can’t imagine too many people will actually be protected by this. It is virtually common knowledge amongst anyone who understands poker (and who would actually be willing to deposit a meaningful amount of money on the poker room) that the higher the stakes you play, the better the competition is. I don’t think there are going to be too many people who deposit large sums of money expecting it to be as easy at high stakes as it is at low stakes games.

• A rating system will do nothing for the most popular form of poker anyway. Tournament poker is the most played form of poker to my knowledge. When someone enters the event, they are paired at random with others. A rating system for these players would dramatically alter the nature of the competition itself if people were to be paired up at random and then be spoon fed information on how well their opponent plays. Not to mention, how does this protect the consumer? If they see a bunch of very good players, it is against the rules for them to quit the tournament and be refunded their money if they choose to quit. I think having tournaments with buy ins of as little as $1 and as high as $10,000 (like what currently exists on Poker Stars) is adequate enough “warning” for the consumer. Any reasonable consumer should know that the more money you compete for, the better the competition will be. I think this is common sense.

• While this is not necessarily a new point, I think it deserves mention that part of the skill in poker is to deceive your opponent. It is the nature of the game itself. Deception is essentially a skill that every poker player aims to improve at all times. To try and remove deception as much as possible and provide clear cut choices for the protection of the poker consumer is just not feasible in this specific game. In chess, a rating system makes sense for many reasons. People want to play against people with similar skill sets in most cases. There is not money involved in online chess. With poker, people sign on to play a game where deception is one of the fundamental components to the game itself. There is a reason we don’t turn our hole cards over for the table to see! Deceiving opponents into thinking in a way about your play that is contradictory to the way you actually play is fundamental to the game itself. To essentially have your results publicized unwillingly gives away information about your game that takes away from one of the fundamental skills in poker.

• What are the goals of a rating system? I am a believer that poker is viewed by most as not only a form of entertainment, but also a sport that perhaps one day they can become skilled enough that they can do it for a living. Over 100,000 people have read my book, Treat Your Poker Like A Business (which is now 50% off using code DUSTY) presumably all of which did so because they either already make poker their career and want to improve, or would like to make poker their career one day.

I don’t think people want to play poker for the same reasons they play a slot machine. So while empowering them with informed decisions makes sense, as a whole, poker has become very much a sport and one in which anyone; no matter how short or tall, skinny or fat, poor or rich, can legitimately work at and hope to one day realize their dreams of becoming a professional poker player. This is one of the strongest things the game has going for itself. The more we can create a level playing field, the healthier the sport becomes and the more legitimate a career in poker is perceived. I don’t believe that we should try and treat poker exactly like a slot machine, a lottery or any other comparable form of gambling. Poker is a game of skill. I believe that the primary goal should be to preserve the integrity of the game itself. I do not believe a rating system does anything above and beyond the protections offering stakes as low as 1 cent 2 cent and incrementally increasing to as high as $500/$1,000 already does. I think it is common sense that the lower stakes you play, the weaker the opponents will be.

Alternative suggestions to protect the consumer:

• I think what we can do instead is give consumers information suggesting that they play limits that best reflect what limits they should play. Perhaps a test could be given (for which they could opt out of taking if they don’t care to take the test) that would indicate what limit they should have a reasonable chance to profit from.

• Perhaps the poker rooms themselves could publicize how much money a typical player with the skill set they have (based on their test score) typically loses per every 100 hands they play? This would help the consumer make more informed choices. I thought Kurt Eggert made an interesting point in his congressional testimony when he said slot machines sometimes pay out 98% and sometimes as low as 85% (and probably lower in some cases). So effectively the consumer does not know if $1,000 worth of wagering costs them $20 for their entertainment or $150. I get that point. In poker, it is obviously impossible to accurately inform the consumer what they are spending, but perhaps some historical data from players with similar skill sets might better inform them than a rating system.

• Setting deposit limits, stop losses and times of the day their account will not let them log in (to protect people from playing drunk on weekend nights when they do not want to) would be tremendously beneficial to them. None of this should be mandatory in my opinion, but allowing the consumer to set these settings on their account and not making effective any changes they make to their account for 48 or 72 hours (to protect them from changing their settings automatically) would make a lot of sense.

If I were to make one point and one point only about the subject, I think the strongest is that the hierarchy of stakes ranging from .01/.02 blinds to $500/$1,000 blinds and everywhere in between does the best job of protecting consumers I can think of. I don’t think anyone would feel surprised to find out that the competition gets better as the stakes increase. I think that the wide variety of stakes does a great job of protecting the consumers and a rating system is too convoluted and does nothing to protect the consumer.

The reason for this sale is not because the books aren’t selling and we are simply trying to give them away, but rather because the rights to each of these books have recently been acquired by Cardoza publishing, the same published of Super System, Super System 2 and many other legendary titles. We have been given a very short time frame to liquidate our remaining inventory. After that time expires, you will not be able to purchase either of these copies until they hit the bookshelves in stores across the country and the price will go back up substantially.

So if you are interested in either of these book titles, you should buy them now not only because you won’t be able to buy them until they hit the bookstores in Spring of 2012, but also because they will become much more expensive. To get 50% off the already reduced price. If any poker business is interested in buying a large number of copies for whatever reason, please get in touch with me directly at leatherasscoaching@gmail.com. This is the last chance to get the original versions of one of the most popular poker books in recent years and I hope people will take advantage of that opportunity.

I just got back 2 days ago from a really great golf trip to Bandon Dunes golf resort. We played Bandon Crossings, Bandon Trails, Old Macdonald and Pacific Dunes. I improved my score each day shooting a 74,73,72 and 66 respectively. The last day was a round I will not soon forget. After a par on #1, I made a 10 footer for birdie on #2, a 40 footer for birdie on #3, a 50 footer for birdie on #4, a 35 footer for birdie on #5 and a 10 foot birdie putt on #6 for 5 birdies in a row. I caught the lip on #7 from 20 feet for 6 straight. I cooled off after that, playing even par for the remaining holes to shoot a very memorable 66. The wind was down a little by Pacific Dunes standards during the last round. It was only blowing 7-8 MPH with some gusts to about 15 MPH. That helped me to be able to get at some pins I might not normally be able to get to which is kind of fun because I usually play Pac Dunes in huge winds and it is quite a grind.

I just love that 13th hole at Pac Dunes. Wow, what a great hole. I hit a 7 iron into the wind there from 128 yards that never got more than 10 feet off of the ground. The wind was really gusting when we played that hole which is pretty cool if you ask me. Here is the link for anyone interested in checking it out < ahref="http://www.bandondunesgolf.com/pages/pacific_dunes/50.php">Pacific Dunes #13

If you are serious about golf and have never been to Bandon, I would highly recommend checking it out. Wow is it a special place.

This makes me proud and excited in so many ways.

First, the site’s founder, Phil Galfond, is arguably the best poker player in the world. I know that being in his midst will help me grow immeasurably, and I can’t wait to pass that knowledge on to my own students. When Phil asked me to audition for a coaching position, that alone was a huge compliment. To be impress him and then chosen is beyond words.

Second, perhaps the best testimonial I can give about Bluefire is that long before I became an instructor there, I was a client. I’ve personally been a member on the site for a long time. I’ve watched countless videos on the site, and it’s a beautiful thing for all of that to come full circle and to know be called a Bluefire coach.

To celebrate this announcement, as well as another development in my professional life, we are providing a special 50% off coupon code for DustySchmidt.net. For a couple of weeks, when you enter the code DUSTY (all caps) you’ll receive 50% off all the books you find in the store on DustySchmidt.net. We hope this is valuable for you, and that maybe it helps you knock off some early Holiday shopping, too.

As I said, in addition to my joining Bluefire, there’s a second reason for the release of this code. We’ve reached an agreement with Cardoza Books in Las Vegas to become the future publisher of “Treat Your Poker Like A Business” and “Don’t Listen To Phil Hellmuth.” I’m very excited about this, but what it means to you is that after Jan. 1, the books might disappear for a while, and when they re-emerge, I’ll have no control over their price. That’s why I hope you take advantage now.

All in all, it’s a great day, for which I want to thank Bluefire, Cardoza and especially all of you who make my life so full.

What stands out to me most about DragTheBar is its integrity. The people behind the curtain there are good, genuine and decent, and in bad times as well as good their mission has remained the same: to exceed the expectations of their customers. Poker has a Wild West mentality to begin with, and we all know how desperate things have become since the economic downturn — particularly since Black Friday. But the folks at DTB have held onto their character while some other poker companies have abandoned theirs.

I’m proud to say that I coached at DragTheBar. It truly has been a pleasure.