Back to the Grind

Wow ! Last post was September 2010. That was about 7 months ago. Just to quickly update, I did not really stop playing poker. I was just too busy to update my blog as I can no longer access blog sites thru our office internet. And when I come home, I only have so much time to do all the family stuff plus play my usual hours. So this blog was the least of my priorities.

In any case, the biggest news in the pokerworld is Black Friday where it seems that the DOJ equivalent in the USA has filed fraud and laundering charges against the 2 biggest poker sites: Pokerstars and Full Tilt. This has led to the complete banning of US players from their sites and the freezing of their accounts. For the past week, US players have been in limbo and I would guess that hundreds of online pros who rely on poker for their living expenses are banging their heads on their monitors and shouting WTF.

Based on latest news that I heard, Pokerstars has already begun the process of allowing players to withdraw their money. But nothing definite yet from Full Tilt.

Although the 2 poker sites have repeatedly reassured their non US players that its business as usual. One cannot help feel a bit of apprehension about the continued viability of their business models. Logically, they should still survive and thrive well enough as other countries have no restrictions in place and international players are still populating the tables.

But to be safe, I withdrew 80% of my bankroll from Full Tilt and almost 90% from Cake. Both have been approved and I am just waiting for the checks to arrive. Hopefully, there will be no issues and I can deposit them in local banks with no problems. Since I only had less than a thousand dollars in Pokerstars. I decided to just leave that behind for playing.

Although everything seems ok for international players and my withdrawals quickly approved, I actually want to kick myself for being lazy and keeping a huge chunk of my bankroll in the sites themselves especially FTP. I was confident that Pokerstars and FTP were too big to fall. But the events that have happened has shaken this confidence and although I will continue playing. I will make sure that I only have about 50 buyins in each site that I play in. Everything else will be withdrawn promptly and kept locally.

OK. That's about it for now. Hopefully I can update this blog more often. I don't even know if I have any readers left. Heheh.