I’m very excited to announce that I’ve been signed as a PokerVT Pro.  For the past few months, I’ve been working hard with the PokerVT Team towards my launch and helping to drive PokerVT towards success.  I’m really, really excited about all I can do with the VT platform in terms of teaching.  For those of you guys who don’t know me, I was a martial arts instructor for 7 years and loved every minute I spent teaching.  Poker probably ruined me for teaching, but it would have been something I could have enjoyed doing for a career.  The Spicebox was a cool, fun way to give back to PITR and I learned a lot myself from making videos there, in addition to giving me valuable experience that helped make me into a decent poker instructor.

If you want to discuss PokerVT, or the changes that’ll happen to The Spicebox now, there are going to be two threads in PITR in which to do so.  I haven’t made The Spicebox 2.5 thread yet, but that’ll happen tonight, and the big announcement thread for PVT can be found here.  This post is more personal, more about my story with how I got set up with PokerVT and my experiences thus far than an announcement.

I have to give thanks to a lot of people before I get started.  Without these people’s help this whole thing probably wouldn’t have happened or went as well as it did.  I’d like to thank my friend Adam Junglen firstoff.  Without his recommendation to DN and counsel regarding all things PokerVT I don’t know if I ever would have gotten my foot in the door.  I want to thank the PokerVT team who made me feel really at ease during my transition to PokerVT – Gary, Brad, Brian, Chad, Emmye, Steve, and anyone else over at VT I’m forgetting.  I want to thank Daniel Negreanu for giving me this opportunity, even though I don’t think I’ve beaten him out of a pot yet in the 15 hours we’ve played together.  Special thanks goes out to my buddies Dustin Iannotti and Matt Carpenter, who have spent an insane amount of time working (more like DEALING) with me and making sure everything goes smoothly.  Finally, I want to thank fellow BBCers Derk, StefanProdan, and Chiyochan for all their help getting this off the ground and/or their work with the new badbeatscrew.com.

I never really planned to join a poker training site.  Some people had asked me awhile ago if I was going to pursue it, but I didn’t really plan to.  It sort of just all fell into place.  During WSOPE in London, I got to play with Daniel for 6 hours or so and sat directly to his right.  He ran super super hot during that time and beat me out of near every pot, and had the added benefit of doing it on camera.  Every time he entered a pot an entire camera crew blitzed over to record the action.  Even though I busted late on day 1, DN and I spoke extensively about a wide variety of things prior to my bustout – TV, politics, religion, poker, and PokerVT.  We talked about the possibility of me joining up with PVT, and a few days later, I got in touch with him and the got the ball rolling.

In late october, I signed with PokerVT after discussions with the closest of my friends.  I wasn’t sure what to expect, really, but I liked what I saw – I toured their studios, met the staff, and was really impressed by the whole package.  I decided to go with it and now I just had to not say anything until we were ready to launch.

During the Foxwoods WPT, I had the fortune (misfortune??) of being seated once again with DN.  We didn’t play too many pots but it was another fun day and we talked a bit about working together on some PVT projects in the future.  We both made it to day 2, and once again, with a RANDOM draw, were seated together.  Nice right??  Unfortunately, I started with a shortstack and busted in the first level of the day.

I recently went out to LV for a session with the PokerVT team.  I spent a week there exactly as described in my earlier blog post, spending my “work days” at the PokerVT studios.  I think I booked a lot of solid content when I was there, although I definitely started out nervous (and tired, heh), by the end I felt like I had found my groove and was churning out solid, insightful content.

On Monday of that week, I was at VT while DN was in studio recording.  I had the chance to watch him do his thing, and damn – he is good.  He’s very talented at explaining his thoughts well in an interesting and engaging fashion and I tried to learn whatever I could from him.  I’m not sure how well I did it, heh, but I tried.

After we were finished, while Daniel was driving me back to Bellagio, he invited me to go to dinner with him and a bunch of his friends.  He invited me to some Korean restaurant, and if you know me at all, you know I’ve never eaten asian food in my life.  I couldn’t say no, though, and had a great time that night – the food wasn’t even that bad!  We all ended up going back to his place (which is insanely baller) afterwards.  We played some poker but unfortunately I didn’t win either the NLHE or the PLO sng.  Daniel ended up the big winner of the night, but not from poker – he won a ton of money at Golden Tee, haha.  All of Daniel’s friends were really cool, chill people and very welcoming.  I didn’t get home until near 5AM – and we were supposed to record the next day.  Oops!  We didn’t have a chance to work together on any PokerVT stuff this trip but when I go back to Vegas I’m sure we’ll record some good stuff.

Anyway, that’s the story with me and PokerVT.  I hope you guys enjoy the new content!
Time for The Shield series finale…