Adam Junglen

Ahh finally, it’s almost that time of year again. The first World Series of Poker event is officially less than 2 weeks away now. I’m doing my best to prepare for the long grind. I’ve been working out for a change to prepare for the sometimes/often > 12 hour days, plus just to get my lazy ass in shape.

Motivation has never been an issue for me when it comes to the WSOP. I’ll be playing my heart out everyday. Sometimes I’m just too hard on myself and hold myself to an unreasonably high standard, but part me knows that I wouldn’t have gotten to where I am today otherwise. I wish I knew where I got that from…

I still truly enjoy poker and believe it will always have a place in my life. Unfortunately, motivation for balancing life has not always come as easy, and I can tell I’ve used poker as an escape at times. Regardless of how well or poor I do I still have to deal with life afterwards and I might be branching away from poker. Who knows? I’m not really sure at all to be honest. Right now all I’m thinking about is a champagne shower victory at the Rio.

Perhaps I’m just burnt out and partly just hoping/waiting/procrastinating for the legal situation with online poker to be regulated and rectified. I have been playing this game pretty seriously for almost a decade now. Ugh I’m getting old.

I’ll see you people’s at the series!

gl,

- Adam

This will probably be the last blog I repost for awhile. It just so happened to be 7 years from today, and also gives a great example of why I decided to take down all the older blogs. Basically as soon as I started moving forward into the poker world I knew it’d be best to take them down, plus I wanted to start my own domain anyways. I really didn’t and do not want anyone’s pity so I took them down.

So this was just a few weeks after my amputation. I was obviously was going through a lot. Still remember this day vividly because it was just so gory. At one point my brother just happened to come into the house and he helped stopped my “limb” from bleeding endlessly. Lucky timing looking back.

………Enjoy!

“Ya know what’s really disturbing? When you wake up, take a shower, and your leg starts leaking. So then the bathtub fills with blood. Then you turn the water off, and it just keeps coming. Spots of blood everywhere. So I hop out of the shower, and turn the water back on to clean it up. Lo and behold underneath me there’s fresh blood stains all over the bathroom floor. So here I am one legged with blood everywhere..definetly not cleaning it up. I wish my effin leg would heal.”

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I was also going to write about ethics/integrity in poker but I’m going to save that for later….until then apparently Howard beat me to it

Below I’ve pasted a blog post I wrote back in my blogspot days. I was 17, finishing up my junior year of HS. I refer to two different people named Andy in this post. One of them, Andy Linden, I recently had the pleasure of attending his wedding. He’s an old friend from high school. The latter is Andy Webster, my best friend growing up and he moved away and was visiting at the time. Ms Paul was my high school guidance counselor and the school year was almost ending. At the time I was playing weekend home games with all my best friends from high school routinely and had recently had my leg amputated the previous month.

I just recently started re-reading all my old blogs from high school…might end up doing something with all of these.

Anyways, enjoy!

“Last night was fun. Cashed out $84 (44 prof.) at Andy’s. Later tonight I’m goin to see Star Wars. Not a huge fan, but I’m excited to see it. On Friday my mom talked to Ms. Paul, and she said that this Friday will be my last day.

I’ve decided I’m going to start playing poker full time. Since I get 2 extra weeks of vacation, it’s a good time to start. I’m gonna deposit another $200 so I can take advantage of the deposit bonus, and start playing real seriously. Like changing my sleep schedule to accomdate the times of tournaments and such. I’m gonna play a whole lot, and then by the time Andy comes (June 16th I think) I’ll have a good idea of where to go from there. I really want to make 5 figures this summer…may be a pipe dream, but I also see it being reasonable. Especially if I win tomorrow .

Speaking of Andy I CAN’T wait for him to visit. He’ll be here for 2 weeks next month. That’ll be great.

Everyone wish me luck tomorrow, I’ve got a that tournament to play that I’ve been talkin about forever. A $10,000 score would be nice.”

Once again I’m back in Vegas. Toronto was great, and I did miss playing online poker – but feel like I cut myself off from the majority of my friends. It can be hard to process living such a backwards life sometimes. Most people goto Las Vegas to blow money, get wasted, and get divorced (I’ll never talk to you again!). I’m back in town to figure out what to do with myself, get in shape (both mentally & physically) and obv “work.”  Not exactly sure where I’ll move to next, but definitely  nowhere near Ohio. Not a normal life at all…(everyone here is a tourist, hooker, or bathshit crazy)

Online poker also wasn’t the same. Moving to Toronto to play felt almost forced, as if “what else would I be doing?” In reality, my hardcore, high volume grinding days ended long before Black Friday. Sundays are still very large with great value, but I found the weekday tournament schedule to be very depressing. Simply put, tiny prize pools/my ego’s too big to play. That’s not to say I’ve lost all motivation for the game, that’s not the case. I’m just a part time genius, lol..

Uprooting my life to play one day a week and live alone in an apartment in downtown TO during winter….in hindsight, not the smartest thing I probably could’ve done with my self (not being results oriented). It’s more painful than the money lost when you move your life for a single purpose and your confidence is high and then you get knocked down. It’s all apart of the job I signed up for years ago. I went through the same thing (except on a much larger scale) when I first moved to Vegas after turning 21 with Shaun Deeb in 2009. I was super high from moving to LV and had very high confidence in my ability only to be knocked down by the reality of variance and poker. I got right back up though

In non-poker news I’ve also begun putting a small amount of effort into finding my biological parents. It’s something I’ve put off for a very long time, basically completely ignoring it until my “parents” started telling me things they neglected to for years. I’m not sure if I really expect to find anything, but at least I can say I tried when my life is over. Until then I’ll continue making sarcastic remarks about their profession. “Oh yea, my dad was a brain surgeon who loved music and my mom was a hippie backgammon player!” HA HA HA *tear* they’re all probably dead.

I suppose that’s all for now. I went through a phase of loathing writing and switched back to using notebooks….but I might start blogging more. I certainly don’t use this outlet as much as I used to. Maybe that’ll change. I kind wanna tear down this site and start anew. We’ll see though. We’ll just see.

Adam

Well, another year in the books. To say it’s been a year of ups and downs would be an understatement on so many levels. Suppose that’s life though. I hope I’ve at least grown a little as a human and learned some things about life through it all.

Sadly, my Grandma (my father’s mother) passed away recently – just two days after Christmas. I’ve been extremely lucky to have had both sides of my grandparents alive for so long. She had been under hospice care for a couple of days. They were able to bring a hospital bed to her house, which was nice and our whole family was in town to share her last days together. Cancer claims another life, although she did live a very long and happy life. When I was in grade school, I used to ride my bike with my old neighbor friends to her house and go swimming in her backyard pool. Some of my earliest happy memories involve my grandma and she will be missed.

2011 wasn’t all bad by any means. I do sometimes find it difficult not to be pesimistic about the future of poker, especially after black friday and everything that came with it. But it appears as though there’s finally reason to be optimistic about the future of poker. I haven’t been keeping up to date with all the news as much as I was a couple months ago (I find reading about FTP too often to be overwhelmingly depressing), but it sounds like we’re making legitimate legislative progress and maybe we’ll get our FTP funds by next Christmas.

Partly out of laziness & disorganization and partly out of just not feeling up for traveling, I’m leaning towards passing on the PCA this year. As I’ve said before, I don’t like playing when I’m not feeling close to 100%. We’ll see though, it’s still a week away. The next series I do plan on playing is the Fallsview Classic $5k in February. I’m planning on moving back to LV a month or two before the WSOP this year and get back into playing more live.

Well that’s all for now. Happy Holidays everyone!

Adam

Sometime in August I went to Turning Stone, played their $1.5k and busted. I told myself that’d be the last hand of poker I play til I’m setup online. After giving PokerStars my life story and blood sample, they finally let me back on; Monday morning. Tragically, I missed “double million/warmup day, but I guess that’s my fault. Oh well, it’s just nice to be back on for now.

So far Toronto’s nice, although I’m sort of kicking myself for not going to WSOP-E (after seeing the big turn out). I was pretty over live poker in August though, and don’t feel too bad for taking a two month break between hands. I’ve probably taken longer breaks.

I turn 24 in a few hours….and I’m still playing cards.

adam