Getting the Ball Rolling

This is hopefully the start of a very fun and interesting year. One in which I plan on graduating and getting back into the game of poker. As I said in my bio; I was a few months away from going from a low-stakes grinder to a full-time player. Then the government stepped in. Now, I do my best to stay out of politics, but this time it directly impacted my everyday life. In March of 2010 the Department of Justice shut down the top three major poker sites. Mine, Pokerstars.net was the first one to go. This is how thousands of Americans made a living and in an instant it was gone. No time to withdraw the funds that was in their online poker account; not even time to get up from the online table they were currently playing at. That is when poker was put on hold, not just for me, but for everyone living in the US. From that point on poker became just a hobby again. I would get the chance to play a couple of times every month if I was lucky. That's when I decided to take a break. The last nine months have been spent focusing on school and work. I sat and waited, getting my mind together and seeing where the online market was going. At the turn of the new year I came to the realization that online poker wasn't coming back anytime soon. That means it's time to start devoting more and more of my time to "brick and mortar" casinos. This last Saturday was my first day back at the tables, and I quickly realized how much I had missed it. It's not just sitting there and getting good hands and winning some money; its the atmosphere of the card room. It's the conversations that you can have with complete strangers that soon turn into friends. At the end of my six hour session i managed to scratch out a small profit (somewhere around $150), but the comfort of actually being there again was what was truly important. I missed being able to read peoples faces and know their tells; something that frequently gets lost in online poker. Needless to say the poker bug is back and I am excited to see where this year leads.