Back Story: I’m 24 now and have played some form of poker for the past 7 years. I’ve been a winning player for 2.5 of them and a huge fish (sometimes on a heater, but mostly a big donator) for the rest. I played live cash for a living for 14 months, before landing a cushy job in the oil industry which pays well and offers significant time off to focus on poker. I currently play 100-500NL online and quite a bit of live cash. I have over $100k in profit from all forms of poker lifetime and have played as high as 5kNL live.
Poker and gambling have been such a huge part of my life for so long, and accountable for so many of the major up and downswings in my life that only seems right to try and chronicle them in some form. My formative years have basically been one big BBV story.
School Life – Discovering alcohol, girls and a strange relationship with money.
I guess my poker story really starts at 17. I was still in school and really beginning to uncover the benefits of growing up. I had a close knit circle of friends who I saw most days and we all had aspirations to be a million different things all at once. I honestly don’t think I’ll ever be closer to a group of people than I was when I was 17. Most of us played football for the same team growing up. From the ages 12-17 I played football every evening for fun, and another 3 or 4 nights a week with various amateur and district teams. I lived and breathed football for 3 years, but suffered a pretty bad injury at 16, when I shattered my knee cap in a friendly. Football had been such a major part of my life for so long, but at 17 I fell out of love with the game. I guess I was also very afraid of playing again after spending a third of a year in crutches. Everybody around me was getting into girls and partying, and so that became the natural priority.
I was in my final year at school at the time. I’m fortunate enough to be from pretty intelligent stock, and as such I have always done well with exams and grades. I’d achieved the results I needed to get into university in 5th year, so I was taking it pretty easy with my classes in 6th. My school has something called study periods for 6th form-ers. Hour long periods of down-time to allow you to catch up on the heavy work load you are supposed to have. I had 17 of these study hours a week, out of 30 overall. It was ludicrous. I had more down time than I had classes and the classes I did have were Physical Education, Advanced English and Art. My weekly schedule was a bit of a joke and I spent more time in the STA (Student Something Area) playing cards (more on this later, ldo) and 5-a-side football in the school yard than doing any school work.
The school has since plastered over this loophole, by forcing kids to fill a minimum of 25 periods a week. Poor bastards.
My pathetic school schedule left plenty of time for parties and such and, having only recently discovered how much fun alcohol was, I indulged. My friends and I got really good fake IDs from a friend of my brother’s and started going out 3 or 4 nights a week. I particularly remember being hung-over almost every Thursday morning because I was due to have a double lesson of swimming. I sat out on the beches for more than half of these due to ‘illness’.
I was working in a little corner shop after school at this point and spending every single penny I earned on going out. I emptied my savings account (about £3k) before Christmas and spent everything else I could get a hold of. Luckily we weren’t able to access casinos at this point (needing a legit passport / driver’s license to register) or it’d probably have been a much quicker and less enjoyable road to busto. Looking back, its clear to me how ******ed the whole thing was. We went out every other night wearing oversized suits and paid for bottle service in expensive clubs, trying to ball-out like ****ing Brad Pitt. We must have looked like characters from Bugsy Malone. But it sure was a lot of fun at the time. Girls seemed to come pretty easy (and so did I, ldo) and I went from being a 17 year old virgin, to ****ing married women in alleyways outside of night clubs.
A few nights a week we’d come home **** house wasted and all crash at one of the group’s house. We were irresponsible, arrogant and drunk – and must have had a close to 90% record for trashing whatever neighbourhood we ended up in. We had a few very close calls with the police, but somehow I never ended up with a criminal record. I’m definitely not proud of this period of my life, and would 100% kick the **** out of my 17 year old self if I ever met him. I’m a very different person now and can only thank the stars that I was never thrown in jail, or had my legs broken by some pissed off property owner.
In school I needed something to do to fill in all my free hours. So I started a little card game ring with a few of the other guys in my year with lots of study periods. We played games like Rummy and Bull**** – before eventually upgrading to ‘poker’. It definitely wasn’t Texas Hold’ Em, or any other known variant for that matter, but we played it none-the-less. In the beginning we played for purely fun and pride, before increasing the stakes. I think it was somewhere between £1 and £10 to buy-in depending on the game.
Like so many of these BBV stories I ran hotter than the sun in the beginning. We played 5 or 6 times a day on average, and I was making an extra £100 a week from the other kids. Obviously I thought I was God’s gift to card games and I rarely had a losing day. In my eyes I was pretty much Maverick - with my unmatched ability to read people (read: get lucky and draw out vs. better hands).
Outside of poker, partying and school I was playing quite a lot of Counter Strike at the time on my PC. I was 1000% addicted to this game from the ages of 13-16 and shudder to think how many hours I logged in total (10,000+ easily). I went to LAN tournaments every year, played for decent cash prizes online and spent hours drilling tactics with my clan every night. I’d probably guestimate that I played from 9pm-3am 75% of nights, for four solid years.
Eventually though, as with anything, I fell out of love with CS. It just so happened that a good number of my gaming friends were transitioning to online poker. I was obviously amazing at poker IMO, so it seemed like the easiest snap decision of all time. I made my first $50 deposit online and lost it within probably 30 hands of 25NL…
To come: Getting crushed online, moving out, winning £15k in a week at roulette, expensive clubs and expensive friends, Las Americas, getting robbed in Belize, Cocaine friends, playing live poker across Europe, broke and sleeping in a bus shelter in Paris, becoming a winning player, European adventure Mk.2, living in Croatia, playing live cash for a living, HUNL grudge matches, weekends in Berlin, the live grind, Champion League final and YouTube sensations, break-ups and make-ups, settling down.
Last edited by Kangal_; 08-14-2013 at 09:44 AM.