Ever since I was young, I've had a talent for strategy games. I would routinely beat my parents at Chess, Monopoly, and Mancala. When I was 8, a friend's older brother introduced me to Magic: The Gathering. I spent countless hours and dollars building up a collection and playing. At age 12, I started playing magic competitively at a local card shop with a lot of success. I won a Junior Super Series tournament the following year netting me three boxes, an $1000 college scholarship, and an entry to the Junior Super Series Championship. I was introduced to poker through friends at the card shop. One day an older friend gave me a ride to Mike's house (the owner of Savage Games) where I made $26 playing $.25/.5 no-limit and $.5/1 limit hold'em. I was excited that I could beat these guys and I had just started playing.
During summer I went to an all boys sports camp. The camp was filled with rich kids who loved to gamble. Over the course of camp I made $200 playing poker. The following summer I came back having read Mike Caro's Book of Tells, and Super System. I had a tougher time getting action, but still was able to make $500. Clearly, there was a lot more money to be made in poker than Magic.
When I got back from camp, Mike told to me about online poker and I decided I'd give it a try. I gave him $50 to deposit on Party Poker for me. I started by playing the $5+1 sngs. I fluctuated between $30-70 dollars. I moved up to the $10+1 sngs because it was the same rake for higher play. A bad run in those left my account empty. Ever confident, I had Mike deposit another $50. This time it took about two weeks before I went bust. I deposited another $100, and this time, I won. I quickly made back my lost $100, and more. Over the next two months I ran my bankroll up to $700. I entered Marblehead High as a freshman. My mom was concerned about me gambling at such a young age, but she figured that I would probably lose interest. I moved up to the $20+2 sngs My bankroll peaked at $1000 and I had my first real downswing. When I ran bad, Mike ran good. He won a tournament for $14,000. I was intrigued by how much potential profit you could make in MTTs. I played a few without much success. One night against my better judgement I entered a $100+9 MTT with Mike. I have no recollection of the tournament but I guess I ran well finishing first out of 98 players for $2700.
I told my mom how much I won that night and she got really scared. She decided that I could keep the money, but she didn't want me to play anymore. I wasn't really that concerned, and had no real intention of stopping. It just made playing a little tougher.
I started playing in the $.25/.50 6 max nl games with decent success. It took me awhile to adapt to cash game play but I incorporated my tournament strategy with prior experience in live games. Over the next couple months, I got my roll up to $6000 grinding cash games and sngs of all different levels. My bankroll peaked at $8000 but I began to experience higher variance due to bad luck. My edge was not as big compared to the small stakes I had been dominating.
Something clicked the summer before junior year. I went to Brown University to take a finance class for three weeks. During my time there I was able to play a ton of poker. I went from $4,000 to $7,000 after 4th place in a $30+3 rebuy during my second day at Brown. I ran really hot in $100+9 sngs. I played 4 at a time and had a ridiculous in the money rate. Some of it was luck, but I really was a strong sng player. Most players didn't understand how important it was to not bust early on, and how important it was to stay aggressive on the money bubble. If I was the shortstack, I was always looking to take blinds. If I was a bigger stack (which I often was because I was good at accumulating chips in the early levels) I would push around the shorter stacks who were afraid of bubbling. That and really strong heads up results left my bankroll with a huge boost. The sng wins brought me to $9,000. I tried the $200+15's. I lost the first four I played. Determined, I entered another four, winning two and cashing third in one. At the end of my three weeks at Brown my bankroll was up to $14,000.
My bankroll peaked at $16800 before I hit another downswing. I lost at sngs. I switched to cash playing 2-4 no limit. I kept losing. I moved back to $1/2 NL and $100+9 sngs. I kept losing. I tried playing all different mtts with no real success. I'd heard about people getting coaching and decided that what I needed to improve was a coach. I read about Seal, David Eisenstein on pocketfives.com He had written several articles, and made great posts in the forums. I took several lessons with him focusing on MTTs and cash games. Even though I pretty much lost every session we played, I learned so much about the process- how to think about poker. After receiving coaching, I started doing well again. I got my bankroll back from $10,000 to $12,000 over the next few months. I moved up to $2/4 NL and in two weeks, I was up to $18,000. I felt so confident about my play and my success was amazing. I tried playing $3/6 NL and didn't notice much of a difference in the level of play. Two weeks later, I was up to $25,000. I decided to take a shot at a soft $10/20 NL full ring game. If I lost 1 buy-in I would drop back down to $3/6 NL. I lost $800 that session. I switched to 10/20 NL shorthanded, and made $1800. I took those profits and put them on two tables of full ring where I went on to make another $2500. I played another shorthanded game the next day and over the course of a 2 hour session made $7000.
My success continued. Over the next month and a half I ran my account up to $90,000. $10/20 NL on Partypoker was interesting. It tended to be very aggressive with a lot of loose play. People would make extremely large 3 bets very often. I used my own style adapting to the loose players by playing an unpredictable TAG game. There were many good regulars but just as many donators. Party added the $25/50 NL games. I observed the tables a few times and saw that there was some fishy play. I decided to take a buy-in to the game. My first session I made $3000. $25/50 NL was a rollercoaster ride for me. I played $10/20 and $25/50 when the games were soft. $25/50 NL tended to play pretty tight. So I adapted once again with a very LAG style. When I ran well I made lots of money, and initially I did. My 18 vpip/13 pfr game worked... I made some insane reads, had good fortune, and saw my bankroll double. Then everything started going the other way. I had a my biggest loss ever, $38,000 in one day. Bad beat, after bad beat, after cooler. It was a bit demoralizing but I'd had big downswings before. I was playing good poker but these were sessions I was bound to lose. In 4 months I'd run my roll up from $10,000 to $180,000 and variance finally caught up with me.
When Party Poker shut down to U.S. players everyone panicked. Because I was underage I just wanted to get my money out. I paid 74% on the dollar and got the money in cash leaving myself a $16,500 roll to play with.
I entered senior year of High School. I had my friend deposit $5,000 for me on Pokerstars. In 3 weeks I ran it up to $28,000 playing $2/4 NL, $3/6 NL, a little $5/10 NL, and winning a $50+5 MTT for $6000. I still had my high stakes itch. I decided to give $25/50 on Stars a try. The results were bad. I lost $8000 before moving down. The play was a lot stronger than party $25/50 NL. I dropped back to $3/6 NL where in the next couple weeks I got the account back up to $30,000. I took a shot at $10/20 NL where I lost another $4000. I dropped to $5/10 NL had an upswing followed by a big downswing. I moved down to $3/6 NL and kept losing. I got so frustrated with cash games at this point that I decided to switch back to my old moneymaker sngs. I figured that I could make some consistent money in sngs even if it wasn't as much as I could from cash games. I stupidly played an $1000 hu sng, a $1000 sng, and several $500 sngs. Lets just say they went poorly. I decided to multi-table $100-$300 sngs. I played up to 16 sngs at a time. I lost and lost and lost. My good sessions were tiny wins, and my bad sessions lost me several thousand dollars at a time. I wanted to see if I could make the pace for supernova elite, but realized that sngs were no longer profitable. Over 1100 sngs I had a -6% roi and lost a little over $25,000. I had to re-deposit cash that I had pulled as profit and exchanged my fpps for cash. I made a little money back in cash games, and I vowed that I would never again abuse my bankroll. I would not try to make the big time faster than my bankroll allowed. If I was going to take a shot I would be strict about it. During this time I looked for ways to increase the bankroll, and one of those was poker coaching. I started small but over time got some rep and a few students. Since switching to Stars I had played 130,000 hands of cash netting $5000. This period was one of the most frustrating and toughest times for me. During this time though, I met John Anhalt who asked me to come in as a coach for his coaching site. I decided to get involved.
I finally started running good again. On April 15th I had two nice scores. I finished 2nd in a $24+2 for $1900. Later that day, I took 4th in the Sunday Mulligan $200+15 for $10,700. On April 22nd I won a WSOP package in a $200+15 double shootout for $12,000. This was a huge boost to the bankroll. Two days later I got 11th in the Full Tilt 1K Monday for $2800. I was pretty disappointed because I made an aggressive play with a big stack that ended up busting me. I shrugged it off and won $2000 in a $200+15 Bracelet Race. Though I was doing well in MTTs cash continued to go poorly. I saw my MTT profits shrink. On April 30th I won my second WSOP package in a $200+16 double shootout. I had a bankroll again
The same pattern continued... Cash still sucked. I had some good sessions, but mostly losing ones. I had several multi buy-in downswings. Luckily the same pattern of MTT success continued as well. I played the $200+15 rebuy on May 7th finishing 5th for $10,200. I was literally having a $10,000 + score a week. Over the next month I didn't get to play too much. I worked with some students, hung out a lot with friends, and developed content for my site. Cash still went bad. I would play and lose, I had moved up to $5/10 NL where several buy-in downswings really hurt my profit. I qualified for the Jun 17th $500+35 Main Event qualifier on FTP. I ended up winning a seat outlasting over 3000 people (top 138 paid) taking it down to win my 3rd 12K package. On Jun 29th I took down Fifty-Fifty on FTP for $9700. This brings us up to present day. I am looking forward to making a boatload of cash at Turningstone where I am playing the Empire series including the $5000 main event.
At TS I final tabled the 5K got 9th for $12700. I also took 3rd in the FTOPS 300r for 76K.
Since then I've won the 2nd chance on stars for 56K, took 2nd and 1st back to back in the 55K for 15K and 22k respectively.
I recently moved out to Newport Beach, and I'm now playing poker professionally. |
.
United Kingdom. Mar 29 2008 01:49. Posts 5635
