Ask me questions, guys.

**IW edit**

I'm putting his poker story in this post because of the number of people wondering who mike is:

In the middle of 2004, I started to become intrigued by watching WSOP on TV. At that point it was the middle of the poker boom, and it seemed that poker was on TV all the time. I was very interested and mystified by the people I saw playing. A guy with weird multicolored sunglasses who used fossils as card protectors (Raymer). And another guy whom the announcers referred to solely as "Devilfish." What, how can a guy be named "Devilfish"??? During the commercial breaks there were ads for PartyPoker and Paradise Poker, among others. I decided to start playing online around this time.

After reading reviews of around 5-6 different poker rooms, I decided to start playing on Pacific Poker, becuase everyone said they had the softest games. I deposited $240, and began my online poker adventure. Pacific Poker did not have NL holdem cash games at that time, so I started playing limit holdem. IIRC, I was playing some $.05/$.10 and $.10/$.25 Limit Holdem. And I would eagerly browse the tournament lobby; for Pacific had freerolls several times per day, but they were not announced in advance. You had to keep an eye on the lobby, and observe when the freerolls appeared, and then register quickly before they filled up. Looking back, I am befuddled by the excitement I got from being able to enter a $250 freeroll with 2000 entrants, but at that time, I was so happy to play them.

Pretty soon I started to actually try to learn correct strategies and bought ToP and SSHE. Around this time I discovered the 2+2 forums, but I was still a really bad player.

After clearing the Pacific Poker bonus, I decided to try some other poker sites. In researching the different sites, I stumbled upon bonuswhores.com; which at that time was the premier resource for information regarding poker bonuses. After discovering that site, I began my bonus-whoring career in earnest. In those days, there was an abundance of bonuses; not only for poker, but also casinos and sportsbetting. So during the next couple of years, I would never play at a site unless I had a bonus to clear. I hadn't really settled on a specific game to play, so I was playing NL and Limit holdem in cash games and MTTs and SNGs.

During this time, I was working at a pharmaceuticals distributor in Queens, NY and was getting very frustrated with work. Many of my coworkers were lazy and/or incompetent; however the bosses always got upset at the workers who were doing their jobs well. In early 2006, I was making almost as much playing poker for around 10 hours/week as I was making from my job. I got into a ridiculous argument with my boss about vacation time, and I quit my job and decided to play poker for a living. By then, I had started to play mostly full-ring NL holdem cash games.

All was going well, until the UIGEA passed, and around 1/2 or more of the sites I played at stopped accepting players from the USA. With the sudden contraction of the online gaming market, the quality of bonuses and promotions declined quite precipitously. I actually had to become good at poker in order to make a living at it!

I continued playing and studying the game, and improved my play a little bit at a time. Nevertheless, I was winning much less than I should have been, and the quality of the games continued to get worse. In September 2009, I had had a pretty demoralizing downswing, and I decided to get coaching for the first time. I found a really inexpensive poker coach and booked 10 sessions with him. During those 10 sessions, he found some really obvious leaks in my game which were quickly corrected. After receiving coaching from him, I insta-improved my winrate by around 1bb/100.

I continued along for quite a while, happy with my improved winrate, until I started to feel kinda stagnant around April 2010. I saw Team Moshman's thread in the coaching forum, and decided to apply. Team Moshman offers long-term coaching deals, in which the payment for coaching is a percent of the student's profit every week. They have many different coaches for all types of games: NL cash games, limit cash games, SNG, MTT, etc. So I signed up for 6 months with them, and was assigned a coach who plays mostly 6-max. The aggro moves which he suggested opened my eyes quite a bit, and I stopped worrying so much about "Do I have the best hand?" and started to consider "Do I have the best hand/Can he fold a better hand/Do I have enough fold equity + pot equity when called to semi-bluff?" I think I gained about 1-2bb/100 in my winrate from this coaching.

About midway through being coached by Team Moshman, they asked me if I would be interested in coaching other full-ring NL cash game players. I suppose they had looked at my results and the improvements I was making in my game, and they felt that I could help other players with their games. So I agreed; and since that time I have been coaching other players who are playing stakes between nl10 and nl50. At first I was kinda scared to coach other players, and I thought to myself "Wtf am I gonna be able to teach these guys? I always feel like a donk myself!" But the things I was able to teach them are things that I hardly ever think about, because I take them for granted. I mean, if there's a full-stacked MP limper, and I have A5s OTB, I iso-raise, barring some unusual read. It is like a really simple situation that I never think too hard about, but sometimes people just limp-behind and don't really think about isolating. Sometimes people open and call a 3bet 100bbs deep to setmine. So I can certainly help these players who might make a bunch of mistakes and not realize that they are mistakes.

So, this brings us up to the present day. I could have added more details; I especially can ramble on for hours about the "golden era" of bonus-whoring. But this post is probably already tl;dr as it is, so I will end it now and go back to answering some more questions.

Who are you and why should your opinion be valued?

He crushes all of us in forum games ...

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?k...vA&output=html

What do you do for a living?

I've never been to your town. How would you compare it to Oneonta or Cooperstown? Edit: and why move there from NYC?

Whats your poker story?
Cash or tourney?
Stakes?
What site/sites do you play on?

What is your best solution to playing better?

And does limit just suck, or really suck?

How much you earned in poker

how many 5th graders are you smarter than ?

how many 5th graders could you take in a fight, if they came at you all at once ?

It was a dark and stormy night...

I'm a solid full-ring nl100 grinder. I've been supporting myself from poker for around 5 years now, and have witnessed a lot of changes in the game during this time. Within the past couple of years I have befriended several of the regular posters in BQ, and I think it is certainly a very friendly community and a lot more helpful to players who want to learn than many of the other forums at 2p2. Perhaps my "poker chops" would not entitle me to a well in another forum, but I think I have more than enough qualifications to be of interest to players who are "Beginners".

I play pokers for a living! I thought you knew this already. Obviously.bogus question.

My town (Norwich, NY) is pretty small compared to Oneonta. Cooperstown is a better comparison, although Cooperstown has more activity/commerce due to the baseball HoF, and the fact that Cooperstown goes to great lengths to maintain a small-town, historic identity.

When I was living in Queens, a buddy of mine bought a house in Sidney, NY and offered to let me live there while paying a pittance in rent. So I thought "Why am I paying high rents, car insurance, and taxes here while I can grind poker basically anywhere that I want? I should choose to live in a cheaper place." So I moved to Sidney and lived there for a couple of years. But then my friend was unable to make his mortgage payments, and the house was foreclosed. I had about a month to find a new place to live, and the place I found was here in Norwich, NY. There are certainly big differences between here and the area around NYC. My first winter in upstate New York was a big shock to me. And there are fewer stores, restaurants, etc than in the city. Driving on some of the unlit, backwoods dirt roads up here is an enlightening experience. Real estate certainly is much cheaper here, though. Entire houses can be purchased for less than $75k, which is amazingly inexpensive compared to NYC/LI. Right now I am paying $450/mo in rent for a 2 BR apartment (the apartment is half of a house, with 2 floors and a basement).

How did you discover poker, and when did you start to think you could do this for a living?

Is poker it now for you? Or do you want to do something different in the future?

wow this is great that ur doing a well, i have to admit i watch ur game very closely everytime i play with u, which is only really in shanoobs or fish fry events

u said in ur previous post that u have been supporting urself from poker for about 5 years now, but how long had u been playing before that? did u go busto many times or was it plain sailing for u?

i have seen u playing 8 game as well, which u always look very skilled in, how long did it take to learn the all the different games?

Can you talk about any adjustments you've made due to these changes?

I always used to watch Mikes game when I first played (still do) and I picked up plenty of tips without him even knowing!

Oh, and the first time I 3bet him light and he folded I actually fist-pumped lol he usually reads me like a book.

Got a girlfriend? Want one?

may i also ask what the micro justice league is?

oo 100NL FR... stars or tilt? stats or pretty graphs? have you tried to move up at all past 100nl?

If you were mod how long would it take before you perma banned BB99? Doc? ASB? Hippy? Teh Fuul?

Which BQ mod is the biggest slacker iyo?

What is your educational background?

Family situation?

Do you coach? if so what games?

I will be back to your well for more information later.

Is melchybeaux your gimmick bot?

Does your family know you are an openly ghey online poker player? If so, do they care?

GL in the future...

Mike,

I've been delving into a little genealogy and my ancestry since the first of the year so this question comes from that angle.

If I remember right (which Bona will say is seldom), I think you are of asian descent and were born in Canada. And I think you said you are a Canadian citizen living in the U.S. I was just wondering where your parents and grandparents were from and how did they end up in North America?

Doc

Edit: And you missed my uHULA match with AlienSpaceBat. Justice was administered in about 20 minutes. Which means I ran hotter than the sun.

Heh, every time Mike 3bets me out of the blinds, I immediately think "Mike's such a LAGtard, he does that all the time".

Then I look at the HEM stat, and notice that he actually doesn't do it all the time. He obv just does it to me all the time or something lol

What's your favourite game when you're not playing NL ?

Is NL your strongest game ?

How would you rate other poker games in terms of skillz required ?

Its cause you're a hige fish, I have 184 hands on you and you are down $43.31 most of it at 2nl, and I have your winrate at -1170bb/100


Mike, what are your plans for the future? Im assuming you don't wanna grind 100nl forever?

*** I'm not trolling ***

You have 460ish posts in 7 years. The forum "Regs" are the ones asking the questions, the rest are asking who you are.

Instead of just saying "Ok ask me stuff", why not post a background story, a graph, maybe a little color?

I've been reading this forum as long as I've been here and I have no idea who you are or why you should be making a well. I can place the people asking the questions.

Perhaps some of the "regs" bullied him into doing a well so we could learn something from him?