1 year/almost pooh-bah post(very long, probably boring)

[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.

[TakeMeToTheRiver]

Nice story. I would not recommend dropping out of school but apparently a lot of the young folks are doing it. [Just call me Grandpa.] Getting a degree is important. Poker really does not prepare you for life (although it can teach you some lessons). Should a life-long poker career not be your thing, you will be unhappy you didn't finish school.

Whatever you decide, good luck in poker and in life.

[Bob T.]

Wow, that is a different story.

I think that eventually it will be important to you that you finished school.

I also think that given your brushes with the law, you probably want to be extra diligent about paying your taxes.

[TheHip41]

[ QUOTE ]
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.”


[/ QUOTE ]


Seriously, who does this? I tell no one about 2p2

[TPupAZ]

In all honesty, dont drop out of school. I mean you can make great money while in school. You won't need a job during college, you'll have the opportunity to develop experiences, make networking contacts, and enjoy a time in your life that you wont ever have back. I would love to say, go for it man but you'd be more rewarded in my opinion, by playing, making a ton of cash in school.

[brettbrettr]

[ QUOTE ]
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.


[/ QUOTE ]

WTF?

[QTip]

Cool. I love these kinds of posts.

I'm going to beg you to stay in school.

[W. Deranged]

Newhizzle,

Dude, don't drop out of school. Yes you can make tons of money at poker, but the thing you really need to be concerned about is psychological/mental burnout.

Yes, you can beat the games and make a lot of money. That you know. What you don't know is how long you will be willing to put up with the mental stress of focusing hard on poker, the lack of interpersonal contact, the frustration of bad beats, the reality of working for days and even weeks and having less money than you had during that stretch, etc...

A lot of people burn out on poker, particularly online poker. You might have suspicions about your poker endurance, but you really don't know.

And just think about how much it would suck to be totally sick of poker and in pain every time you have to play because that's your only option in like three years. And then you decide you want to do something else...

...and then you wake up and realize you can't do anything because you forgot to graduate from school.

[callmedonnie]

Well done. As a recent college graduate who is not fond of his job, I can relate. It sounds like you don't have enough of a sample size on many of the limits you are playing at. If you feel confident you know what you are doing regardless, all the power to you. Best of luck.

Edit: oh yea, and I would graduate. I miss college. I wish I had another major, but I really was an interested student so its sounds like we're coming from different places.

[TakeMeToTheRiver]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
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.


[/ QUOTE ]

WTF?

[/ QUOTE ]

Are you asking about the difference between jail and prison? Depending where you live, it could be the difference between the Andy Griffith Show and Oz.