Apestyles gets an article in the Sunday Statesman

Online poker pro: 'A hard way to make an easy living'

John Van Fleet is without a doubt Austin's premiere online poker professional. He's ranked #1 in the state actually on Pocket Fives last time I checked. I was poking around the news sites trying to find the story about a northeast Austin game getting robbed this weekend when I found the above article. Cool stuff...

Most of the people I know who went to Westlake know who John is, even people who know nothing about online poker. This summer I met my extended family of cousins, aunts and uncles for dinner. A lot of my cousins that live here in Austin went to Westlake. My cousin Chad's girlfriend found out through the course of conversation that I was into poker and that I played online. She asked if I knew him and I said I knew of him, but not him personally.

I actually messaged him once on Pocket Fives to ask him about a story my old college roommate told me. He responded back saying it was true (I won't go into details, sorry too personal I think). That's all I got and I haven't contacted him since. Truth be told I've often thought about trying to befriend him to maybe learn a thing or two. I don't know if that will ever end up happening though.

The article is really good I must admit. The only incorrect information was calling sit-and-go's "sit-and-plays".
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I'm purposely avoiding my regular poker sites today in the attempts to shield myself from finding out the results of the World Series. They were supposed to play down to the final two yesterday and I think today they'll finish the heads up battle. This year is the first time they've delayed the final table for 4 months to air everything up to it on ESPN, THEN air the results on delay. The idea was to generate more hype and garner bigger ratings.

But the great thing is you have a better chance of avoiding the results and keeping the element of surprise. Since I follow all the tourneys online as they're happening I pretty much always know who's winning every WPT that's aired because it happened 6-8 months prior. If I can successfully dodge spoilers until tomorrow night I'll actually have that element of surprise. Pretty exciting.