[newhizzle]

I don’t know where to post this, so I will post it here because this is where the majority of my posts have been. I haven’t posted anything in about a week and a half and I just logged on to see that I have been a member for a year as of yesterday and will be a Pooh-Bah soon. Anyway, here is my poker story:

I remember seeing Chris Moneymaker win the World Series in 2003 and being surprised that I found watching people play poker on T.V. interesting. I started playing right around the beginning of 2004.

I got suspended from school after my first semester in the fall of 2003 for three drinking offenses and still had some court dates pending in my home town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina from when I used to get arrested every couple of months or so for underage drinking mostly.

The DA was obviously tired of seeing me every month for about three years straight and told me I was looking at seventy-five days, thirty in jail, and forty-five in prison (This was only for a long string of underage drinking charges and one DWI about four years ago). Now a month in jail, I was not too worried about, but forty-five days in prison was not at all something that I was looking forward to.

My public defender got me out of it and I had to take forty hours of DWI classes and go to three AA meetings a week. AA was where I found my new addiction and prospective career, gambling, specifically poker.

We played in little cheap no limit games after meetings and my brother, who had been playing for years, taught me some basics and I started winning. I bought my first poker book, Super/System, and by combining my brother’s weak-tight strategies and Doyle’s loose-aggressive strategies, before long I was the biggest winner in these games by far.

I was never really a bonus whore, I started my online career jumping from site to site playing in every free-roll I could find. I would occasionally win very small amounts of money and then lose it back in the cash games. I eventually stuck with Golden Palace and their ten cent giveaway sit-n-goes. I think I got up to like ten bucks or something at one point, but that [censored] was to frustrating and a waste of time. I was convinced that Golden Palace was rigged because of the ridiculous beats I always got. I decided to just say [censored] it and buy into Partypoker for fifty bucks.

I think I started playing five and ten dollar sit-n-goes and I really don’t remember how I did. Anyway this was around the time that I bought my second poker book, Hold’em Poker For Advanced Players. I actually re-read and studied this book a few times and started playing limit poker.

I don’t know how many times I bought in, but I know to this day I have never deposited more than fifty dollars into Partypoker at once (Except for when I transferred my roll over from Empire after the split). Anyway, I worked my way up to about twenty-five hundred dollars at one point and lost it all back moving up to 10/20 too fast (I was probably about a break-even player at that point).

Around this time, I remember doing something with pocket eights at a Party table and a guy said something like:

Guy: “That was the correct play, 2+2er I presume?”
Me: “What?”
Me: “Oh, Sklansky’s website?”
Guy: “Yeah, are you a 2+2er?”
Me: “No, but I have his book.”
Guy: “Which one?”
Me: “Hold’em Poker For Advanced Players.”
Guy: “Well you should check out the site some time.”

And that’s where it all started. I registered on 11/30/04 and was a lurker for a while (By the way, please don’t be that guy, I might have found twoplustwo anyway, but still, there’s no reason to expedite the process). I think I made my first posts in the Books/Publications forum a few months later after buying Small Stakes Hold’em (I now have probably like thirty books or something). If I remember correctly, my first post was asking how it could possibly be correct to raise KJs from the big blind after I had read about half of the book, then after finishing it I found a very detailed answer to my exact question in the miscellaneous concepts chapter and felt like an idiot.

Anyway, some time went by and I started making dumb ass posts in the strategy forums. I also found a bigger no limit home game and started killing it. I had just quit my job at Staples to sell weed full time and decided to quit selling weed to live off of this game for the rest of the summer and avoid risking any felonies. This was also around the time that I finally switched to empire and started getting rakeback.

I went back to school in the fall of 2005 and started posting and playing online a lot more, I worked my roll up to about eighty-five hundred moving up at three-hundred big bets and started following my buddies around to bigger games. I hit a bad run at short-handed 20/40 and lost about half of my roll, then moved back down to 5/10 and 3/6 and tilted away almost all of it.

I was pretty much surviving on rakeback at this point and was back at 2/4. I made a stupid downswing post and got semi-constructively-flamed. This was when I started posting a lot more. I think I was probably an enthusiast or an addict or something at that point. I think I have grown more as a player in the past three months or so than I had in my two years of playing.

So I got back up to about three grand and this was about the time that Party split from the skins. I stayed on Empire for about a week and then went back to Party. Over the next two months I went on a ridiculous rush making about seventy grand at limits ranging from 5/10 to 100/200. My luck eventually leveled out at 100/200 and now I have moved down and am playing exclusively (and so far beating) 30/60 and 50/100 basically finding the best games between the two limits.

I am seriously considering dropping out of school after this semester and going pro. I know that I still have a lot to learn and I actually think a lot of the small stakes posters are much better players than I am, but if I use proper table selection, I feel that I will have an edge. I really have no interest in school and could make a very good living at even 10/20 if it turned out I have just been running very well at the higher limits. Also one of the main reasons I want to quit is to actually devote more of my time to improving my game as well as playing.

Anyway, thanks for listening and of course, thanks to everyone for helping me improve my game over the past year. I don’t think I could possibly be where I am without the help of all of the posters in the Small Stakes forum. Also I think that it is worth saying that as much as I don’t [img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img] jason_t because he talks too much [censored], I think he has probably helped me at least as much if not more than any other poster on these forums to get to where I am today.

Thank You

-New


P.S. - Also a special thanks to Tricia Takanawa for the kind words of encouragement that helped motivate me to move up through the limits.