My somewhat different poker story (extremely tl;dr)
09-08-2011
, 11:04 PM
Quote:
As weird as it sounds reading your material makes me so good. Its as if Im watching a film good film but its in a post on 2+2.
Im glad you expressed your stories with us, and actually quite relieved that youve said you didnt like the way you were. Since the stories you right are so well written you actually glamorize the situations in my eyes, and make me eager to actually do something on the lines of what you have done.
Anyway youve made me question whether I am doing enough with my life. I am a poker player too, have lived in Thailand and had fun times there but now I want to explore sooo much more - Youve help me realised that, so thanks!
The only problem is I want to have stories like yours (as they are so exciting), but the stories you have while are extraordinary, arent some I particularly want to be experiencing myself since they seem to be so extreme!
Anyway do you have any tips? (bit vague i know lol!) Also you seem to have a whole host of friends around the world - how did you get to meet them? (in Aussie you know a load of people but never said how you met them)
Thanks
Im glad you expressed your stories with us, and actually quite relieved that youve said you didnt like the way you were. Since the stories you right are so well written you actually glamorize the situations in my eyes, and make me eager to actually do something on the lines of what you have done.
Anyway youve made me question whether I am doing enough with my life. I am a poker player too, have lived in Thailand and had fun times there but now I want to explore sooo much more - Youve help me realised that, so thanks!
The only problem is I want to have stories like yours (as they are so exciting), but the stories you have while are extraordinary, arent some I particularly want to be experiencing myself since they seem to be so extreme!
Anyway do you have any tips? (bit vague i know lol!) Also you seem to have a whole host of friends around the world - how did you get to meet them? (in Aussie you know a load of people but never said how you met them)
Thanks
Hmm.
Like I said a couple of replies above, meeting people has never been that easy for me. I'm definitely a bit shy by european standards and I suck at talking to strangers. I'm not one to make friends by starting a conversation with a random person.
Many of my most interesting meetings with new people have been entirely coincidental. For example, when I was living with three girl roommates in Australia on my 20th birthday (...or was it 19th?) they said they'd treat me to a night out. They refused to tell me where they were going to take me. They got me insanely drunk at our place, and then dragged me to a gay karaoke bar. One of the girls was friends with a gay guy who owned a shoe store. Coincidentally that shoe store was having their christmas party that they day and the afterparty was in that gay club. They all just sat with us, three gay guys and a girl, and I didn't know about the shoe store part at the time so I thought she was a lesbian. I thought she was really good looking, also it was one of my first nights out in Australia and I hadn't yet realised how hot ALL Aussie girls are, so I thought I was the unluckiest guy in the world. I chatted with her all night, because being a blonde young boy in a gay bar drew a lot of attention and I didn't really enjoy the gropings so I figured I'd stay at the table with her. We really hit it off, she thought me being Finnish was insanely cool and I ended up kissing her on the dance floor and only then I heard about the shoe store thing... and that she was straight and actually worked about 200 meters from where I worked at the time. She ended up being the first girl I dated in Australia, and one of my best memories from that trip is when she took me on a first date (as I didn't know Sydney well yet) across the bridge from the Sydney harbour at night, we ate takeaway pasta and the view was so beautiful I was having a hard time exhaling it all in. She's now an actress and sadly we aren't in touch anymore but I'm never going to forget my short time with her.
(I kind of skipped all my time in Australia before I started poker in the story... I guess stories like the one above could work as a prequel.)
A lot of weird things like that have happened to me and I have many great similar stories with people. As a general guideline it really helps when you're a foreigner in a country. It's always a great way to meet people, if there's someone you think is interesting and you don't know how to start a conversation just ask stuff about their country. People always want to help foreigners. And foreigners are always usually considered as "exotic" by the locals so you'll draw attention in a good way as long as you know how to behave yourself. So yeah just traveling around helps with meeting people for sure. I'd also suggest networking with other travelers. I've met some people on rainforest walks and white-water rafting trips and stuff like that and I ended up traveling with them for a while.
As for crazy experiences, all I've ever done has been to hang out with the right people, have a willingness to do something crazy every day and get drunk a lot. The universe has done the rest pretty much. But people are different, just ask yourself who you really want to be and work towards it. Not all people are meant to be crazy degens who travel around the world and get into trouble. But if you feel that you have an adventurer in yourself, I really would suggest to "go before it's too late". Life is short.
I think that was all the direct questions answered now, if I missed something please re-quote. I don't want to turn this into a questions-answers thread but it would've been rude to not answer these
So yeah I'll continue with the next part on saturday night hopefully. PS. Thanks discomonkey, I'll use that next time!
09-09-2011
, 12:34 AM
09-09-2011
, 07:15 AM
09-09-2011
, 12:28 PM
09-10-2011
, 04:06 PM
Awesome story so far, Chuck. Looking forward to read the next chapters!
One question regarding Serena and her health problem. Was it impossible to get a surgery for her heart problem?
If this question is too private please just ignore it.
One question regarding Serena and her health problem. Was it impossible to get a surgery for her heart problem?
If this question is too private please just ignore it.
Last edited by fidstar-poker; 06-23-2016 at 07:50 AM.
Reason: name change
09-10-2011
, 04:28 PM
Quote:
does anyone know the "dan" guy that he lived with for abit that was a 1k reg at the time is this dan cates ?
also chuck when the next update im climbing the walls with this cold turkey, if its any longer i may need to go back and read through the old post's
jk in your own time just make sure there good
09-10-2011
, 06:00 PM
I'm starting to write the next volume now so give me a couple of hours.
Last edited by fidstar-poker; 06-23-2016 at 08:10 AM.
09-10-2011
, 07:55 PM
09-10-2011
, 11:35 PM
09-11-2011
, 12:02 AM
Vol.12: My 15 Minutes Of Fame, The Cab Hijacking Episode And My First Live Final Table
I'm not a one-night stand kind of guy. I'd love to be like Tony "Bond18" Dunst and be able to have sex with randoms all the time, especially sober. It's just not my thing. I'm definitely the kind of guy who enjoys being in a relationship. Almost everyone I've had sex with has either been my girlfriend or at least someone I've been dating or have known for some time as a friend. The next couple of months after breaking up with Serena was pretty much the only time in my life when I've had one-night stands.
I was really sad for the first couple of weeks after the break-up. A part of that was because I felt like I had failed, and I hate failure. And of course I was sad simply because it didn't work out. I didn't even feel like hanging out with my friends, so for the most time I stayed in and watched High Fidelity over and over. That, my friends, is the ultimate break-up movie. I like the book too and I think Nick Hornby is great, but regarding this particular piece I actually prefer the movie. It has John Cusack and Jack Black in it. Go rent it.
I don't remember much about my games during that period. I know I played a lot, actually I grinded rebuilding from zero once again pretty much non-stop. Grinding helped me forget about all the negative stuff in my life. I believe I won quite a bit of money, because a couple of months later I had a pretty deep bankroll. Don't ask me how it happened, probably just the standard grind from the micros up to 1/2 or 2/4.
I hit the bars more than ever before right after the break-up too. I went out at least two, probably three nights a week. I had flings with different girls almost every night I went out. I called all my friends who I knew had many female friends or were good with the ladies, and went out with all of them on separate nights, and almost every time I ended up at least making out with some random chick. I don't mean to sound like a big womanizer, because that I definitely am not. I just got help from people who're better than me at picking up chicks and lowered my standards for a while.
Eventually I got over the break-up. It was spring. Not only in my heart, but outside too. Most of you have never experienced the long Finnish winter, but I can assure you it's brutal. If you're a grinder and normally wake up after 2PM, you quite possibly don't see sunlight for six months. I get so depressed without sunlight, and these days I always spend at least a month or two abroad every winter. Luckily our break-up happened exactly in the point where the winter's about to end and the spring is kicking in, and I soon saw my mood brighten as there was more and more sunlight every day and it was getting warmer. And when my mood brightened, my poker started going better and better. By the end of April I was pretty happy again, and I had a five-figure bankroll.
Back then Pokerisivut was affiliated with a guy who owned almost all the best night clubs in Helsinki. All the biggest rakers got VIP cards to these night clubs, and got to hang out in the back rooms. I got the VIP card too and started using it. Every time I went to a certain club, which was the biggest in Helsinki at the time, there was this one celebrity chick who was there. Every single time. I once was the first customer to come in, yet she was already in the room. Every time we were asked to leave when it closed, she stayed there. She probably even slept in the back room.
Her name was Henna. She had risen to fame from the Finnish Big Brother. She was the classic wannabe celebrity - fake boobs, lips full of botox, huge hair extensions and so on. A famous Finnish soccer player (whose brother I coincidentally knew and who now plays for the Finnish national team himself) had been caught having an affair with her when he was seeing someone else, and the woman quickly became a frequent face in the Finnish gossip magazines. Here's a picture of her:
So, every time I went drinking with my friends, she was there. She seemed like she was always picking up men, and we were often joking about coming up with a prop bet regarding banging her. Not because we wanted to bang her, but because she was such a skank. I was pretty famous for prop bets back then, because I had been involved in quite a lot of four-figure prop bets that were publicized, and some of them had been pretty crazy (for example, as a result of a lost prop bet I had to listen to this on auto-repeat for a month every time I grinded: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyfc10qDcR4).
I blogged about her in one of my blog entries, and then went to sleep. It was totally innocent, I think I just basically mentioned that I was once again drinking with her the night before, and that a prop bet was discussed. I wrote the entry and went to sleep.
When I woke up the next morning, I had 17 missed phone calls and 12 text messages. Many friends I knew from totally different areas in life, some random numbers, my mother. I thought something must have happened, and I started up my computer while looking at the text messages. The first message said something along the lines of "WTF MAN, HAVE YOU SEEN THE NEWS? HAHAHAHA". I felt temporarily relief because the laughing part made it sound like at least nothing bad had happened. The next message was from a female friend, who asked if I really was involved in paying for sex.
What?
I opened up three of the biggest news websites in Finland, and found my name in every single one of them. The headline in all of them was basically the same:
"YOUNG POKER STAR OFFERS BIG BROTHER CELEBRITY 20 000 EUROS FOR SEX!"
I opened the article. It said that Jens Kyllönen had made an offer to Henna (the BB chick) to pay her 20 000€ for sex and it had my name in there too. I knew that Jens wouldn't do that it if he was paid 20 000€ for it, and neither would I. I immediately knew that there was something fishy about it. Then I noticed a link at the end of the article that pointed directly to my blog.
It turned out that Jens, who had become famous for his EPT win, had commented on my blog entry from the night before. He had jokingly said that he'd bet me 20k on who'd be the first to have sex with Henna if he wasn't in a relationship. And somehow all the gossip rags had found out about it, turned the story around, and made it sound like me and Jens were offering her 20k for sex.
Some magazines got it somewhat right, and just publicized it as a sex bet removing the "if I wasn't in a relationship" part, which was humiliating in itself. But the dirtiest gossip magazine in Finland got it as wrong as you possibly can, and made a newspiece saying we just wanted to pay for sex with her, removing the bet part entirely from the article. They got comments from that stupid woman, and the reporters tried calling me too, and it became quite a media circus for a few days. I had done absolutely nothing, and Jens had done next to nothing as well, and all of a sudden our names were all over the press claiming we wanted to pay for sex. There were people at the gossip magazine's forums that said they had seen us with Henna (we had been at the same VIP area, but that was basically it, we never even talked more than a few sentences with her), and all of a sudden there was evidence that we were involved with her.
Even now, if you put my name on google, one of the first results is the Henna sex bet. I've had my girlfriend's parents find out about it, and it hasn't been exactly a joy to explain what happened. And if you put my name on google image search, one of the first pictures is the picture of that woman. Still it was much harder on Jens, because no one knew me outside the poker circles while Jens was known everywhere in Finland. The magazines came up with made-up stories about their meetings and stuff like that, and I can only imagine how hard it must have been for him given that he was in a relationship. He's still seeing the same girl though, so luckily they survived that circus.
Here's one sample link to an article about the case (in Finnish): http://www.mtv3.fi/viihde/uutiset/mu...ia-bb-hennasta (the headline translated: "Poker star would pay tens of thousands for Henna from Big Brother).
On the last day of April we have something you could call the national drinking day in Finland. It's my favourite day of the year, and I ended up skipping the softest of all EPTs, San Remo, because of it this year. You just can't miss Vappu. It's a long tradition that has roots as a holiday for working class people or something like that, but these days it simply means that everyone has a day off work just to go out and get drunk.
On that day in 2009 I found my next girlfriend. Just like my all ex-girlfriends, she too has blocked me on Facebook so I can't ask for her permission, but I'm almost sure she wouldn't want me to use her name so I'll just give her a code name. Let's call her Gina.
I had met Gina once before, really briefly in a night club. I was there with a good friend of mine who knew a lot of women, this was during the time when I was still recovering from my break-up. She had told me that she was in a relationship and we only chatted for a really quick while, as I was looking for single girls. I remember making a note that I quite liked her, though. She was really good at soccer, close to making it to the Finnish women's national team. She was also a good girl, exactly the kind I needed after Serena.
On that vappu I ended up getting more drunk than almost never before. I remember absolutely nothing after 10PM, so I can only tell you what I've been told happened that night:
I went drinking with my best friend. We went to a giant park in Helsinki where all the young girls go drinking on that day. The plan was simply to get drunk and pick up chicks. We are usually good at the getting drunk part and not-so-good at the picking up chicks part. At about 10PM my friend left with a girl he had miraculously managed to pick up, and when I was wandering around the city alone I ran into the friend who knew Gina. I hung out with him and his friends, and some time later Gina and her boyfriend joined our group too. I was irritated by his boyfriend from the beginning. Almost instantly when they joined our group, I had shouted "oh my god, are you serious? You seriously can't be with that guy, he's a [insert 30 seconds of random insults here]". I had kept on and on and almost got my ass kicked. The funny thing is that I hardly even knew the guy. I can only assume that this had been my drunken way of getting her girlfriend's attention. (Remember when I said I wasn't good at picking up chicks? Well, there you go.)
What happened after this I don't really know, but in the end I woke up from home under a chair and without a girl. I was later told by my friend that I had been extremely rude all night and mocked his boyfriend non-stop and called him all kinds of names, and that everyone had thought I was an idiot. I didn't really care what people thought, but I sent the girl an apology message on Facebook anyway. We started talking, and it turned out that his boyfriend actually was a massive douchebag and had cheated on her. I also heard things about him from some friends who randomly knew him, and they all said he was a scumbag. All of a sudden I didn't feel bad about my behaviour.
A week or two later there was a birthday party that both me and Gina attended, and we ended up talking there all night, and Gina and her boyfriend broke up soon after. We set up our first date almost immediately after that. It's funny that the guy whose girlfriend I basically stole works in a store that's the nearest grocery store from where I live nowadays, and I see him on a regular basis. I still always try to avoid using his counter.
Early in May I received a no-deposit casino bonus for some reason that was worth something like 50 euros on my Unibet account. I played some Unibet blackjack with the bonus, and managed to run it up to 1650€. There was a banner that was promoting the Unibet Open Portugal that'd take place in a couple of weeks. The Unibet Open buy-ins are always exactly 1650 euros. I took this as a sign and bought in from the software. It's crazy how life works, first you get a small no-deposit bonus and all of a sudden you're going to Portugal.
By now it had become a public joke that I never did well in live tournaments. I had played quite a lot of them and never cashed. I was pretty much the only Finnish professional who didn't even have a Hendon Mob page (I had cashed in the Vegas tournaments, but Hendon Mob didn't track them). For some reason from the beginning I just knew that things would go well in Portugal. I had my first date with Gina set up, we'd go out immediately when I came back. I was in a good place mentally, I had a decent bankroll again, and I had no worries about anything. I just knew I would go deep in that tournament. It was held near Albufeira which is a town known for its student parties, so I wanted to have fun on that trip too. Because of that I decided not to sell any shares, so I could spew around as much as I wanted and get drunk while playing.
I finished day 1A second in chips, having over two times the average. On the last hand of the night I flatted my big blind with pocket deuces and flopped quads. I had been doing all kinds of aggressive stuff all day and had a pretty bad image, so I got it in easily against someone's pocket eights on a board of 227J for 50 big blinds or so.
I had many friends there who also played that day, and we decided to get a taxi to Albufeira to go out on the night of day 1B. Day 2 would start at noon the next day, and the 2011 Miikka would never go out when still in a tournament. But again, I didn't really care back then and was just playing for fun.
In the beginning the night played out in a pretty standard manner. It wasn't tourist season in Albufeira yet and the bars were relatively empty, so they had sick promotions trying to get people to drink. You could get 1 liter (about two large pints) vodka-red bulls for 5 euros. I remember drinking a lot of them. At some point we ran into a team of Finnish female basketball players who were there on a training camp. One of my friends ended up having sex with one of the girls, only to find out in the morning that she was 16. I concentrated on drinking - I had my date with Gina coming up and even that I wasn't even in a relationship yet it still would've felt wrong to chase girls - and started having trouble forming understandable sentences by 10PM.
Then, at some stage, me and E (who I had met in Warsaw on the night I lost my watch) got an idea to go to a strip club. We didn't know where to find one, so we figured we'd just take a cab. There weren't any cabs in sight, until we noticed one standing in the nearby traffic lights. We waved at the driver but he didn't seem to notice us, so we ran over before the lights turned green. I entered the cab from the rear right door and my friend from the rear left. We just hopped in... only to land on top of some very freaked out 60-year-old English tourists. The taxi driver seemed to think that we were somehow trying to hijack the cab (there was a light on top of the cab that said "occupied" which we were too drunk to notice), and he got off the cab and waved at the police car that was coincidentally standing behind him at the traffic lights. We were too drunk to be able to get off the cab so the cops came and lifted us up and beat us to the ground. They beat us up against a wall with some kind of metal sticks - local policemen policy I guess - but eventually let us go without taking us to the station or anything. I think they realised that we were just dumb drunk tourists instead of actual robbers. Albufeira is a town where drunk tourists cause a lot of trouble and the policemen hate them like plague, so they decided to give us a lesson by beating us up instead of giving us a fine. I had my back bruised for like two weeks after that night.
Anyway, after the cops left it was still early and we were still drunk, so in true Finnish style we were like "what the hell, let's keep drinking!". By this point we had lost our friends, but it didn't matter so we just headed to the first bar we saw and ordered drinks again.
The night went on, I think we eventually even went to a strip club, and then finally at some stage we noticed that the sun was getting up and it was six in the morning. We were about to get a cab to our hotel when I noticed a homeless dog lying in the street. Like I've said before, I'm a big dog lover. I decided to buy him a hot dog from a nearby 7-eleven. At the same time my friend decided he needs to take a leak somewhere, and as we were in a somewhat open street, he chose to go to an alley behind the 7-eleven. I bought the hot dog and started feeding it to the... err, dog. The last thing I remember is hearing a noise that sounded like a frisbee flying by. I blacked out, and woke up from the street feeling severe pain in my head. My head was bleeding and my wallet and cell phone were stolen. My friend who had been taking a leak had also been robbed at knifepoint, and he ran away unaware of me being robbed as well.
So there I was, my head bleeding in another town with no money and no cell phone, 6 hours from the start of day two. I didn't know what to do so I boarded a cab and just told him to drive to my hotel, not informing him that I had no money. I don't think I really had a clear plan at this point, I just wanted to get to that hotel where all the people I knew were staying. When we got there, I explained him the situation, but of course he was a 70-year-old portuguese gentleman who didn't speak a word of English. I tried to explain him slowly that I'm going to get the money from my friends and come back to pay him, but he didn't understand. Eventually I just got up and ran to the hotel from the front entrance and he followed trying to chase me. This must have looked good to the hotel staff. I didn't know the room numbers of any of my friends, so I just randomly knocked on everyone's door, yelling Finnish curse words and the word "help", knowing that if anyone Finnish happened to live in that floor he'd open the door. Luckily enough one of the first doors opened and it belonged to the Finnish country manager, who'd spent the whole night sleepless because of food poisoning. He must have been delighted to see me. He paid the taxi driver, and I was able to go and get my wounds taken care of and go to sleep.
When I woke up 4 hours later I was more hungover than I had ever been. My body was aching all over, my head, my back, even my legs from all the running. But I had no choice but to go and play. We had made a pact with my friends who were still in on the night before that we'd all use these blinking sunglasses we had bought from the street. Here's a picture of me, my chipleader chipstack and the glasses:
Day two went smoothly from the beginning. In one of the first hands I announced to the entire table that I was still drunk from last night, which I was. I challenged the guy who had the second biggest stack at the table to a bet that the one of us who'd be able to win a pot first would win a beer from the other. He raised the next hand, I 3-bet blind, and there was a shove and a re-shove. The guy folded, and I looked at my cards. Ace and an ace. I held against AK and 99 and scored both the beers and the chiplead, which I didn't give up until the bubble had burst.
I made the first OOP float of my life too in that tournament. I'm blaming the alcohol for making me even more creative than I usually am. It was near the bubble, and I had raised basically every hand. I raised once again from the small blind, and got called by the big blind (the guy in the picture above) who had about 30 big blinds. I held Q5o and the flop came KK2. I made a normal c-bet and he raised leaving something like a pot-sized bet behind. I considered shoving, but then I decided to just call, because I figured he'd check back the turn if he didn't have it and I could bomb the river. This way I'd save my chips if he actually had a king. The turn was a brick and it went check-check, and the river came a five. I might've had enough showdown value, but I ended up shoving anyway. He tank folded.
On the bubble I played every hand, I had three times as much chips as the next person in my table, and everyone kept folding. I had something like four times the average after the bubble, which would've been the average at the final table.
There had been 150 runners left in the tournament when we started day two, and we played all the way down to the final table. The night out and the severe pain and headache started to show soon after the bubble, and I couldn't concentrate anymore. I made a crucial mistake when someone opened from middle position, I had AJ and everyone behind me had 20 big blinds or less. I thought the opener had 20 big blinds as well so I just shoved. It turned out that he actually had over 50 big blinds because I hadn't seen the colour of his chips properly (I thought that a stack of 5k chips was a stack of 1k chips). He called with QQ and I lost over half my stack.
That was the longest day of my life, we played for 15 hours but it sure felt like a week. In the end I managed to make it to the final table. I gave an interview to some media before the final table where I promised to challenge Phil Ivey to a heads up match with the entire prize money of 150 000 euros if I won. I have no doubt in my mind that I would've done it just for the kicks, because that 's what I was like back then. In the end I got coolered being the first one out of the final table when I shoved 17 big blinds from the cut-off with AT and the small blind woke up with JJ.
I ended up cashing just 9000€. That covered the trip's expenses, and turned out to be a nice profit from the original 50€ casino bonus. On the minus side, it took me two weeks to recover when I got back home, and I was still sore all over on my first date with Gina. Despite that I still managed to get her to like me, though, and we became an item soon after.
One more thing happened in late May. Pokerisivut started shooting a poker documentary series for their website. They hired a guy who didn't know much about poker to shoot it. I was one of the first people that were asked to star in their own episode. They were all 30-minute episodes about the careers of the players. How we'd got there, some strategy talk, the usual stuff. Back then I was well known for my tilting and shot-taking, and the guy asked if I could show him how I tilt so we could put it on the video. I asked if I could get the money I lost doing it back, and he said no. It was pretty silly, but I thought it would be good entertainment, so I agreed to do it anyway. He shot me for 15 minutes playing 5/5 and 5/10 PLO. I played as bad as I could, making all kinds of stupid tilt moves. Then the ****er edited it, for some reason that I still don't know, to make it look like I was making a strategy video. He made it look like calling a 5-bet with half my stack with 226Tr was something I do on a regular basis. The documentary was aired, and I got flamed hard for being the worst PLO player in Finland. I was pretty bad, but I wasn't that bad. I have no idea why he did it, but I still regularly get comments flaming me for my lack of PLO skills because of that stupid video.
I'm not a one-night stand kind of guy. I'd love to be like Tony "Bond18" Dunst and be able to have sex with randoms all the time, especially sober. It's just not my thing. I'm definitely the kind of guy who enjoys being in a relationship. Almost everyone I've had sex with has either been my girlfriend or at least someone I've been dating or have known for some time as a friend. The next couple of months after breaking up with Serena was pretty much the only time in my life when I've had one-night stands.
I was really sad for the first couple of weeks after the break-up. A part of that was because I felt like I had failed, and I hate failure. And of course I was sad simply because it didn't work out. I didn't even feel like hanging out with my friends, so for the most time I stayed in and watched High Fidelity over and over. That, my friends, is the ultimate break-up movie. I like the book too and I think Nick Hornby is great, but regarding this particular piece I actually prefer the movie. It has John Cusack and Jack Black in it. Go rent it.
I don't remember much about my games during that period. I know I played a lot, actually I grinded rebuilding from zero once again pretty much non-stop. Grinding helped me forget about all the negative stuff in my life. I believe I won quite a bit of money, because a couple of months later I had a pretty deep bankroll. Don't ask me how it happened, probably just the standard grind from the micros up to 1/2 or 2/4.
I hit the bars more than ever before right after the break-up too. I went out at least two, probably three nights a week. I had flings with different girls almost every night I went out. I called all my friends who I knew had many female friends or were good with the ladies, and went out with all of them on separate nights, and almost every time I ended up at least making out with some random chick. I don't mean to sound like a big womanizer, because that I definitely am not. I just got help from people who're better than me at picking up chicks and lowered my standards for a while.
Eventually I got over the break-up. It was spring. Not only in my heart, but outside too. Most of you have never experienced the long Finnish winter, but I can assure you it's brutal. If you're a grinder and normally wake up after 2PM, you quite possibly don't see sunlight for six months. I get so depressed without sunlight, and these days I always spend at least a month or two abroad every winter. Luckily our break-up happened exactly in the point where the winter's about to end and the spring is kicking in, and I soon saw my mood brighten as there was more and more sunlight every day and it was getting warmer. And when my mood brightened, my poker started going better and better. By the end of April I was pretty happy again, and I had a five-figure bankroll.
Back then Pokerisivut was affiliated with a guy who owned almost all the best night clubs in Helsinki. All the biggest rakers got VIP cards to these night clubs, and got to hang out in the back rooms. I got the VIP card too and started using it. Every time I went to a certain club, which was the biggest in Helsinki at the time, there was this one celebrity chick who was there. Every single time. I once was the first customer to come in, yet she was already in the room. Every time we were asked to leave when it closed, she stayed there. She probably even slept in the back room.
Her name was Henna. She had risen to fame from the Finnish Big Brother. She was the classic wannabe celebrity - fake boobs, lips full of botox, huge hair extensions and so on. A famous Finnish soccer player (whose brother I coincidentally knew and who now plays for the Finnish national team himself) had been caught having an affair with her when he was seeing someone else, and the woman quickly became a frequent face in the Finnish gossip magazines. Here's a picture of her:
So, every time I went drinking with my friends, she was there. She seemed like she was always picking up men, and we were often joking about coming up with a prop bet regarding banging her. Not because we wanted to bang her, but because she was such a skank. I was pretty famous for prop bets back then, because I had been involved in quite a lot of four-figure prop bets that were publicized, and some of them had been pretty crazy (for example, as a result of a lost prop bet I had to listen to this on auto-repeat for a month every time I grinded: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyfc10qDcR4).
I blogged about her in one of my blog entries, and then went to sleep. It was totally innocent, I think I just basically mentioned that I was once again drinking with her the night before, and that a prop bet was discussed. I wrote the entry and went to sleep.
When I woke up the next morning, I had 17 missed phone calls and 12 text messages. Many friends I knew from totally different areas in life, some random numbers, my mother. I thought something must have happened, and I started up my computer while looking at the text messages. The first message said something along the lines of "WTF MAN, HAVE YOU SEEN THE NEWS? HAHAHAHA". I felt temporarily relief because the laughing part made it sound like at least nothing bad had happened. The next message was from a female friend, who asked if I really was involved in paying for sex.
What?
I opened up three of the biggest news websites in Finland, and found my name in every single one of them. The headline in all of them was basically the same:
"YOUNG POKER STAR OFFERS BIG BROTHER CELEBRITY 20 000 EUROS FOR SEX!"
I opened the article. It said that Jens Kyllönen had made an offer to Henna (the BB chick) to pay her 20 000€ for sex and it had my name in there too. I knew that Jens wouldn't do that it if he was paid 20 000€ for it, and neither would I. I immediately knew that there was something fishy about it. Then I noticed a link at the end of the article that pointed directly to my blog.
It turned out that Jens, who had become famous for his EPT win, had commented on my blog entry from the night before. He had jokingly said that he'd bet me 20k on who'd be the first to have sex with Henna if he wasn't in a relationship. And somehow all the gossip rags had found out about it, turned the story around, and made it sound like me and Jens were offering her 20k for sex.
Some magazines got it somewhat right, and just publicized it as a sex bet removing the "if I wasn't in a relationship" part, which was humiliating in itself. But the dirtiest gossip magazine in Finland got it as wrong as you possibly can, and made a newspiece saying we just wanted to pay for sex with her, removing the bet part entirely from the article. They got comments from that stupid woman, and the reporters tried calling me too, and it became quite a media circus for a few days. I had done absolutely nothing, and Jens had done next to nothing as well, and all of a sudden our names were all over the press claiming we wanted to pay for sex. There were people at the gossip magazine's forums that said they had seen us with Henna (we had been at the same VIP area, but that was basically it, we never even talked more than a few sentences with her), and all of a sudden there was evidence that we were involved with her.
Even now, if you put my name on google, one of the first results is the Henna sex bet. I've had my girlfriend's parents find out about it, and it hasn't been exactly a joy to explain what happened. And if you put my name on google image search, one of the first pictures is the picture of that woman. Still it was much harder on Jens, because no one knew me outside the poker circles while Jens was known everywhere in Finland. The magazines came up with made-up stories about their meetings and stuff like that, and I can only imagine how hard it must have been for him given that he was in a relationship. He's still seeing the same girl though, so luckily they survived that circus.
Here's one sample link to an article about the case (in Finnish): http://www.mtv3.fi/viihde/uutiset/mu...ia-bb-hennasta (the headline translated: "Poker star would pay tens of thousands for Henna from Big Brother).
On the last day of April we have something you could call the national drinking day in Finland. It's my favourite day of the year, and I ended up skipping the softest of all EPTs, San Remo, because of it this year. You just can't miss Vappu. It's a long tradition that has roots as a holiday for working class people or something like that, but these days it simply means that everyone has a day off work just to go out and get drunk.
On that day in 2009 I found my next girlfriend. Just like my all ex-girlfriends, she too has blocked me on Facebook so I can't ask for her permission, but I'm almost sure she wouldn't want me to use her name so I'll just give her a code name. Let's call her Gina.
I had met Gina once before, really briefly in a night club. I was there with a good friend of mine who knew a lot of women, this was during the time when I was still recovering from my break-up. She had told me that she was in a relationship and we only chatted for a really quick while, as I was looking for single girls. I remember making a note that I quite liked her, though. She was really good at soccer, close to making it to the Finnish women's national team. She was also a good girl, exactly the kind I needed after Serena.
On that vappu I ended up getting more drunk than almost never before. I remember absolutely nothing after 10PM, so I can only tell you what I've been told happened that night:
I went drinking with my best friend. We went to a giant park in Helsinki where all the young girls go drinking on that day. The plan was simply to get drunk and pick up chicks. We are usually good at the getting drunk part and not-so-good at the picking up chicks part. At about 10PM my friend left with a girl he had miraculously managed to pick up, and when I was wandering around the city alone I ran into the friend who knew Gina. I hung out with him and his friends, and some time later Gina and her boyfriend joined our group too. I was irritated by his boyfriend from the beginning. Almost instantly when they joined our group, I had shouted "oh my god, are you serious? You seriously can't be with that guy, he's a [insert 30 seconds of random insults here]". I had kept on and on and almost got my ass kicked. The funny thing is that I hardly even knew the guy. I can only assume that this had been my drunken way of getting her girlfriend's attention. (Remember when I said I wasn't good at picking up chicks? Well, there you go.)
What happened after this I don't really know, but in the end I woke up from home under a chair and without a girl. I was later told by my friend that I had been extremely rude all night and mocked his boyfriend non-stop and called him all kinds of names, and that everyone had thought I was an idiot. I didn't really care what people thought, but I sent the girl an apology message on Facebook anyway. We started talking, and it turned out that his boyfriend actually was a massive douchebag and had cheated on her. I also heard things about him from some friends who randomly knew him, and they all said he was a scumbag. All of a sudden I didn't feel bad about my behaviour.
A week or two later there was a birthday party that both me and Gina attended, and we ended up talking there all night, and Gina and her boyfriend broke up soon after. We set up our first date almost immediately after that. It's funny that the guy whose girlfriend I basically stole works in a store that's the nearest grocery store from where I live nowadays, and I see him on a regular basis. I still always try to avoid using his counter.
Early in May I received a no-deposit casino bonus for some reason that was worth something like 50 euros on my Unibet account. I played some Unibet blackjack with the bonus, and managed to run it up to 1650€. There was a banner that was promoting the Unibet Open Portugal that'd take place in a couple of weeks. The Unibet Open buy-ins are always exactly 1650 euros. I took this as a sign and bought in from the software. It's crazy how life works, first you get a small no-deposit bonus and all of a sudden you're going to Portugal.
By now it had become a public joke that I never did well in live tournaments. I had played quite a lot of them and never cashed. I was pretty much the only Finnish professional who didn't even have a Hendon Mob page (I had cashed in the Vegas tournaments, but Hendon Mob didn't track them). For some reason from the beginning I just knew that things would go well in Portugal. I had my first date with Gina set up, we'd go out immediately when I came back. I was in a good place mentally, I had a decent bankroll again, and I had no worries about anything. I just knew I would go deep in that tournament. It was held near Albufeira which is a town known for its student parties, so I wanted to have fun on that trip too. Because of that I decided not to sell any shares, so I could spew around as much as I wanted and get drunk while playing.
I finished day 1A second in chips, having over two times the average. On the last hand of the night I flatted my big blind with pocket deuces and flopped quads. I had been doing all kinds of aggressive stuff all day and had a pretty bad image, so I got it in easily against someone's pocket eights on a board of 227J for 50 big blinds or so.
I had many friends there who also played that day, and we decided to get a taxi to Albufeira to go out on the night of day 1B. Day 2 would start at noon the next day, and the 2011 Miikka would never go out when still in a tournament. But again, I didn't really care back then and was just playing for fun.
In the beginning the night played out in a pretty standard manner. It wasn't tourist season in Albufeira yet and the bars were relatively empty, so they had sick promotions trying to get people to drink. You could get 1 liter (about two large pints) vodka-red bulls for 5 euros. I remember drinking a lot of them. At some point we ran into a team of Finnish female basketball players who were there on a training camp. One of my friends ended up having sex with one of the girls, only to find out in the morning that she was 16. I concentrated on drinking - I had my date with Gina coming up and even that I wasn't even in a relationship yet it still would've felt wrong to chase girls - and started having trouble forming understandable sentences by 10PM.
Then, at some stage, me and E (who I had met in Warsaw on the night I lost my watch) got an idea to go to a strip club. We didn't know where to find one, so we figured we'd just take a cab. There weren't any cabs in sight, until we noticed one standing in the nearby traffic lights. We waved at the driver but he didn't seem to notice us, so we ran over before the lights turned green. I entered the cab from the rear right door and my friend from the rear left. We just hopped in... only to land on top of some very freaked out 60-year-old English tourists. The taxi driver seemed to think that we were somehow trying to hijack the cab (there was a light on top of the cab that said "occupied" which we were too drunk to notice), and he got off the cab and waved at the police car that was coincidentally standing behind him at the traffic lights. We were too drunk to be able to get off the cab so the cops came and lifted us up and beat us to the ground. They beat us up against a wall with some kind of metal sticks - local policemen policy I guess - but eventually let us go without taking us to the station or anything. I think they realised that we were just dumb drunk tourists instead of actual robbers. Albufeira is a town where drunk tourists cause a lot of trouble and the policemen hate them like plague, so they decided to give us a lesson by beating us up instead of giving us a fine. I had my back bruised for like two weeks after that night.
Anyway, after the cops left it was still early and we were still drunk, so in true Finnish style we were like "what the hell, let's keep drinking!". By this point we had lost our friends, but it didn't matter so we just headed to the first bar we saw and ordered drinks again.
The night went on, I think we eventually even went to a strip club, and then finally at some stage we noticed that the sun was getting up and it was six in the morning. We were about to get a cab to our hotel when I noticed a homeless dog lying in the street. Like I've said before, I'm a big dog lover. I decided to buy him a hot dog from a nearby 7-eleven. At the same time my friend decided he needs to take a leak somewhere, and as we were in a somewhat open street, he chose to go to an alley behind the 7-eleven. I bought the hot dog and started feeding it to the... err, dog. The last thing I remember is hearing a noise that sounded like a frisbee flying by. I blacked out, and woke up from the street feeling severe pain in my head. My head was bleeding and my wallet and cell phone were stolen. My friend who had been taking a leak had also been robbed at knifepoint, and he ran away unaware of me being robbed as well.
So there I was, my head bleeding in another town with no money and no cell phone, 6 hours from the start of day two. I didn't know what to do so I boarded a cab and just told him to drive to my hotel, not informing him that I had no money. I don't think I really had a clear plan at this point, I just wanted to get to that hotel where all the people I knew were staying. When we got there, I explained him the situation, but of course he was a 70-year-old portuguese gentleman who didn't speak a word of English. I tried to explain him slowly that I'm going to get the money from my friends and come back to pay him, but he didn't understand. Eventually I just got up and ran to the hotel from the front entrance and he followed trying to chase me. This must have looked good to the hotel staff. I didn't know the room numbers of any of my friends, so I just randomly knocked on everyone's door, yelling Finnish curse words and the word "help", knowing that if anyone Finnish happened to live in that floor he'd open the door. Luckily enough one of the first doors opened and it belonged to the Finnish country manager, who'd spent the whole night sleepless because of food poisoning. He must have been delighted to see me. He paid the taxi driver, and I was able to go and get my wounds taken care of and go to sleep.
When I woke up 4 hours later I was more hungover than I had ever been. My body was aching all over, my head, my back, even my legs from all the running. But I had no choice but to go and play. We had made a pact with my friends who were still in on the night before that we'd all use these blinking sunglasses we had bought from the street. Here's a picture of me, my chipleader chipstack and the glasses:
Day two went smoothly from the beginning. In one of the first hands I announced to the entire table that I was still drunk from last night, which I was. I challenged the guy who had the second biggest stack at the table to a bet that the one of us who'd be able to win a pot first would win a beer from the other. He raised the next hand, I 3-bet blind, and there was a shove and a re-shove. The guy folded, and I looked at my cards. Ace and an ace. I held against AK and 99 and scored both the beers and the chiplead, which I didn't give up until the bubble had burst.
I made the first OOP float of my life too in that tournament. I'm blaming the alcohol for making me even more creative than I usually am. It was near the bubble, and I had raised basically every hand. I raised once again from the small blind, and got called by the big blind (the guy in the picture above) who had about 30 big blinds. I held Q5o and the flop came KK2. I made a normal c-bet and he raised leaving something like a pot-sized bet behind. I considered shoving, but then I decided to just call, because I figured he'd check back the turn if he didn't have it and I could bomb the river. This way I'd save my chips if he actually had a king. The turn was a brick and it went check-check, and the river came a five. I might've had enough showdown value, but I ended up shoving anyway. He tank folded.
On the bubble I played every hand, I had three times as much chips as the next person in my table, and everyone kept folding. I had something like four times the average after the bubble, which would've been the average at the final table.
There had been 150 runners left in the tournament when we started day two, and we played all the way down to the final table. The night out and the severe pain and headache started to show soon after the bubble, and I couldn't concentrate anymore. I made a crucial mistake when someone opened from middle position, I had AJ and everyone behind me had 20 big blinds or less. I thought the opener had 20 big blinds as well so I just shoved. It turned out that he actually had over 50 big blinds because I hadn't seen the colour of his chips properly (I thought that a stack of 5k chips was a stack of 1k chips). He called with QQ and I lost over half my stack.
That was the longest day of my life, we played for 15 hours but it sure felt like a week. In the end I managed to make it to the final table. I gave an interview to some media before the final table where I promised to challenge Phil Ivey to a heads up match with the entire prize money of 150 000 euros if I won. I have no doubt in my mind that I would've done it just for the kicks, because that 's what I was like back then. In the end I got coolered being the first one out of the final table when I shoved 17 big blinds from the cut-off with AT and the small blind woke up with JJ.
I ended up cashing just 9000€. That covered the trip's expenses, and turned out to be a nice profit from the original 50€ casino bonus. On the minus side, it took me two weeks to recover when I got back home, and I was still sore all over on my first date with Gina. Despite that I still managed to get her to like me, though, and we became an item soon after.
One more thing happened in late May. Pokerisivut started shooting a poker documentary series for their website. They hired a guy who didn't know much about poker to shoot it. I was one of the first people that were asked to star in their own episode. They were all 30-minute episodes about the careers of the players. How we'd got there, some strategy talk, the usual stuff. Back then I was well known for my tilting and shot-taking, and the guy asked if I could show him how I tilt so we could put it on the video. I asked if I could get the money I lost doing it back, and he said no. It was pretty silly, but I thought it would be good entertainment, so I agreed to do it anyway. He shot me for 15 minutes playing 5/5 and 5/10 PLO. I played as bad as I could, making all kinds of stupid tilt moves. Then the ****er edited it, for some reason that I still don't know, to make it look like I was making a strategy video. He made it look like calling a 5-bet with half my stack with 226Tr was something I do on a regular basis. The documentary was aired, and I got flamed hard for being the worst PLO player in Finland. I was pretty bad, but I wasn't that bad. I have no idea why he did it, but I still regularly get comments flaming me for my lack of PLO skills because of that stupid video.
Last edited by fidstar-poker; 06-23-2016 at 07:48 AM.
Reason: name change
