Hello!

My name is Jason (Jay to my friends and those in the poker world) and I go by DreamKrusherJay on PokerStars Michigan these days! I didn't see a subforum specifically for introductions to the community, but this looked like it might be a nice place for it. :)

I'm in my early 40s, and I will have been married to my beautiful wife for four years this July! (We've been together for ten years this November!)

2011... we met and got together just a few short months after Black Friday had torn my life apart. :( I was a very solid winning player before that April and made almost all of my income from the game. It was also right around this time that I was put on full disability permanently, due to multiple auto-immune conditions. (I can walk and everything, please don't fret on it!)

I dabbled a bit on ACR and Bovada over the years, but I just never truly felt safe, so I didn't play "for real" for nearly 10 years.

I used to be the general manager and main floor of a charity poker room in Michigan, and not bragging, but what I built felt like the best room in the state of Michigan. I built the room up to where we were getting 200 players for my Friday night $30 buyin MTT. I did play cash during this time period, but I worked too much to really do much of anything live. Once I became disabled, not having poker was honestly one of the most depressing things ever in my life, outside of losing my father at the age of 11. He passed away from his exposure to Agent Orange, during his three tours of heroic service in Vietnam, as a Gunnery Sergeant in the United States Marine Corps. The hereditary effects of his poisoning are the reason why my health situation is the way it is, and I honestly can't do much else to help contribute outside of SSD other than poker.

Then PokerStars was legalized in Michigan. Honestly, I don't think I've ever felt better as both a person, and a player. The best part of it coming back was that my wife has taken up the game, and is allowing me to coach her. She'd always played the freebie, Zynga and WSOP apps, but she had never played a hand of poker for money.

That changed on April 29th. :D She has already won her first MTT, a $5 Bounty Builder on Stars, and she now has 14 final tables! I really couldn't be prouder. She is both dyslexic and someone that hates math generally, so it has been difficult, but she has been making very obvious improvements, especially in her preflop play, and her short-stack play.

Anyway, when I came back, I knew I was going to have to really dig into GTO and adapt my game in a massive way to adjust to the new meta-game that exists now, that most certainly did NOT exist up to April 15, 2011.

I wound up purchasing a different product from a different site, and while it is good content, their only forum appears to be a Facebook group, which I do not use, and even though in the product the author says to "ask questions", he wouldn't even answer a single basic one when I contacted him on Twitter. I had already planned on joining here at RIO, and while I don't feel it was money wasted, I definitely didn't feel welcomed at all by them. It wound up that there is a Discord, and there's some good guys on there, but they are just other customers like me. :(

Now, I get it, these high-level players are very busy, but if you're not willing to answer a single question about your product (and I passed along some quality feedback, when I asked) I'm certainly not going to sign up for your advanced product at ten times the cost...

While I don't have any hard feelings toward the content creator in question, it accelerated my purchase of my Elite membership here at RIO, along with PLO Vision! Even more, the fine people here at RIO actually welcomed me to the community on Twitter, as a fellow poker Tweeter had asked who your idols/hero in the game were -- and mine are Doyle Brunson and Phil Galfond. Doyle for obvious reasons, I would think, but it was Phil's PLO play, demeanor, class, and outright balls that got me wanting to switch all of my cash play to PLO!

I wish I would have just spent the extra money and bought FTGU in the first place, along with Vision, but you live and you learn. I'm purchasing FTGU later today to go with my Elite membership and PLO Vision, and I'm ready to work my ass off, and to be active in this community!

Since this is a Journals subforum, I guess I'll just turn this from an introduction into my RIO Journal. :) It is nice to meet everyone, and I apologize for the novel for my first post, but I've been a writer all of my life and I guess a more thorough introduction was appropriate now that I'm just going to use this as a journal. :D

Thank you all for this amazing resource!

Regards,
Jay (DreamKrusherJay on PokerStars Michigan)