Quote:
Originally Posted by alexDJI
I'm really happy to know that people like you exist and are willing to invest time to help others I tip my hat to you sir.
Can you tell us a bit about your poker background? How did you come to poker, how did you move up through the stakes, starting roll, why did you chose to put poker aside (although I'm pretty sure that's a useless question), etc.?
Thanks a lot!
edit: Can you post a 2nd thread saver too?
My poker story isn't too different from a lot of my poker friends...
Got invited to play in a $30 monthly donkament home game after seeing the WSOP on ESPN, and was excited to play. Didn't know really anything about poker at this point. At this point, it was still pretty early in the process of my company, so $30 seemed like alot of money for a night of poker. My perspective would change, lol.
Started with a free $75 I got from PSO on Empire Poker I believe. I had found some guide on the Internet that told about the PSO site and gave some tips how to play tight at .50/1.00 limit (which was the minimum to clear the $75 and get the final $25. I can remember clearing the $100 and being excited to cash out my $106 - $6 profit!! I've never put a single dollar of my own money into online poker.
From there I bonus whored a bunch of sites on PSO, reload bonuses on Empire, etc. It didn't take long for me to switch to $25nl full ring either.
From there, I just built my way up and made ~$5k that first six months or so, about 50% from bonuses and 50% from play. From there I continued grinding full ring NL, observing the 20-30 buyin BR management rules that were standard at the time. I can remember when I was playing $50nl, setting my ultimate goal of just getting to $200nl someday!
Ultimately, I built my bankroll and got to $600nl full ring (playing with Grimstarr!) at which point I had the bankroll to be playing $1000nl and it became obvious to me that full ring was not the place to be.
It was around this time I got really active in 2p2 MSNL, got to be good friends with great group of guys that interacted and talked strategy in an IRC channel that Big_Jim and I started - Big_Jim did all the work. :P At that point, CTS was switching to 6max too and there was just tons of great discussion in that channel. It was also around that time that I hired Krantz as a coach, and he was coaching WiltonTilt and Snipes also. Those three guys were also a huge help to my game and became good friends.
So back to poker results, I had a couple years where I made around $100k each year grinding MSNL. 2009 was very difficult for me poker results wise (~25-30k?), but our business has continued to grow every year and so do my kids, so it just became alot to balance and do a good job at all three. I basically made the choice to take a sabbatical from poker and at this point, it's likely to continue.
Biggest Score: 3rd or 4th place in a FTOPS for $52k. WiltonTilt got 25% of it for an action swap, lucky bastard. :P
Biggest Downswing: ~$50k, representing about 55 buyins at MSNL/HSNL.
Be happy to answer other poker related questions.
One quick edit: I know I've told this before, but PSO was awesome. Much much love to MikeJ, dlk, etc. that I (and other friends of mine) dealt with and they were always awesome.
Last edited by jalexand42; 01-05-2011 at 12:19 AM.