I'm 40ish and live in Rancho Cordova, California, just east of Sacramento. The first time I ever heard of Hold 'em was back in grad school in LA in 1997. I went to Commerce (I think) to play the pit games (hahaha) and saw this huge room with "Texas Hold 'em" over it and had no clue what all those people were doing.

It would be 2003 and Moneymaker before I thought about it again and 2005 before I decided to give it a try. In 2005, I am married and expecting a baby (my wife, not me personally) so I started learning tournament poker under the impression that I risk less of my own money and I had no BR to speak of. I had moved to Sacramento from DC to take a new job that wasn't starting for a couple of months so I had time to learn poker and play golf. I suck at learning from books and videos so my wife bought me a WPT Boot Camp trip to Vegas to learn tournament poker. So I show up at the MGM and decided to take $200 and play some cash game poker before dinner. 1/2 sounded like it was too small so I sat down at 2/5 thinking "how much trouble can I get into?" Well, after going to the ATM to get my second buy-in after donking off my stack to an obvious flush, I raise to $25 in EP with AQss and get immediately called by the guy to my left with a big stack who is literally salivating over my uber-fishiness. I think there was at least one other caller. Flop comes ATXss and I bet out $25. Big stacks to my left instantly raises enough to put me all in. I tank for a good 2.5 minutes and fold and ask him "Did you have 2-pair?" He just laughs at me and shakes his head. I could not have been worse.

So two days of boot camp followed by a second place finish in the MGM $120 tourney and now I think I am the nuts. I go home and put $200 on Full Tilt because I want to learn, chat and play with the pros, ldo. Of course, tournament camp teaches you absolutely nothing about cash games or BR management so I head straight to a 200NL table and put the whole roll down and start playing. I'm super nitty and manage to actually make money, mostly by quitting when I make $40 or more. Then the worst possible thing that could have happened did, I made $1,000 in a MTT. So now I think I am actually good and donk off a bunch of money over the resulting weeks and bail out after losing all my winnings and getting back down to my original $200.

I eventually joined FCP, read more, played more and joined 2p2. As a family man with a real job, I don't get to play much but prefer live (I actually have a roll now) to online but just because I don't play much doesn't mean I like to lose. I invest time learning so that when I do go, I give myself the best chance to make the right decisions. I shoot for 2 live sessions a month at 1/2 and an occasional microstakes jaunt on Cake.

I don't know if I envy the kids who learn how to play online at college (the internet didn't exist when I went) or am thankful that I couldn't have gotten myself into trouble trying.


Cliffs: I'm old and, despite living within 20 miles of a bunch of cardrooms and casinos, real life keeps me from playing much.

I play £1/£2 nl full time and have a live staker, im 19 years old learnt to play when i was 15 and have been playing live since i turned 18. I used my poker winnings to go on a 3 month voluntary project in Tanzania, Africa building a local school. I got back in April and back on the grind, have a real passion for live poker because of all the added info and social aspect but still find it extremely frustrating how few hands are played.

Will be playing at UKIPT Nottingham (pokerstars event) as well so excited about that. Love the live forum and think the strategy can go a lot deeper than online poker hands, its also very different since so many pots are multi-way and with much deeper stacks

Hi All,
I'm Mike, I am in my early 40's and I currently grind 2-5 spread at Bay 101.

Learned poker at a very young age from my dad, although he didn't teach concepts like EV. Played with friends for small stakes making money for movies and parties etc. It was easy to win because I could tell when I was ahead since my friends played so straightforward. Never really took it seriously or even realized you could take it seriously until 2004.

In 2004 it was like there was a poker vortex around me. All sorts of people I knew started talking about poker. It seemed random but was of course the poker boom. Decided to learn about the game and went directly online. Found 2+2 when I was looking for a good book just as Miller's SSHE was coming out. This was my first poker book.

I discovered at this point that I worked literally 3 blocks from Bay 101. Went in there but the stakes were higher than I wanted to play. (I expected to lose and wanted to spend no more than $200 a month.) Risking 1/2 my monthly stake on one night made no sense. So I looked more online and found the How to Build a Bankroll thread in the zoo. So, I opened a Netteller account and started bonus whoring.

Started out with SSLHE Party games but once I had a roll built I switched to Sit n Go's. These were like printing money at the time. My regular job was a 50 hour high tech type gig so I had little time to grind. However I kept building my roll.

I took some money out and played some live but LHE was the only game and I didn't really love it. Really live was for fun while online was for money.

A few months before Party pulled out I started looking at NL cash online as SNG's were becoming less profitable and there seemed like a real ceiling on how much I could make. I started playing cash at Pokerroom and the games were so soft it was crazy. I was not that good but wow they were worse. Moved to Full Tilt when everybody pulled out of the US market.

I continued to grind 2/4 6 Max part time until I got laid off my Software job in March 2009. I decided this was a good time to take the plunge and go pro.

Pro poker is tough, especially online. I have a very difficult time putting in enough hours. When I am on my game I am certainly a decent winner but when I am not really feeling like it I become a marginal winner to marginal loser. And it seems like there are a lot of those days.

In October 2009 I started a 5 month break even stretch. Many factors led to this: My opponents were getting better thus my confidence was lower thus I played fewer hours thus my stress increased. It really is a vicious cycle. I lived off my 401k money for a few months.

March 2010 I felt I had to make a change, something drastic. I looked harder at the spread game at Bay and I knew I could beat the game. I also knew that if I drove to Bay I would actually stay and play for a decent number of hours. Too often online I would lock up a win after playing for 40 minutes.

So I have switched to live play full time since mid march and it is going very well. I put in more hours and am less concerned about whether I am in the perfect mindset to play. I have been running well so I hope to build up more reserves for the next downswing.

I would say my greatest strength live is understanding my opponents. Which ones are more concerned with pulling off a big bluff that winning money? Which ones just have to know what you have? Which ones will be so insulted if you make a tiny blocking bet they simply must raise?

For example I had 55 and I limp/called a young TAG's raise recently. Flop was ten high rainbow and he checked behind. Turn was low and he checked behind. River paired the board and I bet $10 into $30 knowing he almost always has Ace high and he will hate the idea of calling or folding. He shipped $120 and I beat him into the pot to stack his AK.

36, male, native Southerner, lived in the Northeast when I first started posting to this forum.

I was very much a "poker boom baby." Coworker invited me to a $50 home tourney in spring 2004. I knew it was a bad bet but figured it was worth the money to socialize. Played terrible, caught enough cards to outlast my host, was hooked.

First book purchase (within a day or two) was Gary Carson's Complete Book of Hold 'Em. In those days everyone started out learning LHE, but that would change radically within a year.

My lack of career focus started a few years before that and isn't a direct result of the siren song of poker. But flirting with the idea of playing pro didn't help. I got laid off my last technical job in 2008, as I was planning to return to school for a career change anyway. For various reasons I deferred for a year in spring '09 -- decided to use that year to see what it was like trying to grind for a living. Mostly what I learned (after trying various poker disciplines -- everything from online SNGs to 6-max hold 'em to live NLHE and too-small LHE) is that I need to overcome my own risk aversion to be successful on as big a scale as my intellect can support.

(I still wonder how successful I could be at poker if I really dedicated myself to it.)

For the moment I'm mostly playing online -- finding MTTs quite juicy, especially various forms of *LO8 -- but live play is still my first love.

Probably not a very interesting story, but I got a lot of self-knowledge out of living it so that's what matters.

I'll play along...

I'm a Houston resident who has played card games seemingly forever, but I got more serious about poker once the "boom" got people interested in playing overall. Sadly, I wish I were in college when all that hit, but I was one year removed from graduating from law school when Moneymaker hit it big. (so, yeah, I turn 33 next week... I feel old compared to all the Internet prodigies that play.)

I've been playing hold 'em since '04 when we started a regular home game. From there, a handful of the players started taking the game VERY serious... and once I started reading the books and learning that there is strategy in addition to the math, I was hooked on all the games. Yup, I have a degree in mathematics and I'm a patent litigation attorney, but I seem to only use my math skillz when I play cards. Odd.

These days I play about 3-4 times a week for stakes ranging from 1/2 to 1/3 to 2/5 and every now and then I drive to Louisiana for $200+ buy-in tourneys. Sadly, the only regular games are underground places with $10+1 rakes and a small community of players (i.e., few tourists to exploit). But it makes for a fun hobby. I have no delusions about being a "pro" or ever being seen on TV playing a tourney. My only brush with WSOP fame was being at the WSOP-C events in Atlantic City in March.

hello! I'm Andi. I live in San Diego with my husband and my dog. I am currently unemployed and play poker to make extra spending cash, but i will not say i'm a "pro" or a grinder because I don't play to actually make a living.

I have had an interesting 34 years...I have an engineering degree from the Air Force Academy, and I spent 6 years on active duty. I've been a skydiver for 16 years, and been a national-level competitor in formation skydiving for about 8 of those years. I have a gold medal and a world record to my name, both in skydiving. I'm a super-competitive person and I think this is one of the reasons I got interested in poker, beyond the math aspects, which I find fascinating.

I started playing poker about a year ago, after getting killed in our fun games we'd play when it was too windy or cloudy to jump. I look back now and am amazed at how BAD I was! I found 2p2 and began lurking, and realized how much more there is to the game than I thought. Started a Pokerstars account and deposited $50, enough to play 2NL.

I discovered that my ADHD personality didn't lend itself well to online grinding, as I would get distracted by shiny things around my house or on the net and forget that I was supposed to be playing hands. So I set aside a couple of 1/2 buyins and headed 20 minutes down the road to one of the local indian casinos. a year later, I can honestly say I am a slightly winning 1/2 and 2/3 player.

I also got hit by some kind of odd lucky strike of lightning and was able to win a WSOP ME seat at a local tournament...so here I am, lurking both this forum and the MTT forums, because I consider myself a cash game player, and tournaments are this strange different world that I need to learn FAST if I don't want look incredibly stupid in July.

I haven't posted much on 2p2, because I immediately picked up on the fact that online and live are so different that a lot of the advice given for microstakes hands just wouldn't work at a live table. I'm really glad this forum exists, and I will try to get over my strat-posting timidity (I still think I suck and anything I post would be wrong).

On another note, I find the psychology of poker fascinating, particularly where it involves gender issues and stereotypes. I love and hate that I'm typecast before I even play a hand, and learning to use that to my advantage has become a big part of my day to day study/thinking.

My name is Jason.
I live in N.Ireland
25 years old.
I have been playing live on/off for 4 years now, weekends mostly.
I work in an Architects firm, low level tech.

First started playing a tournys winning a few in loose passive games. They I stumbled into cash games winning over £800 in my first night never looked back over the years I ran it up to £7k. Then I got a mortgage, GF and new job so I had to take time out from poker, I went back recently and got crushed runnng into coolers/bad beats, I dropped 1k and with other bills/payments and helping out my brother I dont have much of a bank roll left - only 10BIs.

Never liked online poker as I am at best a small winner at 2NL-10NL playing 9+ tables with 14/12 stats over a large sample. I guess my game is pretty weak-tight both online and live if any decent player were to play me they could figure me out easily as I play very straight foward, ABC poker but still amazes me when I do have the nuts how many times I get called or played back it even with my tight image.

I used to love playing poker it was like watching a magic trick, not knowing how the trick was done but once I studied poker lost a lot of its excitement and fun. The times I do play live it seems like I just hang around waiting for the nuts, Hanging around, hanging around. Kid's got alligator blood. Can't get rid of him. .

I've often seen these people, these squares at the table, short stack and long odds against them. All their outs gone. One last card in the deck that can help them. I used to wonder how they could let themselves get into such bad shape, and how the hell they thought they could turn it around. - I think I am in that category now of "these people" my game hasnt improved, it just got nitter and more systematic. I find poker fascinating and a lot of it has to do it before you sit down at the table.

Cant think of anymore to write but I am sure there is more.

I am Donald. I am a 30 something long time donator. Tremendously prefer live more than online. Have loved poker since Rounders came out. Usually play live on average twice a month. Want to play more, but schedule dictates that I play less live and more online. Do fine playing live and usually donate winnings from live play to online play. I play penny games now online as it is a felony in my home state to play online poker. Considering giving it up and just playing strictly live. I know there is lots to be had playing online but I think that it is just not for me.

Vegas is my favorite place to play and I usually pay for my trip grinding 1/2 or 2/5 NL while I am there.

Way excited for this forum topic. It is a long time coming as I am a longtime 2+2 lurker

Hello all.

I have gone by the online name of Mergatroid for the last ten years in a variety of forums and sites.

I have been playing poker online for the last 4 years, mostly play money. Two years of weekly play at a race-ino near Indianapolis, mostly 1/2.

I don't know everything, but can spot bull**** a mile a way. That may make me rather unpleasant to have on a forum. But the remedy is don't talk crap.

Poker is a great game and it presents a challenge to me, not a living. I will not quit my job to play 1/2 or 2/5. Returns can never match what I do. So poker is fun and a challenge. Similar to finding the groove on an upwind tack in a 20 mile wind.

Hope to learn lots from this forum, have so far.

Greetings to all.

Hey everyone, my name is Spencer and I'm 21. I live in Huntington Beach, CA and go to college. I play micro stakes online and used to make the trek up to Morongo once in a while but since I turned 21 I go to Hawaiian Gardens now and play 1/2. Only been playing a little over a year and haven't had a lot of success live but looking to improve that.

ldo

Name: Keith
Casinos/Cardrooms of choice: Lucky Chances, sometimes Artichoke Joes, Bay101. In Vegas, Venetian definitely.
Been playing NL for about 2 years, limit before then.

Strengths: Calling Station, adept at drawing bluffs out of opponents, value bet thinner than most live opponents.
Weakness: Calling Station, play too many hands OOP with the hope of FPS-ing my way to victory.

Biggest leak to work on: Avoiding playing the strong players OOP with dominated hands, esp broadways. Bloating the pot and hitting medium hands.

Favorite spots: Bet flop, bet turn, check river, snap call their missed draw.

Games played: 1-2NL to 5-10nl live, 10nl-100nl online. Also a big PLO fish.

My name is Jon, Im 23, Im from Detroit Metro Area, Michigan. I fist started online in 2004 my first year of college. Lost $200 right off the bat and decided to read some books and deposit another $50 and never looked back. Started with SNG's and stupidly cashed out a lot for expenses, finally got to $33 and $55 SNGS on Party Poker right before they switched software. Played those until they blocked out American Players and moved to 100NL on Full Tilt. I never made a ton of money but kept grinding.

Eventually I moved back to Michigan and they have "Charity Games" here in bars. Charity games are cash games or tournaments in Bars and they give part of the rake to a certain Charity. It took me a couple times to get a BR going but eventually got my feet and was destroying the 1/2 game in my local bar and would play 3-4 days a week while working full time. Im pretty friendly at the table and always heard people talking about this certain home game that sounded nuts. Well I eventually got invited to a different home game with some of the same players and played that for a month or so. I finally got invited to the main home game and now Im a regular there every week and by far the best player and clean up regularly. It’s a 1/2 game that gets 5-7K(Occasionally more) on the table by the end of the night. I play a ton of 1/2 and quite a bit of 2/5 now and occasional 5/10. Im going to start playing more downtown at the Casinos for more consistent 2/5 and eventually 5/10 as my main game.

Need to work on my attention span, I have a really tough time focusing when Im not in a hand or when I dont have that good of a hand to find spots to take advantage of. Also the game I play in, people are playing Q6 for $20 pf in a 1/2 game and a 3-bet of a $12 raise gets 2-3 callers so there isnt a whole lot challenging me. Although I did get the nickname "Johnny Stacks" from having a big stack all the time.

Cliffs: Started online and got to 100NL, now mainly play 1/2 and 2/5 live in Juicy Home Games. Going to add Casino play for more 2/5 and eventually 5/10.

Well, I guess this is as good a time as any for post #1. I enjoy the game, and rely on it as supplemental income to help pay the bills. I am a husband and father to a beautiful little girl, and my part time playing (ave 50 hours a month) really goes a long way in helping for my wife to be at home instead working. I do work a 40 hour a week day job. I am located in South Jersey, closer to Philly but under an hour to AC.

I am primarily a cash player - 1/2 and 2/5 NL at Borg and Trop mostly. While I consider myself a cash game player, I do play about 10 tourneys a year, usually during Borgata Opens, and the WSOP circuit events, and a few dailys. My tourney records look pretty good - in 2009 I played 12 tourneys, monied in 8 of them, and won or chopped dailys at Trop (2), Taj, and Ballys. Had a deep run in a deepstack borgata open event and a wsop Caesars cash. My cashgame winrate is pretty solid, though looking at my records, I have been considering switching my focus to tourney play. I would like to discuss this with some players who have made that commitment.

At about age 3 i won my first pot of no limit stud. I am 46 now

There was a local game where An Italian( Mario ), a Jew ( Kirkwood ) and Irish grandpa would play. The 4th seat was for whoever else was around, ( Booth sometimes ). Grandpa would stake relatives who would often lose. Grandpa was the master.

All of these guys kinda represented their community at this game.

Booth and Kirkwood played pretty well. ( google those 2 names, wow )

I see Grandpa's face light up. I asked if i could play his hand. The other 2 guys were like, " sure, let him play "

So i ignorantly asked Grandpa if 5 in a row beat 5 of the same color, answer of no.

Into the pile of cash i reach my hand and scrunch some money and ask if i can bet this many. 1/3 his pile. Down into the pot snows grandpa's money.

Kirkwood had the smaller boat and i had his quad.

By the end of the hand, all of the money available was in the pot.

Kirkwood realized i couldn't make a str8, i completely angleshot him and would never let me play again, ever.

Mario loved it.

Grandpa was impressed and taught us poker as grankids whenever we saw them.

I have played with a nun, who i kissed.

Whenever our parents went away on vacation, our grandparents or Nun Maryellen would watch us for 2 weeks. We played poker and watched Heston flicks with a narrative by our own biblical scholar.

Years later i played with the daughter of the guy who builds just about every ship from Korea. I miss those days, a lot.

I played online while an informant vs some people that just about everyone here does not like. I could never sleep so online poker seemed like a good thing to do while i stayed awake for a year.

3 hours sleep per day, that was it.

I did well online untill 18 months or so ago.

Poker has brought me money for sure.

I havent cheated at poker unless it was at age 5 or so, peeking at someones cards.

Online cheats are the worst as they could be stealing diaper money and not know it.

With poker winning i imported a nightmare filipina. Married , divorced, jail time. I didn't do any crime.

I met my present ladyfriend on her way to a tourney i played in also. She is 19 yrs younger than i and a different race also. She drives me nuts and is similar to the exwife in that the situation sounds like more fun than it is.

Hands down, poker has funded some fun with the ladies.

my name is Jeff I am 39 from Maryland...I have always been a good poker player but i had no idea it was as profitable as it is until i lost my job in Nov 09 and started playing part-time to supplement my unemployment...I only had FPP's at the time, but i had a lot of them from playing 3/6 every once in a while for like 3 years and I turned those FPP's into about $5K over the course of 6 months...

I have alway been "good" at things, when i was a younger man I was maybe the most feared basketball player on the streets...I played junior college ball and averaged almost 20pts and 9 assists per game as a 5'5" point guard but I was too screwed up to follow up with that (two players I played with wound up in the pros and I swear I could at least compete on their level) so between the ages of 20 and 27 you could find me hustling it up on some of DC's finest outdoor basketball venues...it was a very unusual game where I wasn't the the sole white dude on the court and even rarer to run into another point guard who could guard me

but playing on concrete does wierd things to your joints after awhile, you could hear me coming from a mile away the way my ankles cracked when i walked so i quit bball and took up chess which i excelled at also....got my rating to just over 2K but i started to go nuts over chess due to my compulsive personality it was taking over my mind so to fuel my competitive nature i took up scrabble and poker

I got really good at scrabble, even took it seriously for a little while and I also played poker online a little bit...believe it or not i probably played poker online before anyone in the forum because I was gambling on sports with WSEX when they opened the poker room in 1999!

So I played like 10-15 hours per week average in poker but back then the only game going was SNG's cause there weren't enough players to fill the MTT's so I played those exclusively...since there were only like 100 regs on the site back then everyone hated me coz i won so much of their money

but naturally i completely missed the poker boom coz between 2003 and 2008 i had an excellent job and with a couple of rugrats coming along didn't really have time to play poker

but when my benefits expired in April 09 and i still didn't have a job i started really concentrating on poker, using this wonderful forum as a training ground

by the time Sept came around I had earned approx. 30K in MTT online tournaments but then my home life crumbled, the stress of it all split my marriage apart and I went to vegas to chill for 3 months where i started playing live and realized that i didn't like online cash so for cash games I really like live where you can socialize and there is more stimulation than just cards but for tournaments I play online

But for some dumb reason I stopped playing all forms of poker in Feb to concentrate on finding a job...right now i have a temporary job in DC that will end June 1, so i'm probably going to go back to vegas to do cash again

really don't like playing poker as a sole source of income but you gotta do what you gotta do

my biggest leak is being a complete spendtrhift and that has ******ed my growth in live games coz if i leave the table with $800 i'm sure to be spending it on women or degenning it at the sportsbook so if i do decide to "go pro" officially this year i'm gonna have to learn to manage the roll a lot better

Percula I have been meaning to post in this thread for just a little while now so here it goes.
Percula - How did you feel at the time playing all those NL dedications online at once? How do you feel about it now in hindsight? Where you so used to poker that it didn't much fase you? They say for the average player its good to stick with just one dedication of poker(i guess for mastery).

Also, why haven't you gone back online? I want to spend some time living in LA, how does your sister like it out there? Ive been once or twice. How hot do you expect it to get in Phoenix this summer?

Ashly - sorry about your dad

Kurt - cardroom fettish, nice I like it..; nice hair man super swagged out

Shaggy - how are players around the Texas boarder?

Dave - Im from the bay area also, maybe I'll see you around the bay, vegas or brooklyn(might need a chick like from coming to america)

Also I look forward to meet you guys in your stomping grounds, Mohegan sun - pat, Winstar - redeemer, and everyone else

Alex(oh-nahh) - my sister went to college in Maryland; I also enjoy your posts on here. Looking forward to hearing how your poker career is going.

Youcheckraise - i salute you, im all about edu for the kids

AKQJ10 - is it raining in seatle right now? lol. It was beautiful when I had visited on work. Didn't play poker at the time; the freeways were all crazy

sactownjoey - "I made $1,000 in a MTT. So now I think I am actually good and donk off a bunch of money over the resulting weeks and bail out after losing all my winnings and getting back down to my original $200."
nice so classic imo
i live near by you
hope you get back out to the cardrooms man

grunge - how are the games in Lousiana? I have family there and surrounding.

skydiver - nice to meet you friend. Sick that you do all that skydiving

gobblydygeek - sup man. look forward to getting to know you better in the future, maybe see you at one of these 2+2 meet ups

Nice to meet you Donald. Greetings back at ya mergatroid; keith. RussianRoulette - nice life man..

unreal - really enjoyed your post. I love bball and have always dreamed of hustling pick up games for a living.


Im John, will be 24 on the 6th and have dreams of being a world poker champion. Ive been playing for about two years and now couldnt see my life without poker in the future. I feel like Ive cultivated a good habit and hope I keep my momentum because we all know how that goes.. Im more of a private person nowadays. I am very much into personal development. Also love the discussion on 2+2

also just some stuff that popped in my head while trolling thread:

I'm a quote head
good chance i have a quote that fits your situation and that you could possibly consider looking into more

what you knew yesterday is not good enough ~ eric thomas


EDIT: also it was good to read about/meet everyone ITT ~ salute