When it comes to poker, I'm an indirect product of the Moneymaker boom.
From 2001-2003 I was living in Neenah, Wisconsin, and I was as happy as I've ever been in my post-college life. After my initial job out of college fell through after only 6 months (the whole department was canned) and 6 months unemployed, I found a job with Kimberly-Clark doing HMI design for their infant care line, Wonderware programming for diaper machines. It was a good gig, actually. I worked 40 hours a week doing vital, varied work that I was good at, went home in the evenings and took nothing with me. I had a good, competent, laid-back boss and a manager who was almost as good at me at ping-pong, and with whom I got together twice a month to play. For three years I received embarrassingly positive performance evaluations and I know the upper management folks knew my name, and in a good way.
One indirect product of that relative happiness was that I was socializing with my coworkers, and I daresay they thought well of me. And so it was, in the wake of the televising of Moneymaker's improbably run in the 2003 WSOP Main Event, that a guy named Mike, who I barely knew, invited me to the weekly poker game that they were setting up, a $20 buy-in NLHE freezeout (though I would know none of these terms at the time). I had never played Hold'em before; I knew of it only through being a movie buff and seeing
Rounders, in addition to Moneymaker's run. And so of course I presented a nice fat source of soft money for the (relative) sharks in the game, and when I went busto that first night with TPNK against aces, I realized I was not very good at this game.
If you know me, you'll know I found that completely unfuckingacceptable.
And so I went out and bought a book; a silly ring-bound clearance rack poker book that focused on Limit Hold 'Em and advocated a pathetic, weak-tight style of "fit or fold" poker, but that nonetheless got me to understand what an intensely mathematical game poker really was. Having been an essentially lifelong video gamer, with a specialty in real-time strategy games (I actually interviewed for a game designer position in 2000, at Stainless Steel Studios, the company that made
Empire Earth - and my name is in its manual), many of the concepts of poker, such as putting the pressure on your opponent and putting them into a position of making a costly mistake - came naturally. (I'm by no means the first to make these comparisons, either; TillerMaN, a well-known high stakes pro and a blogger, was an RTS pro before he was a poker player, and one of the top Starcraft and Warcraft 3 players; I got to beat him around quite a bit at Warcraft 2 back when he was still an up-and-coming upstart and I was a grizzled vet). All that I lacked was the correct context to put it in, and this book provided enough context for the mathematical basis of poker that I came to the next week's game armed with a game that was several step changes ahead of where it had been.
That's not to say I was a pro overnight, or that I'm any kind of poker prodigy, but that jump put me well ahead of everyone else at that particular table, and for three out of the next four weeks, I won.
That gave me the bug in a big way, and suddenly I was downloading all of the poker software programs to give their play money a try. That was, of course, pathetically easy, and I quickly ran my 1,000 in starting money up to several million. Knowing full well you could play with real money on these sites, and being flush with cash as a young, single engineer, I decided that a $200 deposit would be a pittance.
I played a variety of games and inevitably overplayed my bankroll, going broke in a bad string of luck (even though I felt I was playing better than the tables). Another $200 was deposited, at pokerroom, and that $200 stuck around for a long time, thanks to a string of a couple of $20 SNG wins. Still, I just dabbled, and eventually lost it all back. When it came time to redeposit, I decided to go with PokerStars, and between there and Full Tilt, which I later joined, I've deposited a grand total of about $1,800 to online poker sites over five years (which, when you consider it, wouldn't be that expensive a hobby even if I'd lost it all, particularly since I do my playing these days on a $4,000 laptop).
In 2004, I made the fateful move down to Texas, a transfer with the company to one of their diaper plants. As discussed below, this is about where my life turned to shit, as I was essentially friendless and miserable at my workplace for the next three years. The only real positive side to the move was that the poker game down there was much more developed, with a set blinds schedule and two decks per table, a $20 buy-in, and a rotating crowd of about 25 or so players, any 15 or so of which being likely to show up on any given night.
It was efficient, and so was I. After busting out my first night on a cooler, I went on to win the "loser's table" $5 game to turn a net profit of $5 for the night, and was in the black from there on out, winning the next three weeks in a row. I read up on the online sites about specific hands, even posting a few, and was getting better every week. I kept a spreadsheet of my progress at the game, as well as notes on the players, and over the next three years, at that home game, I netted a profit of over $3,000. Now, that's not quite money to live on, but for a single weekly live $20 game, ain't that bad.
Online continued to be a struggle, though, and a constant reminder that I really wasn't quite that good at the game just yet. Mostly, my lesson was in tilt and in bankroll management, for whenever I came into a score, I'd immediately jump into a game for which I was neither rolled nor skilled enough, almost certainly to the delight of the regs at that level. I don't think I played
that badly, all told, but a two buy-in drop and I'd be back to non-baller status with three figures left in my account.
Still, I went for two years without having to redeposit, and indeed haven't deposited any money to any poker site in over three years.
All of which is the groundwork for what was ultimately a low-stakes casual player that had a decent understanding of the fundamentals of the game and a modest t-agg style, but that wasn't nearly successful enough to take any real shots of any sort.
When the job in Texas finally ended, I knew I would have no trouble finding another job and didn't work that hard to conserve money. My Full Tilt funds had dwindled down to about $82.40 (though my PokerStars account was healthy, at nearly $800), and I decided to hop onto Full Tilt one day to give my bankroll one last hurrah. I found a $11+R tournament that drew 528 entrants, with 769 rebuys and 276 add-ons. I contributed to exactly 6 of those rebuys and one of those add-ons, leaving my Full Tilt account at exactly $1.40.
I then proceeded to win the whole fucking thing, taking home a first prize of $3932.50. It was a hell of a final table, too, where I raced for my life and won no fewer than three times (including a memorable AQ vs. JJ hand where I rivered a steel wheel, a 5 high straight flush), and eventually gained a huge chip lead with an over-aggro lagtard went broke with T2 on a JJ5T board (I flopped trips with 9J).
And so, with my online bankroll larger than it's ever been, I decided to withdraw $2,000 of it to cover the expenses of all of my deposits, and let the rest ride. I practiced extremely poor bankroll management during this time and let that remaining $2k drift down to about $200 or so, taking shots in tournaments that were well above my pay grade and not keeping my game sharp with regular play.
And then the new job went to shit, and I found myself with about $400 total left in my online poker accounts.
And I decide to "go pro".
