I want to hear about the first time you played poker. How were you introduced to the game of poker, the first time you played (when, where, etc), first wins/losses, your first revelations..

Anything that takes us back to your first time playing.


Thanks!



stu+stu

I originally posted my story in the Micro LHE strat forum which is where I started out on 2+2 so I'll just copy/paste from there (+ I edited a bit since it's from 2 years ago):

I discovered poker a little over 5 years ago quite by coincidence. I had just taken a new job replacing someone who was leaving his position to go work as the CFO of a new startup in the online gaming industry. The company he was going to work for was called Duplicate Poker (some of you may have heard of it). It was just after the UIGEA had passed when the future of online poker for the US customer base was unclear.


Duplicate Poker was set up by a bridge player who borrowed the idea from bridge of setting up a poker game with duplicate tables and measuring players on poker hands not based on the outcome of the specific hand at the table but rather by measuring how well the player faired with his hand vs. other players playing the exact same hand on duplicate tables vs. identical hands with other opponents. The idea was supposedly to take out the element of the "luck of the draw" from the game and hence have a skilled based poker variant which would be legal in the US. At the time when I knew nothing about poker it looked like an interesting idea. Today when I'm familiar with the game and online poker it's obvious why the idea tanked and the company did go belly up within less then 2 years. Anyway, when I heard about the company he was moving to it peaked my interest in finding out about poker.


I had never played poker before aside from some 5 card draw for play chips when I was like 12 and I remembered having conversations with my Dad discussing gambling where he had stated that unlike other games of chance poker had an element of skill and there were professional gamblers who played poker (this was stated based on his general knowledge, not from playing or having any experience). So I decided to research the topic.


I started with Google and looked up Texas Holdem. Found various sites with lots of info. Today I know most of the information was crap as most of these sites were just affiliates tryign to get you to sign up through them (amazing how I used to take the "top site" recommendations from some of them seriously). I strated playing some poker on MSN games (they had a play money game which was basically a 9 player SNG) and looked for some books on Amazon. The search resulted in me ordering Phil Gordons books (all 3 - I got the "boxed set" ). That was my introduction into poker strategy and how you are supposed to win at poker. With my new found "treasure of knowledge" I looked to deposit money with an online site and "hit it big".


Getting moeny into online poker sites in Israel is basically as difficult as it was in the US. Most sites won't have you, e-wallets shun you and you can't use your local credit card. After finding a guide on how to deposit in a local poker forum (actually THE local poker forum - we only have one which is really active) signed up for UB (Hey, Phil Helmuth endorsed it and he had 10 bracelelts! so it must be a good site right?) depositing $65 and decided to play 0.25/0.50 LHE as it was "safer" and I didn't want to risk all my stack on 1 hand. I was clueless to the fact the little Green Book did little in providing any strategy to beating LHE. Game selection for FR LHE at UB on my timezone was crap (usually only 1 table going!) and I frequently found myslef playing 0.50/1.00, 6-max or NL just because I didn't want to wait an hour for a spot at the 1 table that was running.


Initially I ran good and my BR went up to $100 but then I got tilted from lack of game selection, played above my BR, donked off some at NL and soon enough bruned my whole roll. Around the end of my stint with UB I started looking for a book on Amazon targeted at LHE as I realized I need something more specific. That's when I luckily stumbled upon Small Stakes Holdem. I ordered it and soon discovered 2+2 as well.


Started posting hands (lots of 2+2 style "tough love"), realized I had to GTFO of UB so I deposited $100 at PS and started playing with BR management and working on my game. Signed up for my 1st session review which yeilded my first "a-ha" moment when I finally "got" the difference between getting odds to call based on pot odds and having an equity edge where you can raise for value. At one point I was on a heater (had a 9+BB/100 month!) and was taking shots at 3/6 but a steady loosing streak followed and I was forced to move down all the way back to 0.50/1.00.

At the same time I started playing online I was looking for a live game and tried to find people who played LHE home games online. A casual post in a poker forum led to meeting a guy who did infact have a regular LHE home game with his buddies. Sadly he was full up and rarely had room but he was looking to start another game. We tried desperately for months to try and get a regular game going but finding people willing to play LHE was difficult. Eventually we gave in and moved to NL. Once we did that we were able to quickly recruit players and within a few months we had a regular group going. The same core group has been going on for over 3 years now.

Today I play NL online (25NL) just to keep on my toes but with very little volume (no more then 2K hands/month at most, 2 tabling) + I have a weekly home game I play at regularly which is where I really enjoy playing. Live poker is what it's all about for me and I find that's what I truly enjoy.

Hope I didn't bore you too much.

I occasionally played penny ante growing up with my Dad, and we would play low stakes drunken poker in the military, but the first time I ever played poker "for real" was in January or February of 2008. My boyfriend mentioned wanting to take a trip to Vegas, and I, never having been, thought that sounded like fun. He then casually mentioned that he might want to play some poker while he was out there. "Oh, I know how to play poker! That sounds like fun!" was my reply.

Yeah, I didn't know how to play poker, unless you count being mostly sure that a flush beat a straight.

So we went to Vegas and stayed at the MGM, which is also where we mostly played. I had a blast. Don't ask me why, because I was TERRIBLE. I always wanted to sit with my b/f, and he always sat on my left, and he was constantly bluffing me out of pots because I had no clue WTF I was doing. One hand I remember which sums this up particularly clearly, I was raised preflop and looked down at KK. I just flat called, and when the flop came out like J high and the other player put me all in, I actually tanked for like 3 minutes before calling. The rest of the table was just staring at me, and my boyfriend was like, "Why did you think so long before calling?" My reply, of course: "He could have had AA!"

After that I started reading a little, then saw some commercials for PokerStars and FTP, and decided to deposit a little money online later that year. Lost my first $100 deposit in like 30 minutes playing 100NL; I assumed that if I played 1/2 live, then playing .50/1 online should be similar in skill level.

Ah, how innocent and foolish I was.

unlike most kids my age I got my start at the 5/10 $100 cap games in south florida true degen style. I really had no clue about relative hand values (not that it mattered looking back on it as the board was something to hit, not play), but I loved it compared to table games, you actually felt like you had some agency over your fate.

I started multi-tabling micro cash on FT and actually learned how to play post flop (my first forays were pretty funny, 3bet shoving 100bb with 99+ to any raise which is actually optimal in those old cap games looking back on it but def not online) and when the games in florida became uncapped in the summer of 2010 I started absolutely crushing the 2/5. Those first 3 weeks were a golden age. The regs had literally NO IDEA what to do after you flatted them IP, that just never happened before.

the games are still good but nothing like that first few weeks, the 2-5 went from being a 20bb deep game to a 100bb and everyone was hopeless.

This is also a repost from SSLHE, but it made at least one person smile.

My first time playing was 2/4 [LHE] live in Vegas in 2002. A group of 10 of us were walking back to Mandalay Bay and stopped to rail the poker games at Luxor. They were playing this weird variant where everyone only got 2 cards and then there were 5, face up, in the middle of the table. We had no idea of what was going on - we were vaguely familiar with stud and draw poker, but to be honest half of what I knew came from the poker scenes in Star Trek (TNG).

At some point the floor asked us whether we wanted to play - they'd set up a new table for us. After some discussion about how much we had to put down, etc, etc, we agreed. I actually disagreed at first, because I had actually hit a gambling stop-loss earlier in the day. I was down $100 already (don't laugh, that was a lot of money to me back then), but eventually my friends convinced me to fill up the table so nobody else could sit down.

Strangely enough, because of this, I kind of stumbled into some sort of basic strategy - essentially, I refused to play unless I had a "good" hand, which I thought was {22+, AJ+} based on good 2-card hands in pai gow poker. KQs? Pfft, king high, fold. 98s? Are you insane? 22? ZOMG PAIR MUST PLAY! (Actually, 22 10-handed isn't bad, especially since I was set-mining with anything below KK. It's just funny how excited I got at 22 because ZOMG PAIR!)

Most hands were 9-way, with a few 8-way hands when someone besides me folded. I think I was also one of the few to understand AKs was better than AKo, but it didn't really matter because I was playing so few hands and never raised anyway. If checked to me, I'd bet (or donk) anything worth a bet, otherwise, I'd check-fold mostly. I think in 2 hours I won two big pots, one was with a set (to which one friend commented to another, "what do you think he's betting with?") and the other was with some pair of aces which I check-called to victory (I didn't quite grasp the concept of "top" pair, I'm almost positive at some point I folded AJ on a Jxx board because jacks are only a medium-sized pair). Down $2 overall, which I think put me in 3rd place (obv because of the rake and because the dick of a dealer told us that people usually tip 5-10% of the pot ... an offense that we've never really forgiven them for).

The next year was the year Moneymaker won the WSOP and poker became cool. We got a little bit of jealousy from the people who missed the trip when we bragged that we had played Texas Hold'Em ... in Vegas!

my first run in with this beautiful game was in county lock up at the age of 18 while i was doing a county year. we where playing for soups which is just as good as money in there and i crushed all year and a couple more county years then finally i made it to the big leages (prison) where i did 2 yrs. with 1/2 got in trouble couple of times so did about 18 months and if i wasnt on disciplinary lockdown i was playing cards or reading poker books. the game has always come pretty common sense to me. needless to the games i was playing in were pretty soft nobody folds ANYTHING! then i got out put 60$ on ftp ran it up to around 900$ and obv. brm a foriegn concept to me at the time (and still is sometimes lol) so i busted... but havent looked back since! so in a way poker saved my life. been out of trouble since!

first time was camping out. Nobody had chips and we were not playing for money, but there was enough beer and a pike of rocks about 10 steps away, so we played for rocks. Whenever you got short, you had to make the walk of shame to reload a fistful of rocks.

I'm not sure I could dredge up the first time I played poker, but I remember my first time in a public card room very well.

I was working off shore in Louisiana during college, and killing the 1-2 limit stud games on the quarter boat, making more money at poker than my regular wage. Then we tied up off not too far from Houma, and there was a bar called Troxies - they cashed your checks in the back, but you had to pass the poker table (illegal, but they paid off the sherrif) to get to the check cashing table and then again to get back to the bar. They were playing 10-20 seven stud, and although I'd never played that high I cashed my check and sat down, played a few hands without much action, then picked up rolled up JJJ. I hit my fourth J on 5th street, ended up getting it all in on the river against a non-descript board with all undercards. It had been capped on every street, and I assumed I had set over set, but much to my surprise villain showed me a straight flush, three of them coming out of the hole. I left, tail between legs. If I'd been at all observant I might have noticed that the cards were all crimped and rumpled. I later got to know the guy dealing and he was a pretty good mechanic even with a regular deck, but he didn't need to be too slick against someone as green as I was.

1999 ( I assume some of you were like 10), Tropicana AC 1-5 spread 7stud. Was so scared I didn't raise a hand in 3 hours. Ante and bring in had to be explained to me at least a dozen times. Thought the value of flushes was the same alphabetical order of the bring in rank. Ran like the surface of the sun and won 3 racks of white. Lol, that felt like infinity dollars. Hooked.

Summer of 1980 –

Empire Strikes Back is in theatres.

AC/DC releases Back in Black, first album w/ new singer Brian Johnson (rip Bon Scott).

Olympics are in Moscow, USA doesn’t go.

I turn 18, which means I graduate from the bowling alley video arcade to the smoke-filled card room in the back. I was introduced to the room by a guy I knew, he was 21 or 22, and sold weed to us ‘gamers’ in the arcade, and besides myself was the only other person in there under the age of 30 (which, of course, meant they all appeared to be 50 +).

I had played 5-card draw poker before, for pennies or for fun with family/friends, etc. (this one time, at band camp…) and sort of knew the hand rankings.

In this room, the game was 7-card stud.
5 or 6 players at a table was typical, 1 or 2 normal tables (.50-$1 antes) and, occasionally on weekends, a high stakes table where they played with mostly cash on the table (in the regular game the quarters played, but dollars were chips). Self-dealt, self-policed, there was no “floor” to speak of; a cashier, a security guard, and a room manager (who was also the cashier from time to time) that rarely got involved in game decisions. The “rake’ was collected at odd intervals (whenever they remembered?) by one of the older regs, he’d take a dime, sometimes a quarter if it had been awhile or someone didn’t have a dime, from each player and drop them into an open metal box on the floor under the table (I quickly learned that you buy a roll of dimes from the cashier when you got chips, the rake collector did not give change when you only had quarters).

That first night I played for close to 6 hours, was called “kid” at least 600 times as they impatiently taught me the game, and then in what I'm convinced was a ploy to get me to come back, they turned my $5 BI into $20, and I was hooked.

For the next several years I was in that room, or one just like it, almost every weekend either donating my paycheck or tripling/quadrupling it.

Good times.

When I first started playing at B&M I had a ton of online experience. My first B&M session I bought in for $300 at 1/2 and played very nitty. My stack flucuated between $350 and $150. I left after 3 hours with a $250 stack. Probally the most boring first time at the casino story ITT.

5card draw tournies in my grandparents RV w/ my cousins when we were little.

The first time I played poker was when I was in Vegas with a group of friends to watch a Formula One race (tells you how long ago it was). None of us knew anything about poker, and only one of my friends had much of a desire for gambling at all. We had played blackjack and craps a fair amount, but I was curious about the pokers. I talked my buddy into trying it with me, 7 card stud at the Stardust, buying in for 20 bucks. I didn't know what hand beat what, or even for certain what a flush was.

We both busted our first buy-ins in about 10 minutes. We both reloaded and this time we lasted about 20 minutes. My buddy had had enough and went up to the room. I saw it as a 100% improvement over the first buy-in, so I reloaded one more time. This time it lasted a couple hours. I only remember one hand from that night. It was one of the first hands I played, and I made 4 tens. Even though I didn't know the hand rankings, I knew 4 tens was a good hand. After I showed, I kind of leaned back, all proud of myself, and waited to be handed the pot. Instead, I got more cards. Huh? Wat? Where my pot? Someone said a guy at the other end of the table had 4 kings. One of my first hands and I get beaten quads over quads. These days people would ooh and ahh over a beat like that for an hour. These guys were stud players, grizzled and grumpy, and not a peep out of them.

I didn't play again until after the Moneymaker boom. I tried 2/4 LHE first. My first try at NL was a tournament, my reasoning being that I couldn't lose more than 80 bucks. I entered it 4 hours before my flight home because I was sure I'd get knocked out long before then. The short version is I got hit with the deck like Jamie Gold, literally making people groan with my non-stop pre-flop raising, and left as chipleader with the final table a few knockouts away. People were incredulous as I announced that I had to leave for my flight. For all I know I cashed even though my empty seat got blinded off. They paid top 8 or 9 players.

The first time I played "live" was back when the pots in FL couldn't exceed like 25 bucks or some ridiculous amount.

I thought I had the game wired (why I thought that I have no idea but I did) My approach was play like a total nit and crush the games. (Didn't quite work out the way I thought it would)

So we're playing limit 1-2, I think that was about as big as the games got back then, and some guy back doors a flush on the river after I was pounding the pot with something like top pair. I carried on like some school kid telling him it was a terrible play blah blah blah. I still feel embarrassed every time I think about it.

I don't remember the first time I played poker because I was a little kid. We only played 7stud or 5draw and never for real money. Growing up I loved all card games and we also played BJ, Euchre, Spades, Hearts, etc.

However, I remember very well the first time I played Hold'em. It was the fall of 2001. I was camping at a state park. There was a common area where there were showers, laundry machines, vending machines, etc.

There were about 4-5 people sitting at a picnic table near the vending machines playing a card game. I kinda wandered over to see what they were playing. They were very friendly and chatty and they told me what they were playing and invited me to play. They were playing .10/.25NL with dimes and quarters.

I had never played a game with blinds, never played a poker game with community cards, never heard of hold'em, never played a no limit poker game, and never played poker for real money... so of course I sat right down and jumped right in. I bought $20 worth of coins. I limped every hand pre-flop, chased every baby flush draw, chased gutshot straight draws, etc. and lost 2 buyins very quickly. My thinking was "for a quarter you gotta see the flop, and once you see a flop the pot's big enough to chase any draw." I was so clueless.

The first big pot I lost I had a small flush vs. the nut flush. They had to explain to me why that wasn't a chop. The whole concept of community cards had me completely ****ed up. I knew I was the donkey at the table but that was about the only thing about that game that I understood.

I went back to my tent and vowed to never play that game again. LOL

During 7th grade lunch, 5 friends and I would play .10/.25, with a max all in of $25. We couldn't use chips obviously so we would write down everything. The largest bet ever made was ~$4... We had some good times and actually had a couple tournaments using pieces of paper as chips. This janitor would always come up to us and watch. He'd laugh and say "I know you kids are gamblin'!" but he never told on us. The principal "confiscated" over 5 decks from us so I'd beg my mom to take me to the dollar store to get more. I think I won about $30 over 2 months lol, because we were poor 7th graders, it played more like a limit game.

About a dozen years ago a buddy I was working with casually mentioned he was playing in a regular card game, and I immediately asked if he could get me in.

Game was low-stakes ('quarter-half'), high-low with a declare. I didn't know what any of that meant but I figured 'how hard could it be'??

It was an expensive lesson, considering that we were literally playing for change, as I lost over $75 that first night and over $300 during the first few weeks. Eesh. But I stuck with it, and I'm huge (relative ofc) lifetime winner in the game over 10 years later.

I was taught 5 card stud/draw by my Grandfather (RIP) when I was 6 or 7yrs old for change ect but what I would call my first real poker game would have been playing a home tourney 8yrs ago.

I was invited to a friends house who had been inviting me every two weeks to play in his little $50bi SNG home game. At this point I was totally into hunting/fishing as far as a hobby went but was pretty tired of saying no and hearing about the good times and money won.

So the game starts and I know the hand rankings but didnt know anything about the streets, probabilities, strat ect.. So I came up with the idea that if I folded all hands except big pairs and only played while IN the blinds I would be risking less chips therefore last longer in the game (luckily it was a limp fest). I ended up taking 2nd using that strategy lol, which got me real interested in the game.

After realizing that the strat I used was not good at all but that initial cash is what made me decide that sititng in a Tree Stand in New Hampshire in the winter was not as fun as sitting in a cardroom.

Excerpted from a post I made a long time ago. True story, painful too.

I was in high school and was visiting a friend in a town not too far from mine. He and a friend of his were going to a game, and apparently they had been crushing the home circuit. I'd never played before so I tagged along.

I literally had never played before. I sat down and learned hand values, HE rules, and how to fan out my cards in my first hand played. I remember everything being a blur: hanging out with older kids, being the out of towner, trying not to lose my mom's $20.

I lost my mom's $20. Call it pride, but feeling so lost and losing made me angry. I vowed to never be in that position again. Fast forward 5 years and I'm now a sophomore in college. My parents are helping me out with uni costs, and one fateful day I went with some friends to a pub and found- pub poker. Free entry but $50 to the winner. Needless to say I played that donkament, lost, but that rekindled the flame I had to learn and beat the game.

Now I play 10-game home games, deal at others, and crush players who are like I was. Nice.

(I got my money back after the game. No, I didn't jump anyone, my friend and his accomplice were actually cheating. No one caught on, and they had milkshake money for a couple of days. A year ago I actually played poker with this old friend and made more money than he did. Suck on that.)

We'd play the usual Dealer's Choice games in high school and college: Baseball, follow the queen, 7-card no-peek (we called it "Mexican Sweat" back then...I guess you can't really call it that any more). None of us knew what we were doing, and most of the games had so many wild cards, it didn't really matter. I don't really count those as "poker".

After graduation, only played cards very occasionally during my 20's and early 30's, usually when visiting back home. New Year's weekend, 2004, I was living on the TX gulf coast, and some of my hometown buddies came down to go fishing for several days. We played cards at night...the same old silly stuff we'd played in college. I kept losing, and started getting a little annoyed by it. Toward the end of the last night, I just started betting/raising aggressively, whether I had anything or not, and started winning. Managed to get back up to even by turning from loose-passive into a LAG-maniac (although of course none of us had ever heard those terms before).

This was my first inkling that there was something more to poker than just luck of the draw, and I was also motivated to learn to crush my college buddies in our Dealer's Choice games once or twice a year, lol. By sheer coincidence, the poker boom was starting to take off, but I was oblivious to it, and it didn't have a role in my initial impetus for learning poker.

Went to Barnes and Noble, and randomly picked a poker book off the shelf (didn't know enough to be able to discriminate between the several titles there...I think there were maybe 5; lol, it'd be more like 30-40 today). Through sheer luck, it happened to be Sklansky/Malmuth's Holdem for Advanced Players.

Cursory googling led me to Pacific Poker online. Finally figured out how to deposit $50 there, in Feb 2004. Lol, my wife was convinced we'd be ruined (today, she sometimes will say "hey,it's been a few days...you need to go play!"...she knows where the Christmas goodie $$$ comes from, lol). Single-tabled .10/.20 LHE there, managed to run it up to about $300.

My first experience in a live cardroom was on a casino ship - the Texas Treasure out of Port Aransas Texas. May or June 2004. I had about $200 for a buy-in. The ship would load up around 6pm, and then head out into international waters and then drift around for a few hours in the Gulf before heading back in at about midnight. So the game could only be 5 hours max. Typically they only had one table, sometimes a second if enough interest. I had to wait about an hour, because regs had all the seats locked up from the moment they boarded. They had enough to start a 2nd table though, so I got to play about 4 hours.

The game was limit Hold'Em, and it was 5-5-10-15...I've never seen that structure in a cardroom anywhere since then. I was a complete newbie, but I could tell from my few hours on Pacific and my still-imperfect understanding of Sklansky/Malmuth (which remains "still-imperfect" today) that the game was juicy, lol. My stack was ground down nevertheless...I don't remember much, but undoubtedly I was playing super passive. Finally I was all-in with my last $20 or so in a multi-way pot holding either QJ or QT. I spiked a Q on the turn, and it held up. Whew...if not, I was done. The game went another 2 hours or so, and the deck hit me pretty good. I finished up $262, felt like I'd won the WSOP Main Event (which...at the time, didn't even know what that was), and was hooked.

I went out on the TX Treasure 4 more times during the remaining months I lived in Texas. Won a couple times, broke even once, lost once. I think I was up probably $400 or so total over the five sessions.

We moved to WA State later that summer, where of course there's public cardrooms all over the place. Have been there ever since (other than my current temporary posting in the Middle East).

I sometimes wonder if I'd still be playing cards if that Queen hadn't spiked on the turn.....

Oddly, I lived in Vegas but never once played a hand of poker. I was an aspiring blackjack pro and honestly never got that good at it. I did have a friend who was a professional and I found out pretty quick that there are a few odd tricks of the trade. Regardless, I was still stupid on math and other things, so I honestly thought there was a way to "beat the wheel" so I spent a lot of time sitting at the roulette tables.

But I did watch the guys at the poker tables and always thought it looked pretty cool, but I wasn't too concerned: I did, after-all, think hitting the jackpot on some penny slot would be more exciting. LOL

Moved to LA and found out that the only legal casinos were card rooms and all I could really play was poker or some other weird Pan 9 game or something. Although this was 2004 or so, I was only vaguely aware of Moneymaker and most certainly never seen or heard of Texas Hold'em. I decided to go to Borders and check out some gambling books. Mind that back then, the selection was basically null, so I was staring at some of the books that just came out thinking of what to buy: SSHE or something else.

I read enough in my life that I can usually figure out what will be helpful and what will be interesting, so I picked up Phill Gordon's "Poker: The Real Deal," which is now called "Phill Gordon's Little Black Book."

I understand that today, this would have been a massive mistake, but back then, it was very helpful, though much of the information in that book is questionable, it pointed me in the right direction. For example, I learned that there was some poker genius called "David Sklansky" who came up with some starting hands and some "Fundamental Theorem of Poker." I read the book about 15 times and didn't learn much, but I was thoroughly convinced that I had to try out this weird poker game, and I figured that I had to go with whatever was popular at the time. Some odd ball game called "Texas Hold'em."

I went back to the store and I debated on whether to buy Lee Jones or SSHE. I figured I had to go with the main guy (consulting and pretty much disregarding the advice from PRD) and opened up SSHE. I read the first line: "This is not a beginner's book" and I was hooked.

I read this book about 5 times over and over, taking out pencil and paper, reading on the bus like a dork, and smiling at the examples ($300 pot for me to take? Really?).

With a glint in my eye and a big roll of $40 in my pocket I finally decided that I was ready to try out this game of poker. Sklansky, Malmouth, and Miller taught me everything I needed to know in order to DESTROY the game, and goddammit I was going to quit my ****ing job and go pro in no time. I knew it. I went to what Gordon called "The Best Cardroom in Los Angeles" in PRD: what's the name of that place with the horses?

Day one, I played tight, I played (not-so) right and I lost. I lost every single hand I played (two). I went back home, licked my wounds and started reading again.

Day 2: Now stuff was sinking in, and I went back to da hood and played some more. Once again, didn't win a single pot. In fact, I didn't even play a single hand. Just blinded off like $60 at 2/4.

Day 3: One large pot scoots the other way and I still didn't win a single hand.

Day 4: Commerce Casino. I win my first pot. I have no clue what it was.

Most people tell me that they would have never played poker again after such a start. I had to get my money back, you know? 4 months later I was working as a prop in a casino and making pretty good money. So at leas the story isn't a total dog.

I played facebook poker and kept winning and really thought I was something lol

My family has always played some kinds of card games. the neighborhood boys all played poker. We each had BB guns, so we played for BB's. I played a lot in college at my fraternity house...penny, nickel, dime games. Right after college several of us formed a once a month home game that is still going strong some 37 years later, but we've graduated to dime, quarter, half dollar! First time at a casino was about 5 years ago at a $1/$2 NLHE game. I stopped and at lunch at a nearby Subway before going to the casino. I refilled my drink and thought I'd leave it in the car for the ride home that evening. I bought-in for $100 and lost it pretty quickly. I changed tables and bought in for another $100. Pretty soon I was headed back to the car with empty pockets...and my drink was still cold! I've improved my game a bunch since!

i like all of these stories. bumpin to keep it towards the top and the bored/talkative feel compelled to share their story.