Quote:
Originally Posted by Hero Value
Ooh. I'll go then.
And if you weren't already planning to write a bio or give some history about yourself and your poker career, then that would be interesting.
I spent my early teens on-wards growing up in a rough area of Inner City London, England. Which was both a blessing and a curse. The school I went to was very poor and although I now consider myself to be reasonably good at academia there was very little incentive to obtain good results and definitely no support to do so.
So I left school at 16 and studied acting for a few years but never really took it very seriously. England was an exciting time to be growing up in the 90's with lots of tourists and a very lively free party scne where massive partys or raves were held in abandoned warehouses,cinemas, fields and on beaches where the general ethos was that people were sick of paying to be policed by aggressive security in clubs. You would sometimes call a number up at 10 pm on a Saturday night and would find out the address from an answerphone message and be on your way. I have some great memory's of these events and it really felt like a special time for all that were involved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UAMWzcNKe0
After holding down some casual jobs for a few years and generally living a pretty hedonistic life style I went back to night school whilst working full time and in a year came out with the qualification I needed to study psychology at university.
After leaving university I worked in the city as a corporate researcher but hated spending the day dealing with spreadsheets and corporate clients and watching the clock move round. Fast forward a few years and I had been working in the charity sector playing lots of poker both live and online and used my first big win to set up a business importing designer lighting form South East Asia which meant the bonus of doing lots of travelling to source products.
Around 6 years ago me and my partner being a little tired of our party fueled city lifestyle decided to emigrate to Australia to set up a business there (I have dual citizenship). This turned out to be perhaps the shortest emigration known to man as we found out we were expecting a baby and the obvious choice was to return to the UK where we both had family support. This led me to be staying with my partners parents in Devon, a rural part of England known for its rolling country side beaches and farming. This is actually where Tolkien based his Lord Of The Rings books.
Anyway so I had spent all my savings on the big move and subsequent retreat and was stuck in a place where jobs and opportunity's were scarce so this essentially led me to start playing poker more seriously. I went back to university to study for a Post Graduate Certificate Of Education which is the UK teaching qualification and became a qualified teacher. But while I was looking for a teaching job I stared making decent money at poker so I have stuck with it although I still like to teach along side poker as it gives me a better life balance and I feel like I am contributing to society.
Previosuly I had played a lot of NLHE both live and online and started winning a little as soon as I started playing. This is probably a lot down to the soft fields at the time but I think poker plays to my strengths as someone who loves games and is always trying to look at underlying strategy's behind them. I had also tried my hand at playing online PLO cash on sites like the Prima network and Betfair and had done fairly well including making the funds to set up my own business. After grinding NLHE MTT's I new this was not for me as the variance and hours were just horrid so I guess this led me to O8.