Yeh I think I'm kinda resigned to this fact, can always hope + bombard chuck with tweets until he blocks me/finishes story lol

i like reading this stuff

wow great read, please keep updating

Bump for update ?

I read all this aaaaages ago but now im assuming theres new volumes and i really cba to sift through 50 pages to find them so can someone be amazing and do it for me hehehehehe

Actually it's 93 pages

OMG ^ HAHAHAH

Alright, I believe I owe you guys some updates. I've decided to go all the way with this now. I'm not sure how many more volumes this will actually be, when I look at it I think like 4-5, but when I start writing I get rambley and any length I may have planned doubles up.

Anyway, so I have set myself the following deadlines (the next 2 weeks I'm going to be really busy since it's summer in Finland and I don't really want to be in front of my computer when I'm not playing, which I do way too much anyway):

Next volume: August 25th

The one after that: September 19th

The one after that: October 10th

For the whole story to be finished regardless of volumes: December 19th, my 26th birthday and also so that people will have a week to read it before the possible acopalypse


I'm not trying to build some sick hype around this and postpone it on purpose, but I know it looks like that with silly release dates like that. The truth is I'm lazy, and kinda oi with this thing to the point where I kinda wish I didn't have the burden of having to finish it, and somehow writing this has transformed from something I really enjoyed to something I almost hate along the way. It's obviously not your fault, I'm just weird like that.

Anyway, I realize I can't really start to tell a story like this and not finish it so I have now decided to chin up and do it. To further boost my writing, I'm gonna do the same thing with the dates I did before - if I miss a date, I'll donate people money (this way I won't actually miss the dates).

I'm just throwing these randomly without checking, but if I miss the first deadline I'll send $100 on Stars to whoever made the post #365 in this thread, if I miss the second I'll do the same to #420, for 3rd deadline #79, and for the last deadline #333. If any of those end up being me, I will move up one number (333-->334 etc) until there is a person who is not me. The poster also must have a stars account or a friend who has a stars account I can send to or I'll move forward. All of that is just hypotetical tho, because I'm not going to miss these deadlines

I do have an escape clause and I myself will be the judge of that - if I break my arm, or a close relative dies or something awful like that I will allow myself to not write and avoid having to pay, but I will not use this clause unless there's something that is absolutely physically or mentally stopping me from writing. Being on a ds or breaking up with a girlfriend or stuff like that will not count.


I even managed to turn this to a ramble, but thanks for reading and patience, I'll be back on August 25 the latest

edit: and yes, those dates are 2012.


http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...postcount=1213 <--- index of volumes so far

weeeeeee!


and holy moly what a graph

Amazing 1st post after 8 years of lurking. Love it

wooo i cant wait for the next volume chuck!!!

hahah sick catch.

I remember reading this a while ago, all I remember is you like dogs, have crazy swings, and had a hot crazy gf? Lol perfect time to read again since I can't sleep.

Did not look in this thread for weeks, I take a peek today.. and Chuck is here, leaving a promise about a new chapter, again..

It appears that many of the pics originally posted in this thread have disappeared and some of the past volumes look dumb, because the texts I put under the pics are still there. I think I just uploaded them at tinypic.com and now, a year later they have disappeared.

Does anyone know what happened, and where should I upload them so that the would actually stay? And could a mod help me out to put the pictures back to place because I can't edit the past volumes?

Thankyou.

edit: Also the index page seems to be a bit f'd up atm.

O M G I'm excited. Thanks chuck!

Hahahahaha!...forget Chuck Bass, I want to know this guys story!

Hey guys. I thought I'd start working on this earlier than planned since I'm on a mini-summer holiday and found out that I had actually nearly written the next volume. I think I originally intended to go further in this volume, but I decided that it's better to cut it where I ended up cutting it in. I do acknowledge that this is probably by far the dullest volume of the story, and it sucks that I've kept people waiting so long and I come back with this. In the other hand, it's absolutely mandatory to go over this part too, and I can also pretty much promise that every volume after this will be pretty huge in terms of entertainment value (and painful for me to write). You can just think of this as an early extension, since I was originally going to post this and what will be volume 19 in one bit. This does not count towards the deadlines I set for myself - the next volume still needs to be posted by August 25. I just didn't see any need to hold this back. I'm going to read it one more time and post it.

***

Then another thing - I actually got the writing bug again because I re-read this whole thing yesterday. It was a bit weird, because even that it's my own text and I know what happens in the story, I kind of couldn't stop reading. I don't mean to sound egotistical or anything, but I kinda realized that this is actually a pretty good story. At the same time I started thinking about all the stuff I didn't mention in this thread in order to not make it too long, which is ****loads of stuff, and an image of turning this into a book formed in my head clearer than ever before.

No matter what happens, I will finish the story at these forums like planned originally. I'm not that money-hungry so that I'd end with a cliffhanger and sell the rest in book form or something. But I'm pretty sure now that I'd really love to turn this into a long, 300-page book, that would also touch a bit more on online poker history since I've been there for a long time and I have so many good stories about it. Like, there's a lot of absolutely epic stuff that happened in my life when I was living in Australia just before picking up poker and during the time I was starting that I couldn't mention here. A lot of it was just womanizing and getting drunk a lot, but there was so much incredible **** happening I'd love to document it.

But at the same time since I'm just a guy with a hof life story and not really a celebrity or something, I don't see how I could write about those times alone in the book. However, there are so many characters in my story who already played seriously back in the day, and so much going on in the online world that affected my future (such as the Lodden/TheTerrorist case) that I could include a lot of my own life stuff and blend it with an online poker time capsule to justify it.

However, I have no idea who to go to. Poker publishers seem to publish just strategy books. Standard literary publishers probably aren't interested in a poker story. I don't even know if it should be a book-book or an e-book or what. I have absolutely no idea who to turn to. This isn't a matter of life or death and I can live with this never going anywhere, but I'd love to talk to someone about this who could possibly help me out. So if anyone who happens to read this knows who I could turn to, I'd forever appreciate your help. Also if you know someone who's in the business and you think they might be interested, I'd appreciate it if you could point them in this thread.



Anyway, next volume coming in ~15 minutes.

Anyway, next volume coming in ~15 minutes.



YES!!!!!

Vol.18: Face To Face With The Future

It was my last full day in Portugal on that trip. The EPT final table was about to commence. I've always hated railing live tournaments, so I had no interest in going to the casino. I decided to spend one more day with Sami. Some hours later Antonio Matias was the champion. Perhaps more noteworthy were the next three – Pierre ”zoutechamp” Neuville got second, Jeff Sarwer third and Jan Skampa fourth.

We ate lunch and Sami came over to my hotel to grind for a change. I think he said that in his hotel the internet had been slow – not exactly surprising with hundreds of poker players downloading pornography and grinding – and I said that mine works perfectly. He came to my empty hotel and laughed at the site of a huge hotel with no one living there. We took seats from the enormous couches in the lobby as we basically had the entire place for ourselves, and fired up our sessions.

For some reason that is still a bit unclear to me I chose to play MTTs instead of cash games. I had never done this in my life. Actually, now that I think of it, I'm almost sure that it was because I had given Sami the image that I played bigger than I actually did, and didn't want to either play too high to show off or play in my real games to have him see me playing NL100. Back then NL400 was about as soft as NL100 is today, and NL100 was more like NL25. In 2012 I'd have no problem admitting someone I play NL100 for a living as it actually requires some skills and qualities, but back then playing NL100 for a living was kind of like failing to graduate elementary school. Additionally, I had had my weird feelings of not wanting to play lately, and I thought I'd try out something different. ”I'm just going to fire up a few tournaments for the laughs”, I said. Sami grinded his usual 25/50 games, and I was relieved when he didn't offer me a share this time.

I opened just the PokerStars client, since I knew they had the best tournaments. It was early evening and the big guarantee things weren't starting for a while, so I registered to all kinds of random $20-$50 buy-in tournaments. I had been thinking about this for a while – if I was to tour these EPTs, I might as well try to get a bit better at playing the tournament form of poker. To this day I had approached tournaments in the same way as cash games, and whenever stacks got short I just got annoyed and did silly things because I wanted to get deeper.

From the moment on I started this weird and new kind of session I noticed that I was really enjoying myself. First of all, the players were bad. Sure, there were fish at the cash games too, but there were also a lot of regulars playing back at you. In tournaments there was no one. I could do whatever I wanted to, and no one ever fought back. And the fish in them were an entirely new type of fish. I had seen some pretty absurd villains in my career, but it seemed like half of the tournament players didn't even know the rules.

For the first time in ages I felt truly dominant at the tables. I had been struggling with self confidence issues for so long, and I had half-consciously come to realize that I had fallen behind the curve in my evolving process at cash games. For so long now I had been like a shadow of my former, aggressive and careless self. Even if my theoretical knowledge had increased and I had learnt to talk about ranges and think about hands in the correct manner, I hadn't felt dominant for eternities. For so long I had been just a guy trying to make his living, one of those people who were ran over by the better regs and took their piece from the fish.

I enjoyed myself so much playing that night. Sami was next to me, willing to analyse any spot he came across and to open up his mind to me. Many people would've paid $1000/hour to be in my spot. But I didn't even pay attention. I was sucked in by this new, exciting form of poker. When the inevitable coin-flipping phase started late in tournaments, I found myself really liking that too. I got my adrenaline rushes that I had always longed for, but they came as a natural part of the game. I was able to sweat flips and get excited without putting myself in suicidal spots. So often I had ran stupid 300BB bluffs just to feel the excitement when the villain was time banking. Now I didn't have to. I was there, present, with my tournament life on the line in a spot that I couldn't have avoided, and I got to sweat the outcome of the flip like the kid me playing slot machines. If I lost, I didn't feel guilt, because this was a deserved adrenaline rush and a mandatory part of the game. If I won, good for me, it meant there were more flips ahead.

I ended up making a deep run in one of my tournaments. It was just a random $22 freezeout and fairly meaningless money-wise. It had less than $2000 for the winner, so winning that would add a decent chunk to my bankroll, but at the same time it was nothing to get overly excited about. It was just perfect for the occasion. When there were 18 players left, I remember getting a bit anxious. I really, really wanted to final table this thing. I knew it was silly, since who cares about final tabling a random $22 tournament with a bit over 400 players, but that didn't stop me from making it a big deal in my head. I just wanted to do it, and started seeing this as a sports event rather than money-making. My pulse started racing. I won all the mandatory flips, made it to the final table, and eventually got heads up against a Portuguese opponent. Who knows, maybe he was at the other hotel playing against me.

I had my heads-up background, and this guy had been pretty bad all tournament long. Surely, I wasn't very good either since I still didn't have any understanding about stack sizes or how tournaments differ from cash games, but he was way fishier than I was. I had a chip advantage too, and I was sure I was going to win.

After the first few hands I kind of woke up from the excitement of the tournament, and remembered who I was sitting with. ”Hey Sami, wanna take a look at this? I'm heads up in some donkament, let's crush this guy”. There I was, with arguably the best NL heads-up player in the world, trying to grind down some random guy in a $22 tournament. Of course we lost. It was kind of painful as I, forever the gloryhunter, really wanted to get the title. It would've been awesome to win what was basically my first tournament. But this was fine too. I banked a four-figure profit for the session, but that wasn't important. What mattered was that I had caught the bug. I was more excited about poker than I had been for a long, long time. I still credit that tournament for a lot. I can't know for sure what would've happened if I hadn't gone that deep, and hadn't got to experience all the excitement at the final table. It's funny how life works - if I had ran disastrous and lost all of my flips, it's easily possible this random tournament experiment would've left such a negative mark in my head I'd have never returned. But since I ran good, I got an additional boost to continue working towards what would eventually become my profession.

Sami finished his session soon after mine, and it was already past midnight. I had my flight out of Portugal at 6AM in the following morning, so I didn't have much time to sleep. When I got to my room I was so tired that I decided to just go to sleep and pack in the morning. I fell asleep almost immediately, dreaming about tournaments.

After pressing snooze way too many times I realized my plane was leaving in an hour, I still hadn't packed and the airport was 20 minutes away. I packed my stuff in record time and rushed to the lobby, only to notice that the lobby guy wasn't there. I waited five minutes for him to come, then another 10 minutes for a taxi, and despite getting a maniac driver missed the flight. This was bad, because it was a connecting flight to Ljubljana via London, and there weren't many flights to Ljubljana at all.

I fired my laptop at the airport, and found an Easyjet flight that would depart a few hours later. I booked it for 200€. Pretty expensive for a low-cost airline, but that's the way it always is with booking flights at the last minute. I took a nap at an airport bench, and boarded my flight to London. I had missed my connecting flight, so I had to get a new one. There was not a single flight available that day. All direct flights from London to Ljubljana had sold out, and all connecting flights cost over 1000€. I managed to book an Adria Airlines flight for early next morning, which was the morning of the day I was supposed to be playing the EMOP Ljubljana day one. I had planned to go there one night earlier so I could sleep before the tournament, but now I'd have to get up at five in the morning and travel on the same day. Not ideal, but I didn't really have a choice. I retreated to a cheap airport hotel.

When I got to my room it was already about 6PM. I was pondering whether to start a session. I knew it would be an awful idea, since I had slept only a couple of hours on the night before, I was tired and I knew I'd have to get up in less than 12 hours again and that would be a long day of playing poker. But then again, I really wanted to play. Once an addict, always an addict. Unsurprisingly I fired another session of tournaments.

I again found myself really sucked in. I just really, really loved playing. I think I lost a bit of money, but I didn't care at all. This was such a new and refreshing feeling. For my entire career I had always religiously stared at my account balance during sessions, and I had never been capable of entirely forgetting about the money. But when I played tournaments, from the beginning I genuinely didn't give a ****. I felt so good, so... light. I was like a feather floating in the world of coin-flipping. In my cash gaming career I had always felt really heavy when I played. On top of concentrating on making the right decisions, there was always so much going on in my head. Stressing about my account balances, stressing about losing money, stressing about going broke, stressing about whether I should quit because I'm not playing my A-game anymore, stressing about whether I should change tables. In tournaments I had none of that. I believe it was partially because the opponents were so weak that it felt more like a joke than a genuine challenge. And on top of that you could only lose your buy-in in a single tournament no matter what you did, which was such a comforting feeling.

After my session I started getting the idea that I might have found my true calling. My adrenaline levels had been high for the entire session, and it had just been so enjoyable. And even that I was playing way worse in tournaments compared to cash games I had so much more experience in, I felt much better about my play in comparison to my opponents than in cash. It was still all a bit blurry, as there was too much to think about to be sure. I had still practiced cash for almost two years, and that would be an awful lot of work to be thrown away. And I still wasn't financially very well off, so it would've been a huge risk to start building something from scratch at that point. I didn't have the energy to think about all that, but I really wanted to learn about tournaments, so when I finished my session at one in the morning I started searching the internet for all kinds of information about tournaments.

It was exactly this moment when I started using my 2+2 account and posting some hands. I made really dumb threads at the MTT forums about some EPT hands I'd played, I posted random smaller stakes tournament hands, and I just had this huge willingness to learn I had never felt before. I had always wanted to be the best of all time thanks to my competitiveness, but I had never actually been motivated enough on the studying side. This time I was, simply because I was so excited about MTTs. I wanted to do it for the game, not for myself. I wanted to compete, to be a sportsman. And for that I needed some training. I came across Bond18's article series, and I studied them all night long. My alarm clock went off at five, and I hadn't even gone to sleep yet. I had totally missed the time passing.

I downloaded the articles on my computer so I could re-read them on the plane. During the night my interest for MTTs had grown and grown, and reading Bond18's articles had helped with some leaks I had already noticed I had (mainly short-stack play and stacking off too light). I was more and more certain that I should start concentrating on MTTs.

I was now getting really tired and was trying to wake up, and the shower I took ended up being a bit too long. There was an issue with my checking out that kept me waiting, the airport bus didn't come in time, and I faced every possible setback imaginable that morning. Having stayed up all night, and sleeping only a few hours on the night before that sure didn't help. I got to the counter exactly two minutes after boarding was closed, and I wasn't allowed to board it. Another flight missed. I'd be a rich man if I could get back all the money I've wasted on missed flights in the past few years.

I was able to get a seat on a plane that would leave just a few hours later, and I'd still make it in time for the tournament. The only problem was that it cost 500€. Thanks to my initial error of leaving packing too late and missing my original flight from Faro to London, I had now spent over 1000€ on extra flights. But I didn't really have a choice, since I had to play the tournament on that same afternoon. I also had a meeting just before the tournament with the management of the Entraction skin I was negotiating a sponsorship for the next year with.

Instead of taking a nap on the plane I read Bond18's articles again. I felt more ready for the 1100€ tournament I'd play that day than ever before. I knew I would absolutely crush, and I was starting to form a pretty clear image of what my life would be like in the next few months: MTTs, MTTs and more MTTs.

The date I flew over that marked the first day of European Masters of Poker Ljubljana was November 25th, 2009. Less than 24 hours later I had triggered the chain reaction that was without any doubt the biggest mistake of my poker career, and quite possibly even of my life. Less than two weeks from that date what I had done was made public knowledge, and I was being spit on by everyone in my home country. I was forced to withdraw my travel plans and return home, penniless and in debt to several people. We'll get there in the next volume.

1st

Amazing as usual

moar moar moaaaaaarr!

great read as always