Back Story: I’m 24 now and have played some form of poker for the past 7 years. I’ve been a winning player for 2.5 of them and a huge fish (sometimes on a heater, but mostly a big donator) for the rest. I played live cash for a living for 14 months, before landing a cushy job in the oil industry which pays well and offers significant time off to focus on poker. I currently play 100-500NL online and quite a bit of live cash. I have over $100k in profit from all forms of poker lifetime and have played as high as 5kNL live.

Poker and gambling have been such a huge part of my life for so long, and accountable for so many of the major up and downswings in my life that only seems right to try and chronicle them in some form. My formative years have basically been one big BBV story.

School Life – Discovering alcohol, girls and a strange relationship with money.

I guess my poker story really starts at 17. I was still in school and really beginning to uncover the benefits of growing up. I had a close knit circle of friends who I saw most days and we all had aspirations to be a million different things all at once. I honestly don’t think I’ll ever be closer to a group of people than I was when I was 17. Most of us played football for the same team growing up. From the ages 12-17 I played football every evening for fun, and another 3 or 4 nights a week with various amateur and district teams. I lived and breathed football for 3 years, but suffered a pretty bad injury at 16, when I shattered my knee cap in a friendly. Football had been such a major part of my life for so long, but at 17 I fell out of love with the game. I guess I was also very afraid of playing again after spending a third of a year in crutches. Everybody around me was getting into girls and partying, and so that became the natural priority.

I was in my final year at school at the time. I’m fortunate enough to be from pretty intelligent stock, and as such I have always done well with exams and grades. I’d achieved the results I needed to get into university in 5th year, so I was taking it pretty easy with my classes in 6th. My school has something called study periods for 6th form-ers. Hour long periods of down-time to allow you to catch up on the heavy work load you are supposed to have. I had 17 of these study hours a week, out of 30 overall. It was ludicrous. I had more down time than I had classes and the classes I did have were Physical Education, Advanced English and Art. My weekly schedule was a bit of a joke and I spent more time in the STA (Student Something Area) playing cards (more on this later, ldo) and 5-a-side football in the school yard than doing any school work.

The school has since plastered over this loophole, by forcing kids to fill a minimum of 25 periods a week. Poor bastards.

My pathetic school schedule left plenty of time for parties and such and, having only recently discovered how much fun alcohol was, I indulged. My friends and I got really good fake IDs from a friend of my brother’s and started going out 3 or 4 nights a week. I particularly remember being hung-over almost every Thursday morning because I was due to have a double lesson of swimming. I sat out on the beches for more than half of these due to ‘illness’.

I was working in a little corner shop after school at this point and spending every single penny I earned on going out. I emptied my savings account (about £3k) before Christmas and spent everything else I could get a hold of. Luckily we weren’t able to access casinos at this point (needing a legit passport / driver’s license to register) or it’d probably have been a much quicker and less enjoyable road to busto. Looking back, its clear to me how ******ed the whole thing was. We went out every other night wearing oversized suits and paid for bottle service in expensive clubs, trying to ball-out like ****ing Brad Pitt. We must have looked like characters from Bugsy Malone. But it sure was a lot of fun at the time. Girls seemed to come pretty easy (and so did I, ldo) and I went from being a 17 year old virgin, to ****ing married women in alleyways outside of night clubs.

A few nights a week we’d come home **** house wasted and all crash at one of the group’s house. We were irresponsible, arrogant and drunk – and must have had a close to 90% record for trashing whatever neighbourhood we ended up in. We had a few very close calls with the police, but somehow I never ended up with a criminal record. I’m definitely not proud of this period of my life, and would 100% kick the **** out of my 17 year old self if I ever met him. I’m a very different person now and can only thank the stars that I was never thrown in jail, or had my legs broken by some pissed off property owner.

In school I needed something to do to fill in all my free hours. So I started a little card game ring with a few of the other guys in my year with lots of study periods. We played games like Rummy and Bull**** – before eventually upgrading to ‘poker’. It definitely wasn’t Texas Hold’ Em, or any other known variant for that matter, but we played it none-the-less. In the beginning we played for purely fun and pride, before increasing the stakes. I think it was somewhere between £1 and £10 to buy-in depending on the game.

Like so many of these BBV stories I ran hotter than the sun in the beginning. We played 5 or 6 times a day on average, and I was making an extra £100 a week from the other kids. Obviously I thought I was God’s gift to card games and I rarely had a losing day. In my eyes I was pretty much Maverick - with my unmatched ability to read people (read: get lucky and draw out vs. better hands).

Outside of poker, partying and school I was playing quite a lot of Counter Strike at the time on my PC. I was 1000% addicted to this game from the ages of 13-16 and shudder to think how many hours I logged in total (10,000+ easily). I went to LAN tournaments every year, played for decent cash prizes online and spent hours drilling tactics with my clan every night. I’d probably guestimate that I played from 9pm-3am 75% of nights, for four solid years.

Eventually though, as with anything, I fell out of love with CS. It just so happened that a good number of my gaming friends were transitioning to online poker. I was obviously amazing at poker IMO, so it seemed like the easiest snap decision of all time. I made my first $50 deposit online and lost it within probably 30 hands of 25NL…

To come: Getting crushed online, moving out, winning £15k in a week at roulette, expensive clubs and expensive friends, Las Americas, getting robbed in Belize, Cocaine friends, playing live poker across Europe, broke and sleeping in a bus shelter in Paris, becoming a winning player, European adventure Mk.2, living in Croatia, playing live cash for a living, HUNL grudge matches, weekends in Berlin, the live grind, Champion League final and YouTube sensations, break-ups and make-ups, settling down.

Online Poker – losing, losing and losing some more. Then winning.

It was the summer of 2007 when I turned my attention to online poker. I was starting my English degree in September and working a ****ty job 4 days a week in Tesco to save some money for the coming year. I thought I could make a little money on the side playing poker online. Given all the success I’d had at school playing Made Up Poker, I was obviously a lock to be a profitable player.

I must have made 50 or 60 deposits in the region of $50-100 over that summer. Every single time I’d spaz it all off within a few days, triple –barrelling nits or making hero calls with 3rd pair on the river (not that I knew what any of these terms meant, I was just following my gut feeling). A number of times I ran my account up to 4-figures and thought I’d finally cracked it, only to lose everything the next day.

Eventually I asked one of my old Counter Strike buddies how he was doing so well. He pointed me in the direction of some poker literature and I downloaded a pdf copy of The Theory of NL Hold ‘ Em by Sklansky. I think I read about 6 and a half pages before loading up Stars, re-depositing and losing all my money again. I was nothing more than a gambling junky at this point – with zero desire to actually put in the work needed to improve and nothing in the way of bankroll management. I wanted the world and was not prepared to work for it.

Fortunately I didn’t have access to money outside of my means, and hadn’t discovered the wonders of an overdraft yet. I was broke and had no more money to deposit. I picked up more hours at Tesco and put poker on the back burner for a little bit.

I worked my ass off for 2 months: Doing chores like cutting the grass and washing cars for my neighbours outside of my work hours, to make some money for Uni. Somewhere around this point I made what I hoped would be my “last deposit” of $500 onto Stars (Spoiler: It wasn’t). It was the biggest deposit I’d ever made to anything, and with it came a promise to myself not to fire it into oblivion. I bought a subscription to Deuces Cracked and started attempting to take the game more seriously. In the same way I had with the Sklansky book, I’d watch an half an hour of training videos, think I’d solved the game, boot up Pokerstars and lose some money. I was still losing money at cash games, but I had some moderate success/luck in SNGs and donkaments to save me from busting my account.

In the middle of September I started my life as a Uni student. I had around £5k to my name and blew a lot of it on the trappings that come with being a Fresher (freshman/1st year student for you non-UKers). I was going out a lot, not going to very many classes and probably smoking about a quarter ounce of weed every two days. I remember one day in October of that year going round to my classmate’s housing so we could get the bus to campus one day. He got ready and we walked up the hill and bought a day ticket for the bus. We got on and found seats near the back. It must have sat at that stop for five minutes, waiting for other students to pay and get on. Because in that time we said **** it, got back off the bus and walked back to his flat to smoke weed and play Fallout 3 for the entire day. He’s my best friend to this day and we still have a laugh sometimes about how stupid it was.

Over time things settled down. I stopped going out as much and started attending more classes. I really was very interested in the stuff I was studying. I’ve always loved reading and writing and wanted to learn how to do it. Most of my biggest inspirations in life are authors (Salinger, Thompson, Kerouac, London, Bukowski etc.) The problem is that I’m almost certainly bi-polar and despite my best intentions to stay in and study, whenever I see nightfall I find it very hard to refuse the temptations of drugs, alcohol, parties and loud music. It’s pretty strange because I’m a fairly quiet, unbecoming guy in the hours of daylight. The twilight has a weird effect on me. I guess I’m part Werewolf or something. Most of my favourite writers are huge degenerates anyway, so whatever.

Around this time I got back into online poker. I finally adopted BRM and started 8-tabling 10NL. I was super bad and probably still a losing player, but I played 60k cash game hands in November and had my first ever winning month as a poker player. It felt great and is, to this day, probably the most I’ve ever been able to enjoy winning at poker.

About a week later I had a big fallout with my girlfriend. She’d always had a moral objection to gambling and something I’d done had really pissed her off. We broke up. I lay in my room for probably 5 hours after she left, listening to Nine Inch Nails tracks and staring at the ceiling. I drank a bottle of Jack Daniels and sent her a text calling her a c*nt.

It was Thursday and on the Saturday I went out, to seek solace from the night. I went to a bar by myself and ordered about 30 whisky and soda waters. I met two older business men from London and they took me under their wing. One of them was named Donny, the other was pretty forgettable. Donny was great. We drank loads and shot the **** for a few hours. I told him all about my ex, poker, studies and life. He was almost twice my age, but had more youthful exuberance than I’d ever been able to muster. We stayed out all night and I did rails of Cocaine off of a nightclub toilet for the first time. Around 3am we went to the casino. I’d never been inside a casino before this point and I remember working very, very hard to convince the doorman that I was sober enough to come in. - I wasn’t. But he let me in anyway.

We played some roulette and I won somewhere around £200. I remember peeking my head into the casino card-room and promisinng myself to come back when I was in better shape (probably the single best decision I made that year.) I stumbled home around 6am, having covered my nights drinks and then some with my roulette winnings.

“Wow. I should really do this more often.” I thought to myself as I sat on the bench outside of my house and watched the sun rise.

In the following week I blasted £4k at the roulette tables. I was playing £300 bullets at a time and covering the middle. I withdrew all the money I had in my account and all of the money I had in poker sites. I would go straight to the casino every day after class and stay until 4am. It was me and the old Asian degenerates against the house. I lost almost everything I had saved over the summer. I was ****ing crushed. I walked home one night after losing my taxi fair home on “one last spin” and burst into tears. I couldn’t believe that anyone could be this unlucky.

I stayed away from the casinos for a good month after that. Got my head down and concentrated in classes. I had exams coming up and knew I needed to study if I wanted to stay in university. I got back together with my ex-girlfriend and we were really good to one another. She introduced me to her friends and I locked the Werewolf away for a while.

wasn't a bad read good job

haha go **** yourself.

Thanks. Lots more to come after 1000 more coffees.

Great read!! gl for the future op

Tldr

Wanna find me a job?

Ps just move this **** to house of blogs forum if you actually want people to read it

MOAR.... you sound like the British version of myself

Meh, at least you read it

TYVM, glad you enjoyed it

I did warn you. Also no.

Too late now.

Haha, working on chapter 3 right now. Glad you enjoyed it.

it is never too late to change

Nice read, can relate to the roulette stuff, f***ing horrible game

Everybody's a player, wearing them Kangols on they heads; thinking it's all about their clothes; homey, it's all about yourSELF!

Getting Lucky – Winning more money than I’d ever seen. Expensive days and expensive friends.

We lived in this nicey-nice bubble for 3 months or so. It was all sunshine and walks in the park. I’d buy her flowers and she’d lie on my chest while we watched X-Factor and **** soap operas. It was nice, but I just couldn’t live like that. I broke up with her again one night in such a whirlwind rush that I even caught myself by surprise. I love that girl, but I knew somewhere down the line I’d **** up and hurt her. She’s way too nice for me.

I started going out a lot again. It was around the same time that MCAT became huge in the UK. I tried it a few times, but it didn’t really do much for me. A few of my friends were pretty big users, but I generally prefer alcohol to chemicals. I pretty much moved in with my friend Brendan at this point and slept on his couch 5 nights a week. Everyone I knew was in university and there were pretty much infinite opporunities to get ****ed up and have a good time.

On one particular night out I’d gotten seperated from my friends. By the time they found me a few hours later, I was back at the roulette wheel and in the middle of the most epic MartinGale session of my life. I ran £150 up to £13k double spinning 15, 13, 10 and 0 in about 2 hours. I cashed out shortly after they got there and we went to the bar. They had some stupid rule about not being able to sell full bottles of alcohol. I asked how many shots were in 75cl bottle and promptly bought 30 shots of Goldschager for myself and a friend. To this day even the smell of cinnamon makes me want to vomit.

I spent the next 2 days with crippling stomach cramps, violent shakes and a headache that would take down a ****ing black bear. But I was thirteen thousand pounds richer.

Somehow I managed not to dump all of that profit back into the casino. I bought a VW Golf from my parents with it and put a good chunk of it into the bank. I still played roulette from time to time, but I stuck to my £300 bullets and seemed to win an inordinate amount of the time. I genuinely convinced myself and my closest friends that I had a system for beating roulette. I definitely made close to £20k in a three month period. I considered dropping out of uni and becoming a professional roulette player LOL.

I’ve always been very generous with my cash when I have it. Feast or Famine. That was the motto that my friends and I lived by. I had more money than sense at this point, and literally no bills to pay. I was probably spending about £500 a week on whatever the **** I wanted. I realise its not exactly a super baller amount. But when you’re not accustomed to having it, it feels like all the money in the world. Soon enough it was the Summer break between 1st and 2nd year and I didn’t even have to get a job. I pretty much spent every day at the beach, go-karting and paint balling and every night getting ****ed up and going to the casino. Needless to say, it was awesome.

The summer came and went and it was time to go back to classes. I’d spent a lot over the summer and probably had about £3k left at this point. Whatever. I’d just run it back up at roulette. Right? Lord Gamblor had other ideas though, and I burnt through the rest of my savings in one night of degeneracy. I swore off of roulette and other house games at that point, and have probably played less than 20 spins lifetime since this point. I at least managed to save enough money for a taxi home.

I told the cabbie on the journey back home and he had a good laugh at my expense. I’d been broke before, and it definitely hurt less the more often I experienced it. Funnily enough that same cab driver is a reg at the poker room I play now. I’m probably up about $4k on him. Strikes and gutters, eh?
I needed money for food, water and petrol – so I went back to my ****ty cashiers job at Tesco. I still had quite a few friends working there and the work was easy. I worked on Thursdays and Sundays. It paid double time on a Sunday, which was around £15/hour. I made about £170 a week, which was comfortable enough to cover everything I needed. After a couple of months I’d saved enough to put $500 back into Pokerstars. I played 10NL/25NL and did loads of studying and game theory work. I was still pretty bad, but I was +EV for the first time in my life. It was pretty cool. Because I was working part time and had no bills to pay I was able to pad my roll fairly quickly. Poker was pretty much the only thing I thought about at this point. I’d write EV calcs on the back of till rolls at work and watch hours upon hours of training videos and PAD re-runs.

I played about 10k hands per week and moved up to 50NL a few months down the line. I kept my job at Tesco, but was soon making more from poker. I wanted to test myself on a different front and slowly but surely my mind started to drift back to the poker room at the Grosvenor. The one I’d peeked through the curtains at while out of my mind with Donny. I waited until Friday night, cashed out a couple of pay cheques and drove straight to the card room…

"I went from being a 17 year old virgin, to ****ing married women in alleyways outside of night clubs."

When you gonna tell us this story

Prefered it in BBV where people actually go. :[

Too true. Thanks for reading!

Yes.

Haha. Maaaaaybe some time. Pretty much as it sounds though.

Great stories, I have many very similar :-)

Where abouts you from?

Great read!

Good read OP, I'm enjoying your story. Please come back and tell us MOAR!