Peter Eastgate's Comeback Statement

This was sent to me from Pokerstars as a press release. After reading it, I gotta say that Eastgate is quite a brilliant man. (I'm posting the original transcript here since I assume as a press release this is public info anyways.)

"Sometimes in life a person can feel lost and wake up one morning not recognizing who he is. Last summer that was how I felt. Prior to winning the WSOP in 2008, my life was very much a good solid routine of playing online poker and hanging out with my friends and family. Winning the WSOP changed that. I relocated to London and started a new life, the life of a high profile poker pro. For almost 2 years I was in a constant spotlight, travelling from poker tournament to poker tournament, doing thousands of interviews and never had a chance to catch my breath. In the whirlwind that followed winning the WSOP I lost track of the most importing thing in my life, myself.

Last summer I decided that I wanted to stop playing poker and catch my breath and find out who I am and what I want to do with my life. Over the last 8 months I have had a chance to reconnect with my friends and most important, my family. I have spent quality time with my family and really had an opportunity to figure out who I am and what I want to do with the rest of my life. When there is no financial pressure it can sometimes be hard to get motivated to move forward as a person.

I truly enjoy playing poker. I love the competitive element and the mental challenges of tournament poker. I feel it is important to constantly grow as a person and for a while I didn’t feel I was moving in the right direction. Having had time to think about my life and future I feel I have figured out how I can combine playing poker with a healthy life outside of poker.

I do not consider this a comeback, as I always knew there was a good chance I would play poker again. During my hiatus from poker, PokerStars have been very supportive. Therefore, I am pleased that I will start out with playing two events where I will be sponsored by PokerStars. First, I will be playing the PokerStars.com EPT Copenhagen which of course means a lot to me, since it is on my home ground. Then I will play the NBC Heads Up Championship. I am fortunate that PokerStars have the best online tournaments, so I have an opportunity to get back in tournament shape.

There have been some questions about the sale of my WSOP bracelet. I was not trying to devaluate the WSOP name. It was not sold to make any kind of statement. It was sold to raise money for UNICEF and I am very proud and thankful that the sale raised £100,000 to UNICEF."

- Peter Eastgate

FTOPS Event 7: $216 HORSE

I played reasonably well in this one.

I Barely missed the money. (Busted 174th out of 903, money was at 112 places.)

Made some mistakes to go from $4000 starting stack to $2500.

Moved up to $6500 in Razz thru two hands.

Moved up to high point of $18000 thru Stud and Stud8.

Made more mistakes in Hold'em.

Somehow hit a Royal Flush in Stud8 to win half the pot.

Busted in Hold'em with AQ against QJ.

Oh well.

FTOPS Event 4: $1060 NLH 6-max

This is probably one of the tighter 6-max tournies i've played in, including live and online. I started and finished on the same table, and I was the first guy out of that pack of six to be eliminated. (read: over the two hours before I busted the table was purely doing chips-exchange.) I busted just before the 2nd break, and overall my run has been pretty bad.

In level 2 of the tournament, I got my flopped straight ran over by runner runner flush. It's not like I let it happen either, I bet out every street until the river when I managed to just check-call to avoid busto.

On one of the last hands, I got my flopped set ran over by the same guy with his runner runner straight. In the same whacky fashion, he called my cbet on the flop with 2 under cards (preflop he opened and I 3betted), called my bet on the turn with a gutshot straight draw, and finally made me call down his stack on the river. After this I was left with under 10BB and I shipped it in the 33 which naturally lost to JK.