OK, so after a long deliberation whether I should start my own blog, I came to a conclusion that there's probably not much point, since every man and his dog have a blog nowadays. But I'm a stubborn fucker, so I'm gonna do it anyway. If noone reads it, at least I can reflect on something later.
So the next bit, I guess, is the bit where you write how you became addicted to poker. Well, pretty fucking easy. Someone I knew from when I was little was fucking about playing play money fix limit and he suggested I try. So I did. Fucking loved it! In fact, I don't think I had as much fun playing poker as I did then. Later on I switched to no limit (still play money), built up the bankroll, and decided I was good enough to play real cash. Bad idea. At the time anyway. I think I spent about a year pissing my money up the wall playing cash games.Never heard about Pokerstrategy at that point, so I was picking up bits and bops from various sites, until I decided to invest in Harrington's books.
Worked out quite well acutally. I was still playing cash (and losing), but also started playing some tourneys. The big break came when I came second in $5 MTT on Pokerstars. Ater that I figured, that I might as well start specialising in something specific. So I chose 9-man STTs, since they were something I was making the most money on.
I discovered Pokerstrategy, switched to FullTilt, invested in SNGWiz, and started studying the game with quite decent results. Eventually I managed to build my roll to about $7k, moving from $10s to $20s and $30s. Looking back, all to good luck, actually.
At the time I had a full time job, being a bookies manager. It was an OK job, which was paying the bills, untill the recession kicked in. The company decided it was a good time to take the piss out of the workforce, by freezing the pay, stopping most benefits, suh as double pay on Sundays and bank holidays. On the top of that they required increased work effort from everyone and that was the straw that broke the camel's back.
Not being the one who enjoys being told what to do by some prick who sits in the office and being drunk by my recent succeses, I decided to to stick the middle finger to the management and go "pro". So in June last year I quit my job, went on a stag do in Benidorm, got back and got the bad fucking news. FullTilt is no more. My poker career finished before it even started.
But pirates don't give up, right? Titan with the help of Pokerstrategy were good enough to give me $400. So I dipped into my savings, made a £600 deposit and started grinding there. Saying I underestimated my skill is a fucking understatement. I've no idea how (possibly to a soft field), but I managed to make enough money to pay the bills. They had quite a generous rake back system as well, so that was good enough at the time.
Not sure why (possibly due to this fucking recession), but it became harder and harder to find $20$ tourneys, nevermind $30s and grinding a mixture of $5s, $10s and occasioanally $20s wasn't quite cutting it for me. So despite everyone saying that Pokerstars were reg-infested last month I moved back there.
What can I say.. Yeah, they are. So table select. And study loads. So at the moment I'm playing a mixture of $15s and $30s and running pretty hot. Time will tell if I can actually beat the limit for enough to live on, but I'm being optimistic, which is unusual for a sceptic cunt like me.
OK, I'm boring myself now, so I better call it a night. I'll do an update of the month soon. Peace out!
J
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