Quote:
Originally Posted by Ricky1231
Even though I think lots of us already know this, obligatory poker story/life plans while I think of real questions?
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Poker Story:
(partially copied from interview I did with EurekaKid)
I started playing poker just like everyone else, in the dorm, drinking Natty Light and playing $5 and $10 donkaments with my friends back in ‘04. A few of the other guys were doing decent online (who wasn’t in those days...) so I decided to give it a shot and deposited $50 on Stars to play SNGs. I busted that pretty quickly and around 10-15 more $50 deposits mostly by playing way underrolled ($100 SNGs with little understanding of ICM, etc.) and eventually I decided that Stars must be rigged. I took my last $11 on Stars and entered into some huge 1500 person donkament and spun my $11 into $1500 by taking it down ($1200 if you take into account the $300 I spent at the bar that night). I was hooked. I started taking BRM more seriously and have not made a deposit on Stars since, other than to get a bonus.
Sophomore year some friends told me about this glorious place called PartyPoker where the players were (gasp!) even worse than on Stars. One Friday afternoon I really had the itch and deposited $300 on Party. I basically played for 60 hours straight and by the time I had to go to class on Monday I had over $20,000 in my account, mostly from playing $100 and $200 sit n gos. The rest, as they say, is history. Those were the days, when poker was actually fun. I was so involved in school and had so little free time that I genuinely looked forward to being able to play. Party had this great tournament back in the day, a $33 rebuy that started at like 11pm. You could rebuy anytime you were all-in so the average person was in for $300 or so. At one point, I cashed this tournament 9 times in a row. I would bust around 4am, take a quick nap, and wake up for class at 7:30. Rinse, repeat. F the UIGEA =/. I played donkaments semi-seriously for the next year or so with some decent scores but the whole sit down for 8 hours on end was not very conducive to my busy schedule.
In November of my senior year, I got two five figure scores on Stars and had built up a nice bankroll. I decided that I had pretty much mastered tournaments (laughable, I know) and was ready for a new challenge. I had never played in a cash game online before, so I decided to give them a shot. I immediately started 12 tabling 1/2 FR on Stars. Full ring was the logical choice for me because I was used to the dynamics of 9 handed poker. (I think the first posts about me on 2p2 were me 4b/c A7o and doing other such spewy stuff.) It took me a couple weeks to adjust to playing with deep stacks and develop pot control skills, but after that I was pulling in a steady five figures every month in my spare time. I moved up to 2/4 and 3/6 ~ April (graduated from Ohio State in June and won the million for 135k in July, YAY) and played there for about 6 months before moving up to 3/6 and 5/10.
I had accepted a job working for Ford up in Michigan (pretty sick job in marketing, I was going to be a marketing relationship manager... coordinating cooperative advertising campaigns with Ford's partners such as Sony, Sirius Satelite Radio, BP, Microsoft Sync, etc.) and moved up there in September for the position. The week before my scheduled start day I got a call that Ford was undergoing a hiring freeze and my start date would have to be pushed back. They gave me $5000 for the trouble and said I should be starting within a month. So here I am in a new city where I don't know a single person and have absolutely all the free time in the world... time to triple my volume! Long story short, they kept pushing my start date back and giving me the run around where I wouldn't hear from them for weeks at a time... I had two 50k+ months to start 2009 and the next time they called with BS excuses and to just hang tight I basically told them to go *****.
I was seriously doubting my decision to do this thing full time a couple months later when I hit an inevitable downswing and started to get seriously burned out. I was actually doing job interviews with local advertising agencies, but I found myself basically hoping that I wouldn't be offered a job. I had a sick place in Vegas with alot of FR guys from this forum so I decided to just stick it out through the WSOP and reevaluate from there. I didn't play much online at all in Vegas (I think i had 7000 hands total in June haha) but I came back reinvigorated and proceeded to crush pretty hard. Since then I pretty much play 5/10-25/50 exclusively, playing pretty much everything from HU to FR depending on what games look good at the time. I'm getting much better at shorthanded play (the adjustment has been more rocky than I expected, especially with the tough player pool at high stakes) but I'm still most comfortable at FR where I am pretty confident that I am one of the best online atm.
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