Bill Ricardi - Brave Little Toaster

The rumors of Tribeca letting go of 30 percent of their staff were
denied by a company spokesman yesterday, who claimed it was a handful
of layoffs due to project cancellation.

The Tribeca spokesman said: "We certainly have not released anyone from
the UK. I believe we have released a couple of development engineers
who were working on future projects. These were some light-weight
functionality projects that were terminated by us. It is certainly
nothing like 30 percent of our staff. All the customer support staff
are still in place for a smooth transition of the European facing
accounts to the Playtech platform."

For those not following this: A couple weeks ago, Tribeca announced
that they would transfer all assets available to them over to the
Playtech network (which excludes U.S. players). A whole lot of
regional poker rooms are going to become Playtech rooms at the end of
May / early June.

I say 'available to them' because Doyle's Room and Golden Palace have
both chosen to continue to deal with U.S. players, and won't be part of
the deal. Their software license status is being worked out.

Keep an eye out for more on this. It's one of those things that's more
important than it sounds, because so many players have no idea what the
software companies behind poker rooms are even named, forget about
their goings-on. Playtech is about to become one of the biggest poker
software provider / online poker room builder in the world.

It happened to me, it can happen to you too. There's one thing that will utterly destroy your professional game:

I got a job.

It's a somewhat bittersweet thing for me. I'll be making just about as much per hour at this job as I would playing poker online. I'll need to dress up and walk to and from the job (It's pretty close to the house, thank goodness). So why do it?

The answer is both funny and sad. When I apply for permanent citizenship in the U.K., they're going to ask about my work record, and how employable I am. I've been told that working for someone else, at least some amount of the time, is the best route to go. Self employment is great in their eyes... part time that is.

So I've agreed to be a technical guru for about 25 or 30 hours a week. I've agreed to write for Wise Hand on various gigs for about 10 hours a week, maybe more. That leaves about 10 hours a week of 'real' poker playing. Not enough to make a real impact.

So my professional playing is going to be cut waaaaaay down. Most of my funds are already back in the bank. I have a couple of big freerolls coming up, for being a platinum VIP. But for the most part, I'm going to play 2 tournaments a week. If I do well, I won't play more, I'll play bigger, according to bankroll rules. But to play bigger, I'll need to abandon Titan for somewhere with big GP tournaments, or weekly 500K or 1 million's. We'll see how it goes.

In the mean time, I'm still pumping out material for WiseHandPoker.com and our clients. People seem to love my stuff, and I'm flattered. My hope is that we get some major European contracts, and I can do live coverage at events. Again, we'll see.