Lightbulb moment: i get an email and he wants to deposit to play online.
Lightbulb moment: I check his balance two days later, his modest roll has doubled up.
Lightbulb moment: one week later he is busto.
Lightbulb moment: He writes me a lengthy email with genuine questions about how he can be better. We decide he is a tiltwhore. Then I don't hear from him for a while.
Rinse this and repeat - about every two to three months he resurfaces and gives this whole poker thing another go. He has been Lightbulb since 2009, if I recall correctly.
I often I tell my fellow poker coaches that Lightbulb is going to be an APA VIP Trainee someday. Chuckles, all around. They refer to him as a mascot. A running joke. The guy whose calling card reads: "hey, is he still around?"
To my fellow coaches, who wish me good luck, he is a Lost Cause. LC for short. They remember him for an alleged attempt to get more than his share of the APA free bankroll by creating dual accounts. They remember him for reporting losses because he played in a net cafe and left his account logged on (ano to, ragnarok?)
They know LC as the guy who logs on to forums asking for dole outs. A reminder that for every one hundred people who come to us to learn to play poker for a living - and to become professional about the whole thing - ninety-seven of them will be LC. A bulb that comes on bright and optimistic on day one, and then expectedly just burns itself out eventually...inevitably.
Well, the time to shine for Lightbulb has come. He has been back and is still around - this time for much much longer than he ever was.
And he has started the APA VIP Training Program. And unlike the batch sessions I often do, I will be training him one on one.
I don't expect to call him Lighbulb much longer, because I see in him some things he never seemed to have before. A different kind of light has come on: more passion than ever, the right questions, the right attitude...Respect for the money in his poker account, most of all.
That last part might be one of the toughest things to learn when playing micro stakes. Sure, anyone can look at his freshly deposited one hundred dollars and think: "I am going to turn you into a thousand!"
Anyone can get smacked in the face by variance. In a typical (and recurring) moment of weakness, anyone can look at the remaining eighty dollars - down from over three hundred - and think: "why the fuck should I care so much about not losing that? I should just have fun. I have a salary coming in. I can reload!"
So fun is had, and a reload is in order.
Lightbulb and me, we've been through this as well. In one of his impassioned emails for help, he asked me what I could do for him.
"One thing I can do for you is to not accept your deposits anymore. It's probably bad business for me to refuse you, but the coach in me can no longer stand by while you deposit twenty dollars at a time. Your next deposit will be for at least three hundred dollars, and if you are ready to be serious, it will be your last."
Well, Lightbulb did me one better. He earned his roll the harder way - beating ten other guys in a gruelling staking contest. Lightbulb aka LC, has crossed a line never crossed before.
So here we are - Elsie and Me - off on a journey to carve out a new name for himself. For me, a chance to go back to my fellow coaches and say "We're gonna need a new mascot."
In the spirit of our almost exclusively online training, I will be posting on this blog some bites off of our weekly modules. APA VIP Training Grad "Nizzy" once asked for copies of my materials so that he can review them, and I promised him I'd post them here instead.
So this is for you, Nizzy, I hope you and many others can join Elsie and Me.
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