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My Poker Story |
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rnbsalsa88 United States. Jul 24 2007 02:17. Posts 821 | | |
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 pla<x>yers 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 pla<x>yer. Most pla<x>yers 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 st<x>yle adapting to the loose pla<x>yers 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 st<x>yle. 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. pla<x>yers 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 the website PokerZion. I had thought of making my own coaching site I was perplexed. It sounded like an exciting business opportunity.
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 PokerZion. 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.
Russell "Loosefer" Blattberg
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ggplz Sweden. Jul 24 2007 02:45. Posts 16784 | | | |
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| if poker is dangerous to them i would rank sports betting as a Kodiak grizzly bear who smells blood after you just threw a javelin into his cub - RaiNKhAN | |
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Verbloten Australia. Jul 24 2007 03:59. Posts 1889 | | |
nice read - stick with mtts mate i reckon you are gonna kick arse with them. gotta find your thing - if cash isn't profitable and you enjoy blazing the sngs and mtts then stick with that. i'll write more later - i gotta go put the boy to bed |
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Baalim Mexico. Jul 24 2007 05:07. Posts 34305 | | |
interesting read, u were quite lucky at the beggining |
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| Ex-PokerStars Team Pro Online | |
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Siro Australia. Jul 24 2007 05:45. Posts 1540 | | | |
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XeliN United Kingdom. Jul 24 2007 07:54. Posts 2365 | | |
yeh very interesting read and GL at turningstone |
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| Steal City: if u want to get good at sex u need to read books. Its just like poker, u need to read | |
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sooon2b United States. Jul 24 2007 08:37. Posts 774 | | |
TS is gonna be SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICK. fun read, even though weve been friends for most of your poker career. hopefully well both go very robusto at TS  |
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| http://sooon2b.liquidpoker.net/ | |
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