Hi there, Welcome to anyone reading this. I am going to try and keep motivated to post this and keep it as up to date as possible. Getting motivated to play poker in the proper mindset that I need to win seems to be difficult latly, I am hoping writing might be a good way to get me back on track.
First I’ll just drop a little background info on myself, I have been playing poker professionally for about 3 years. I started out by seeing a commercial for party poker, and I was in a new town on a work/study term for university, didn’t really know anyone yet and was quite bored, so after a few weeks of playing play money I decided to put 50$ on party poker, I played .25/.50 table as it was the smallest stakes at the time. I managed to build it upto a few hundred dollars and quickly cashed out $100, so the worst I could do is finish up $50 i managed to lose what I had in my account and went back to play money. I then got into mtt’s and reading as much as I could about poker. I was reading FTR every day at work, since it was a goverment job it was very slack, and I basically got paid to study poker, reading forums and articles on every site i could. I then won a hubble freeroll on stars and felt like i was the fullblown nutz, so I deposited 200$ on party poker to ensure i got the full bonus at the time and began grinding out singo’s and cash games to clear the bonus. I played mainly 10$ and 20$ sitngos and kept track of everything i did including making a spreadsheet to keep track of my wins losses hourly rate avg finish etc. I did this fora month or so and seemed to kill the party poker sitngos I ended up calling in sick to work most days showing up late to stay and play poker, becasue i was making twice as much money playing poker then working for the government, and having way more fun. I still enjoyed my job, but once it was over 8 month term i was back to school in kamloops to finish my last semester.
During my last semester i ran into an old friend who always asked me to help him with his homework, he was an ESL student english as a second language, and i helped him with his english we got to talking and discussing poker, he told me there is a club in town that plays poker 3 nights a week, he brought me into it, and ever since my first night buying into the5/10 cash game and cashing out $3300 12 hours later I was hooked. I would pretty much gothere every night play all through the night catch a ride to university in the morning at 8 am with a friend that lived beside the poker club sit through my morning classes and once noon came around go back to my dorm room and crash, I think I went to 3 of my accounting and like 6 of my statistics classes all semester , those were my afternoon classes, basically just showed up for midterm final and the day that i heard i would be kicked out if i didnt show up, It actually became a running joke in my class as the teachers and I would joke about it. I remember the statistics course i showed up for the midterm which was only 11 questions i got all 11 correct and one question was thrown out because only 1 person in the class was able to get it. I was the “outlier” in this case. Average score was i think 60% or so and When one of the students asked who got it correct, the teacher pointed me out, and the student said “What , Chris, he doesn’t even fucking show up” I couldn’t stop laughing, of course the funniest part was that it was this young preppy girl who was pissed off because this course was brigning down her perfect 4.0 GPA. I never did great in most of my schoolwork but in my math subject’s everything just came natuarally, and I defiantly think this was a tremendous factor in how easily i was able to jump in to poker and be a winning player. Once school was over and I scraped through all my courses and passed, I had made close to $40,000 during that 4 month stretch in live cash games at the poker club, the games at this club were sick, the best game you could ever play in, unfortunatly they have dried up since then. It was enough to pay off my student loans and give myself a decent bankroll to play with while I “searched” for a job after graduation. This is when I decided to give it a shot and go pro, playing full time splitting my time up between the poker club and online.
Next post I will write about what I’ve done and how i’ve done since turning pro and well as future ambitions, as well as some WCOOP updates.