Huge Poker Weekend!/ Poker Scandals...Sigh

I am happy to report I had a killer weekend at the tables. I ended up winning a little over $30,000 on the weekend bringing my year total to about $67,000 on the year. It has been a great start to the year given that I really haven’t played a whole lot. In fact, the past 6 weeks have really been nice. I won about $65,000 over the last 2 ½ weeks of December, so it has been a $130,000 + run over the past 6 weeks, with limited play. I would’ve liked to have played a lot more poker especially since it has been going so well, but with the release of my new book, I had to focus on that quite a bit and it has left me with somewhat limited time to actually play poker.

Life has been great lately. My baby daughter Lennon continues to evolve all the time. You blink an eye and she is doing all sorts of new things. It is just so much fun to watch her just do her thing. Each and every morning after I wake up, I go straight to her bedroom to watch her sleep for a few moments and it is one of my favorite parts of the day. I think she is really going to become something special some day.

It has been interesting to watch this Jason Ho (a recently banned Stoxpoker.com coach) thing explode on the internet. I am not going to comment on whether I believe all of the allegations are true or not, but I do know from my experience that he made attempts to try and scam me as well earlier this year. He kept trying to get in touch with me about trading services. He claimed he could help me out with some areas in my game and that I could help him. He was a big math guy (or so he claimed) and I have no clue about how to figure out most of the math related poker stuff so I agreed to talk with him on the phone.

While talking to him on the phone we started talking about what we would do in certain situations and I thought his advice was ridiculous so I didn’t work with him again. He was advocating some of the stupidest stuff, and I had a very hard time believing he was a good poker player. He later tried to get me to transfer him my entire database of hands which I declined. Very recently he told me he had “solved” PLO CAP game poker and wanted to talk to me because he felt he could easily make 4-5ptbb/100 at that game. I had no idea why he would want to tell me how to play as well as he was claiming he could play PLO CAP, but I just decided not to bother with him.

He really lost me with his bizarre pictures in his blogs of him with his shirt off and all of the “photo shoot” type of pictures of his supposed girl friends in his blogs. It was quite obvious that there was no way on earth he was dating these women, but to each his own I suppose. In any event, I am sure glad I didn’t involve myself with him more than that single playing “lesson” where he just basically taught me what a mediocre poker player he was.

EDIT————————————————————————————

I just wanted to clarify one point because I do understand how my blog may be misleading to some. When I referred to Jason Ho as someone who “made attempts to try and scam me earlier this year” what I meant was that in retrospect it appears as if he tried to scam me. I had no idea it was a scam at the time and was just as shocked as everyone else when I found out that he was indeed a scammer. What I was trying to say was that in retrospect, I clearly must have been a target of his as well, since he was trying to get me involved in his scam.

Obviously if I had any knowledge at all that he was someone trying to scam people, I would never in a million years want to see him get away with it and tarnish the image of a website I was a co owner of. That would make no sense for me to do. I simply worked with Jason for about an hour awhile back and walked away unimpressed with his poker skills while we were on the phone.

The reason why I didn’t tell Taylor Caby about this was that A. I really had no idea about Jason (other than a 1 hour conversation) and what he was claiming to have earned etc. until just recently and B. I never really expected him to be a great poker mind, but rather did a 1 hour session with him because I had heard he was a math whiz and I stink at the math side of poker. On the phone call I did walk away impressed with his ability to articulate some poker math theory, but ultimately decided I didn’t want to bother trying to deeply understand the math side because I have always been more of an intuitive player anyway.

Anyway, I just wanted to address some people’s concerns that I somehow knew he wasn’t legit, yet opted to do nothing about it. I mean really, what was I supposed to do? Call Taylor Caby and tell him that I spent an hour on the phone with a math intensive poker player and tell him that his intuitive side of poker wasn’t very strong? What if he was just not thinking clearly on the call and I ruined his poker coaching career with one call to Taylor? That was not a road I think anyone would want to go down. What if I was wrong and Jason then sued me?

I hope everyone understands that I spent one hour on the phone with the guy and there were a couple emails and/or skype messages where he asked me if I wanted my database analyzed free of charge and a message telling me he had solved CAP PLO and was wondering if I wanted him to coach me. I had absolutely no idea that he was a scammer and like I pointed out earlier, I had a vested interest in outing him if I ever suspected he was, which I did not.

Thanks for hearing me out,

Dusty