After my trip to the ear doctor in Geneva, I stopped in Amsterdam for a few days to revisit a city that has had a mythical place in my heart for at least 15 years since I first traveled there. Also, after missing two Sundays of online poker, I was champing at the bit to get back in action, and I didn't want to miss the quarterly $1M Supernova freeroll on Saturday the 18th either. In this post-Black Friday, increasingly regulated online poker world, it makes plenty of logistical sense when traveling to put in sessions whenever the opportunity to log on to pokerstars(.com) presents itself.
On the first night there, I caught up with fellow Team Online member Richard Veenman on the evening before he headed off to a vacation in the Alps. Richard grew up in the Netherlands, not far from Amsterdam, and he is a great conversationalist. We went for a long walk, had a nice steak dinner, and on the way back saw a large audience sprawled around the side of a canal listening to a band perform. It was the ideal way to get acclimated to that heady city.
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Then, my friend David, my initial relocation partner and former Canadian roommate, joined me. He was playing the poker festival in Barcelona and after busting the Estrellas main event, he was able to squeeze in a couple days off to come hang with me in a rented apartment near the Red Light District before going back to Spain for the EPT €5K.
It was great to see him, a refreshing reunion and a chance to reflect on how much has happened in the year since we relocated. It was a year to the day that he began his journey by car from his house in Silver Lake to our shitty highrise rental in Yaletown and the anniversary of the highest point of my anxiety, as I reluctantly packed up my California apartment and moved uncertainly towards a new life in Vancouver that didn't seem real (and, as it turns out, wasn't).
For his part, after the Canada debacle was over, David went on a journey of epic magnitude. First, he drove from British Columbia to Portland, OR, then flew to Mexico where he spent a couple weeks in Cabo, killing time and grinding online poker before his planned Birthright trip in November of last year.
He came back to the States in early 2012, picking up the pieces of his relocation journey up to that point: He retrieved his car that he had stashed with a friend in Portland, then drove to Los Angeles where he rented an apartment so he could spend the month unloading a storage locker full of the possessions of his pre-Black Friday life. During that month, he would come down to my apartment in Mexico to play online poker. All this in preparation for his next, and current, move--going back to Israel to make "Aliyah."
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The arc of my story is not quite as sprawling or lively, so when I look at my overall relocation experience I simply take away something that has always been my favorite aspect of the poker life, which is how it has allowed me to see many different aspects of the world, often taking me out of my comfort zone and forcing me to face harsh or strange realities, and in the process demystifying some of those harsh, strange realities.
For instance, I never thought I'd be living in a "third world country," much less traveling to and from it with similar ease to the daily commute that people make from the suburbs. I was once a very closed-in New Yorker. I had traveled a little bit (mostly by road in the US), and I had met many different kinds of people in my teens and twenties; I considered myself worldly, but in reality I was rather provincial, like a small town kid who never left his town. In a way, it wasn't until I became a poker player that I started fully seeing the world, uncovering a fuller scope of how ambitiously people lived and traveled.
I go through phases where I have plenty of mixed feelings about poker as a lifestyle and an occupation, but I am unequivocally grateful for the way it opened me up to new ways of exploring life.
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For me, the hidden backbone of this story is my association with PokerStars. Being offered a spot on Team Online in 2011, then the opportunity to continue with them if I relocated after Black Friday, was the clear tipping point in my decision, the one thing that made relocating a no-brainer. If it wasn't for Stars, I could see myself trying (however miserably) to be a live poker pro or looking for even more soul-sucking work.
The opportunity to represent a company that holds itself to the highest possible standard of quality is extremely rare, and I am grateful for my association with Stars for more than the obvious reasons that having an endorsement deal is pretty sweet. Since the day I first played on the site, I have always felt that it's one of the best products I've ever used in any industry, in any capacity. Everything since then has reinforced that feeling. The way PokerStars has handled its business since Black Friday has been nothing short of inspiring, and the news of July 31st is still mind-blowing to me.
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This spirit of quality and care carries over to Team Online, which, I discovered during our training session at the PCA, consists of a bunch of interesting individuals. I am not generally a "team player" kind of person, to some degree I'm a loner who thinks of himself as an "individualist," but I was instantly taken in by the sense of community that was fostered by the lineup of Team Online. It's clear that Stars put a lot energy and effort into selecting a team of unique personalities rather than just looking for a handful of automatons to spam affiliate links on Twitter.
Just the fact that I would voluntarily seek out the company of Richard Veenman while I was traveling (I'm somewhat reclusive if not completely socially awkward) speaks volumes about the immediate connection many of us made after just spending a few hours together in the Bahamas.
Another team member I met in the Bahamas was Grzegorz “DaWarsaw” Mikielewicz. If there is one quality I could point to about Gregorz as immediately apparent, it's that he possesses a genuine interest in whomever he encounters and what they have to say.
Sometimes, when I am winding down my session in the sunset hours on the pacific coast, I think about what it must be like to be a version of me in an alternate universe--what it's like to be playing poker at 4AM on the streets of a cold Eastern European city. The latest PokerStars short film by Ryan Firpo is sort of like an actual glimpse into the reality I'm usually just daydreaming about. It's a compelling, endearing story about Grzegorz' triumphs, struggles, and ongoing progress as one of the first poker professionals in Poland. There's also a bunch of bowling and some go-karting. Enjoy: