We took Rylee to a pumpkin patch on Sunday morning. It was bit nippley, but she had a great time and even picked out her own little pumpkin. She will be walking very soon, she has been pushing her baby stroller around the house like a maniac. It is hilarious to watch her grow and learn as each day passes. She has been a bit sad the past 2 days, Junior has been away at the doggy hospital with some sort of stomach problem. With Junior away, she has nobody but a non-interested ziggy to torment. Ahh well...good times for sure, pics.... 
Poker is back on track. I feel alive like it was 2005 again. As most people know, for the past few years in poker I had a financial backer. A quick explanation..."backers" have become a huge part of the poker business these days. Basically, "backers" finance poker players. Many, many of the top players in the world do not want to put their own money at risk, so they use their "backers" money to play. Compensation of somewhere between 30-50% of the players profits are than returned to the backer, along with the dreaded word "makeup". Makeup is the amount of money at loss and is paid back to the backer upon success. For example: Boke plays 10k worth of buyins on Monday and proceeds to lose all 10k, however on Tuesday Boke wins 20k. Boke than pays back the 10k (Makeup), and splits the other 10k profit with the backer (Being that the backer agrees to a 50/50 deal). Now that the business part is explained, I will continue...so like I said above, I had decided on trying out the backing business and being a backed player in 2007ish. It wasn't like I was broke at the time, but more so on a huge downswing. During the 1-2 years that I was backed (up until like Mayish of this year), I felt like my game was diminishing. I was a break even player and ended up eventually winning the Stars Million for 200k in August of 2008. I paid the backers and ended up scooping about 90k after all said and done, not including taxes :( . For the following 6-9 months after this big win, I went on a monster down swing and accumulated over 100k in makeup. This sucked more than anything. This meant the next 100k I made went to the backer and that I wasn't gonna see any profit until this monster figure was cleared. Ughhz. As crazy as this seems, it is amazingly common in the poker world for guys to accumulate an astonishing amount of makeup. Anyways, April/May 2008 rolled around and I started hearing rumors that my backer was gonna fire me. I thought no possible way they would just fire me and free me from that figure. Most cases backers will offer buyouts to release a "horse" (backers use the "horse" term for their players they back). An example of this would be, if I had 100k in makeup they would offer me a 20k buyout, meaning I pay them 20k and Im free. Anyhow, the rumors were right, my backers wanted to release me. The great thing for me is, they never once mentioned any buyout and therefore just cut me absolutely free of charge. This may have been my 2nd best acoomplishment of my poker career. HAHA, getting fired and having 100k makeup just vanish. That is right they fired me for free! I would have definitely paid to be released at that point. Lucky me.
So for the past 4 months I have been trying to get that "feel" back for being on my own. The "grind" type of feel, if you will. It's coming back for sure, it's just a slow slow process. I grind the cash games for the most part and mix in a few tourneys here and there. My game has definitely been at it's sharpest point since early 2008, and the checks are on their way. Weeeeee.
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