Can you tell a story about blackjack?

be careful what you wish for - you just might get it
you ask & I deliver

I'm up a lot of money in blackjack

One time I seen this guy play 25 hands of blackjack at once and I believe dealer had 21 and scraped...foggy memory it was over 6 years ago

Grim,

Care to re-share the best results graph ever??

I don't care to but you're welcome to

Yeah, Sklansky told the story about his friend who was a former high stakes player who was grinding 1/3. In the other thread, Cloutier is/was probably grinding daily tournaments. Chan and Greenstein were grinding 20/40 limit holdem. A lot of pre-boom big names and younger boom stars are probably playing low-mid stakes or doing something other than poker.

Also i think back in the day playing 100/200 meant maybe you have a $100,000 bankroll.

I'm liking this non-committal vaguely hostile witness AMA.

doing something else other than poker takes up most of my spare time lately
my bankroll was > 10x $100k when I played 100/200
vaguely hostile witness? what's the witness part mean?

respect

who do you look like that's famous? extra credit for naming a cartoon character

Someone told me I look like Eliot gould. I don’t see much resemblance but I do think we have similar voice. That’s alright with me.
Other than that idk. Everybody always said I looked exactly like my father when I was young. Some say I still do. His wedding photo looked like a spitting image of Al from Godfather 1 so I guess that’s who you can say I look like

Dou you have a wife, a child and a dog?

No no no

Then you made it in life

Wife and child doesn’t seem like horrible idea. I can def live without a dog tho

• Did you start out playing online?
• Have you played much online?
• How long did it take you to get to 100/200 NL?
• Have you played much PLO or limit games?
• Did you read Doyle's book / chapter?
• Were there any book, videos, or sites that influenced you?
• Do you watch Bart's videos?
• Have you studied GTO?

Played some low stakes friendly $5-10 buy in donkaments with friends in high school basically daily lol before I dabbled online. S/o ceegee

Used to 20 table 5/10+ NL at one point across PS/FTP during my hay day circa 2006-2007. I barely play 5/10 cent online nowadays for the lols. Probably several million online hands under my belt idk

2-3 years maybe or playing serious

I like PLO more than holdem. The degens tend to play worse typically but they also have more of a chance to win short run keeping them in action longer and games therefore theoretically should have more longevity. I’ve dabbled in limit maybe as high as 50/100 or 100/200 once or twice but I’m definitely no expert. The whole concept of having to be defending the BB with trash like Q7o and K2s etc drives me a little bonkers. It’s good to know it in case a whale shows up who wants to play it but not really my cup of tea.

Read super system. Was pretty good. I prefer Sklanskys older stuff tbh. Think he’s a bit off the rocker lately tho lol.

As I said I like sklanskys old stuff. That’s how I found this crazy website. I guess ace on the river by greenstein was good too. Cuz the river is always the fuggin ace of spades. I have a small collection of poker books I forgot most of the names ain’t read em in decades. Posting on 2p2 definitely helped me becomes a decent player 100x faster than I would have without it probably. Not a huge fan of the videos I’ve seen from almost everybody. Maybe one or two galfond videos seemed decent but most of the other stuff I see is trash. I did really enjoy watching tuff fish tho. For comedic value tho not learning.

I prefer calling Bart directly with my poker questions to pick his brain rather than watching his videos. See above. I’m sure he’s a good player but not a huge fan of poker videos in general tho his stuff was definitely better than a lot of other peoples stuff I’ve seen over the years.

I don’t know the first thing about GTO. Maybe that makes me worse at cards. Maybe better. Maybe idk idc. Seems to not apply much to live poker. Maybe would apply to someone like myself circa 2006-2007 who was autopiloting 20 tables of full ring. Again, idk idc

How do you not know this

You seem like less of a douche than Limon but also not a very good story teller so I dont think your thread will get the same traction.

Can you tell us a funny story about Guy if you played with him live?

Thats pretty well known online poker lore (if indeed this guy posting is the real Grimstarr)

Unfortunately I never the blessed opportunity to play live with Guy sigh. Only stories I have would be online 200/400 NL experience of him just generally overplaying hands. Nothing spectacular. There’s other good non Guy stories tho I’m sure

• Any stories about whales, pre-boom name pros, etc.?
• Of the high stakes regs you played with, are most playing much lower or not playing professionally?
• Did you gradually move down?
• Did you have big losses when the games got tougher?
• Any good stories older regs told you?

it's probably not good nature to give degen stories about whales....I won't name names but a pre-boom name pro story that comes to mind that I'm proud of is that when CTS and I were grinding partypoker I made a "who makes $100k this month faster" side bet for $1k and won lol. But he got me in the long run when I donked off $100k to him HU @ 50/100 a year later and he instaboughta bentley with it fml. I guess one funny whale story that comes to mind happened recently when a local donator who plays microstakes 1/2 & 2/5 and plays 97% of his hands and almost never books a winning session usually dumps 500-1000BB per sesh on average comes back from a 'restroom break' and the dealer tells the whale as he's sitting down something like 'check your nose' and the whale scrapes off some booger sugar then proceeds to make a sportsbet with the dealer lol...one hand wash the other. def seen plenty of degen alchy stuff when playing the bigger games, one that comes to mind was some ambassador guy or something was playing an uncapped 10-20NL @ foxwoods once and they cutoff the booze at like 1am or 2am in CT and this guy was regularly taking short breaks going to his car refilling a waterbottle (with booze) and then coming back reeking of alc and putting in 30 BB with Q3 lol

i kinda lost touch with the poker regs I played a lot with back in the days. spend a decent amount of time with Bryn Kenney during my hayday and seems that guy just plays higher and higher and will always be a pro. no idea what everybody's doing but I always find it funny when someone asks me "hey didn't we play 5/10 or 10/20 or whatever at [insert casino name here] 10 or 15 years ago" and I just respond - idk maybe shrug?

yeah I'd say my rise from 1/2 NL to 200/400 NL was very very quick and honestly probably based on a good chunk of luck of coolering people in the right spots, finding some wasted fish to play me nosebleed heads up during graveyard shift hours online and my good hands held up, plus binking some luckbox **** in an $80,000 pot versus one of the dang brothers (got it in w/ KK on J hi flop to his JJJ and turned K after typing in chat 'gg life') lol. it wasn't more than say 5-10% of my roll at the time but definitely gave me a little extra life to stick around the nosebleeds a lil longer. but TBH didn't last very long at nosebleeds as the infamous graph shows and was back to grinding 5/10-10/20 within the year sigh. TBH did somehow actually endup busto at one point in life post >1mil sunrun and thankfully never had to experience true busto ever again after that. sure I dumped a lot back in poker but a very large % of the cause of busto was just silly life decisions like buying luxury car(s) and hanging out with scumbag fake friends doing what scumbag fake friends do best. at this point in time i'm happy to sit at 5-10, 10-20 nl and feel somewhat overrolled and happy to gambooool but TBH seems games of those stakes lately are reg infested and I'd probably have a better hourly bum hunting the smaller stakes with signifcantly less stress/variance. poker is more of a fun cool nostalgic social pastime for me nowadays that happens to put a few extra bucks in my pocket way moreso than it is a 'career' tho i am guilty of constantly daydreaming of just going back to LA to grind live @ commercino 40+hours a week cuz poker will always probably somewhat fun to me hehe tho it def became quite the grind at one point after doing it all day everyday for years and years and years straight

biggest loss in a day may have been in the 200-300k range on more than one occasion. first time was doing $4k PLO flips 5 handed. pretty sure i got scammed there cuz the 5th person who joined started folding sometimes which is a huge edge. busted like 200-250k full tilt funds. def sucked but TBH within like a week or two I ended up winning that back and then some hehe. another time dumped a similar amount playing nosebleed 300-600NL HU versus david degenymine. he gave me a fishy vibe for some reason but he played kinda solid. one hand that came to mind was me going for 3 streets (all in) of value with top set JJJ on a JT9x8 type of board when i was on the button and he kept check-calling. he ended up having Q or QK and snapped the river sigh. he played a bit more solid than I expected of him. probably lost ballpark 200k or so to him but honestly thats like barely 3.5 (tree fiddy hehe) buyins of 300-600nl (60k cap) so it's pretty boring poker wise just was a pretty large amount of money to poof dissapear in an hour or two. another night had a tremendous loss playing $25-50 NL heads up with glove55 aka stevebets one day on FTP when i was on monkeytilt just blind shoving 100BB out of rage after he managed to win like 15 or 20 buy ins consistantly getting it in slightly bad versus me and binking. must have dusted off 200-300k to him that night. probably most embarassing poker session of my career as could have easily been avoided by just quitting after losing the first 4-5 buy ins. no reason to ever play like that but just experienced the most rage tilt ever sigh.

one good story that come to mind isn't exactly from an older reg, as we're prob about same age, but shawn deeb telling me about how he played some chinese businessman whale in chinese poker in LA on credit and beat him for $1MM. the guys friends all vouched and said the guy pays his debts and deeb has quite the history of giving extensive credit to people so didn't seem too out of the realm of possibility. low and behold he said he had to travel to china to collect it but the guy paid him every penny lol NH. another funny story was from a borgata reg not gonna name names but self proclaimed big jew lol he said he used to take bets on anything and became known around time as the 'murder bet' guy and was telling me about how he won all this money on the OJ verdict and Casey anthony verdict etc. smh lol