Crossroads in my poker career(long)

[redrooski24]

No, I don't mean my pro career. Anyway, I'm deciding to post this here since this is the forum I post most at now(almost exclusively actually), although if it should go in general, someone let me know. Onto my background and the meat.


I'm 19, going into my junior year at Madison(yes I know I'm young). I started playing poker in my dorm in October, little $5 games we'd play once or twice a week with anywhere from 5-10 people. I had no clue what I was doing, but after the first couple games I thought I got the hang of it, and after a month or so I won some of the times we played(everyone was pretty bad now that I look back). One of the guys I played with told me about online poker and naturally, Party Poker came up. I decided I'd give it a shot and put $50 down and played some NL25 games and $5 sngs, still clueless. Somehow I managed to keep it pretty even for a while but after a month or so my account was empty. We were all still playing the $5 tourny games on the floor and I was having better results by playing a little tighter than I had before(I used to think QT was pretty good), so I thought I was ready for another dance with online poker. Put down $50 again and ran it up to $200 around winter break, and yes I thought it was pretty good(variance liked me back then). I was sick most of my break and decided to get a couple books, Theory of Poker and Caro's Book of Tells. I wanted to really figure out what this poker game was all about and read people's souls Phil Hellmuth style. Most of my break consisted of reading about poker and trying to apply what I learned. I started playing .5/1 LHE and I hit a little downswing and decided that limit sucked and I should stick with NL.

I chugged along playing NL25, getting better each day I felt, when in March I stumbled upon this site. It was like I found some underground poker network of people who knew what they were doing. I read all I could and realized that 4 tabling was a good idea, when the dreaded day arrived. I started to whore myself out....to poker sites. By this time I got $500 and just went from site to site, depositing it all and clearing $100, taking it all out and moving on to the next site until I hit all the major sites. By the time I was done, I had around $2500 and was 4 tabling NL100 and being a consistent winner, but I kept wanting to improve. I had dabbled in MTTs a little, but played it almost exactly like a cash game, so the only time I could get deep was if the deck hit me in the face. I pulled some all nighters a couple times while playing, and it wasn't rare for me to play until 3am before going to sleep. This of course pissed off my roomate because I had a compulsive addiction to doing chip riffles whenever I was playing(I always had a stack of chips on my desk) and sometimes at night I would do it and wake him up. By the end of the school year, my roll reached about 5k and I felt great. My plan was to play poker over the summer and see how much I could make.

When I got back home(San Jose, CA), my dad let me know of an internship working for a VP of Sales in a small company and I thought it would be a great learning experience and a good resume builder. Unfortunately, I didn't do much of anything, worked 40 hours a week, didn't get paid, and after about 6 weeks of it decided it wasn't worth my time especially when I could be making good money playing poker. I was still playing poker during my internship, just not nearly as much as I could or wanted to. It was at this point that I started reading on the MTT forum and playing tournys(not coincidentally, I got in a tourny craze with all the WSOP buzz going on at the time). Work felt like a real grind, and I wanted some new and exciting things from poker, and MTTs seemed like the answer. I was pretty unsuccessful overall, but I kept reading and got HoH1 and 2, which helped me a lot. I read about the Bodog 100k tourny here and that there was a good overlay and weak field, won a satellite seat to it and took 3rd for 10k. I just tripled my roll in 6 hours...wow. I went back to cash games and was playing NL400 at this point and went through a rough patch over a 3 day span and pretty much didn't go back, I was almost 100% MTT with some sngs mixed in there. Fast forward 2 months, I still have barely touched cash games(except to bonus whore and to mix it up) and I have 2 more FTs under my belt, taking 2nd in the Bodog 10k for $1600 and 6th in the 100k for $4500. Over this time I was playing a lot of MTTs and in the past month have dipped more heavily into the $55 sngs on party.

Now the crossroads...I am leaving back to school in a week and am completely lost on what I want to do with poker. Some days I feel like playing all sngs, sometimes MTTs, maybe a little cash games, or mix them all in. This coupled with my massive ADD, I'm having trouble finding my "calling" in poker. I have a 7bb/100 winrate at NL200 over ~50k hands and not enough hands logged on NL400 to really tell, although I'm pretty sure I'm a long term winner there also. MTTs are by far the most fun for me to play(as well as the most frustrating [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]) and it never feels like I'm grinding them out like I am with sngs or cash games, even though I would venture a guess and say those are more profitable for me. Anyway, once I'm back in school I will obviously have time constraints on my MTT play since it will be difficult to set up a 5 hour block of time to play in them, so it may be back to grinding I go. Unfortunately, nothing beats the thrill of going deep in a tourny and making that final table.

My current poker goals are to have fun and make as much money as I can. I plan on finishing school(need a 5th year) with a major in economics and minor in biology. I have entertained the thought of going pro for at least a year out of school with my early successes as a player, but I want to see if I can keep improving and consistently winning before I even really start thinking about it.

My bankroll is sitting around 15k(took 5k out which I haven't found anything to buy with) as I enter this crossroad so it is enough to sustain any kind of big variance since I am keeping within my bankroll and not taking too many shots. I know this sounded like a poker biography, and I guess most of it is, but I'd just like to hear from you guys any advice or comments you have on what my future poker endeavors might be. I hope my story was interesting enough to get you through this beast of a post, thanks again.

[MLG]

Reading 2+2 is great, but it can cause you to forget that for 99.999999% of people poker is a game to enjoy. People play poker to have fun and relax. My advice would be, don't worry about what gives you the highest return or anything. When you have some free time and wnat to play poker just sit down and play whatever you feel like playing. If poker is your hobby there is no reason to treat it like your career.

[CardSharpCook]

I've seen you in the 100 L tournies on Party. You've seemed liked a good player. My biggest piece of advice would be to do well in college. Seriously, don't let poker interfere with studies. Also, I'd advise you to have as much fun in college as possible. I miss that lifestyle.... As for poker, I think you have what it takes, both from reading this and from my snap judgements of watching you at the table which, for some reason, have stuck in my head.

Anyway, GL, thanks for the post. These are always interesting.

CSC

[ansky451]

Nice post- I posted something similar to this a week ago (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...mp;sb=5&o= --dont mean to hijack, just thought I'd share it with you since we have somewhat similar stories.) I also started with cash games and have moved towards MTTs, they are just more fun, [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]. However like you I sort of have a tough decision to make about what to play during the school year, because MTTs simply take too long, to just play on whim for an hour or two.

I dont think you should entertain the possibility of being a pro without a college degree first, you always want to have a fallback.

All in all, congrats on your success, it sure isn't easy, and good luck with your school year and poker.

[A_PLUS]

Enjoy your last year(s) in college. You will never get them back. Playing a lot of poker can SUCK time away without you even realizing it. For someone like me, playing online poker isnt a bad way to spend a random friday night. I only say this b/C I am 27, and have over 10 years of too much partying under my belt. Couple that with a serious GF, freinds who are settling down, etc. and it is fine.

You can not miss out on the fun of your teens-early 20s playing online poker. Trust me, you will regret it for your entire life. If you want to try to play pro for a year when you graduate, sh!t..go for it. But dont waste this time.

But most importantly, I would play about 10% of the poker I do now if I didnt have a gf that I consider to be a piece of @ss. No way playing poker is worth giving up the loose moral standards of college women.

Get drunk, bang ugly chicks, play poker when you want to. Oh yeah...graduate to. You never know if all of the fish will turn to internet checkers in 5 years, no college degree = "welcome to TGIFridays...would you like to try an ultimate pina colatta?"

[ansky451]

[ QUOTE ]
Enjoy your last year(s) in college. You will never get them back. Playing a lot of poker can SUCK time away without you even realizing it. For someone like me, playing online poker isnt a bad way to spend a random friday night. I only say this b/C I am 27, and have over 10 years of too much partying under my belt. Couple that with a serious GF, freinds who are settling down, etc. and it is fine.

You can not miss out on the fun of your teens-early 20s playing online poker. Trust me, you will regret it for your entire life. If you want to try to play pro for a year when you graduate, sh!t..go for it. But dont waste this time.

But most importantly, I would play about 10% of the poker I do now if I didnt have a gf that I consider to be a piece of @ss. No way playing poker is worth giving up the loose moral standards of college women.

Get drunk, bang ugly chicks, play poker when you want to. Oh yeah...graduate to. You never know if all of the fish will turn to internet checkers in 5 years, no college degree = "welcome to TGIFridays...would you like to try an ultimate pina colatta?"

[/ QUOTE ]

what a post. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[CardSharpCook]

Ya, that's a really cool post. Most enjoyable (and true)
[img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[redrooski24]

Maybe it sounded like I played at every given moment during school. I definitely did not. I probably played around 20-30 hrs a week and Thursday-Sunday were major binge and blackout fests. God I can't wait to go back.