Hey guys,
My name is Razvan, I’m from Romania and as you might have guessed from the title I’m an 18 year old (turned last month) who plays pokah. What you might find interesting is the story to how I got here (well, some of it), so I thought I’d share this with you. Hopefully, the story to follow will be just as enticing.
I’ve always been a really sporty guy, so I guess the competing drive arouse when I first started doing sports – karate first, then football.
Until the time I was 14 I was basically going every morning (and sometimes afternoons as well) to the football training grounds and worked my ass off. It felt pretty exhausting but I was enjoying it so I never considered any other option for my future other than becoming a badass pro football player.
It was all about to change when I turned 14, though. To begin with, I got my first injuries, and they weren’t very soft (knee problems basically) and when I returned to training I felt very weak, drank A TON (over 5l/day) of water and was pissing every 10-15min tops. On top of that, I was getting constant muscle cramps every time I had to run, or do anything physically demanding. After about a week of that, I decided to finally see a doctor about it. Sure enough, he gave me a bulletin of analyses I had to do.
Among those was the glycemic test, where they found the level to be 5 times the normal healthy level. Obviously that meant only one thing, and that was diabetes. To this day, I do not know what caused it. It couldn’t have been genealogical as no one in my family has had trouble with diabetes in the past. The best guess is that it was a hormonal dysfunction combined with going through puberty at the time.
I wasn’t scared in the first place, because I just thought I’d have to take a couple of pills a day for the rest of my life and that didn’t give me much trouble. It turned out it was Type 1 insulin-dependant diabetes though, the type where you have to inject yourself with insulin every time you have an important meal and once at night before going to sleep. That scared me shitless. If that wasn’t enough, doctors told me I’d have to avoid any kind of sport that may cause exhaustion/tiredness on a frequent basis. Although I was very disappointed I had wasted a ton of time working at something I wasn’t going to see the results like ever, I kind of understood the situation and decided to call it quits with football and focused more on my health, rather than my future occupation (or so I thought). At first it seemed hard, but diabetes isn’t the type of illness that you have to control tirelessly, but rather keep at bay. It’s pretty easy to manage once you get the hang of it, actually.
For the next couple of years I was just trying to maintain a good, healthy lifestyle and not 'tire myself out'.
Around this time, in my classroom a card game was getting popular, poker. Some 5card draw in the beginning, but mostly Texas NLHE. I have to note that me and my classmates were absolute degenerates, playing dice and a ton of card games in general during breaks. This NLHE game was more appealing though, as I had seen some WPT (or WSOP, can’t remember) episodes on TV a very long time ago, so when it first got popular at school, I thought I was the baws. It took about 1 week to have people convince me that A2 two-pair kind of hand is better than KQ two-pair kind of hand. My mindset was something along the lines of ‘lol K is 2nd highest card and Q is 3rd highest, while A is first but 2 is lowest, gtfo’. Not to mention that in the first year or so, everyone invented rules along the way (like f.e. a 34567r board where someone had T9 and the other AQ, they would never chop because the kicker of the straight of the AQ was obv bigger so he shipped the pot). The rules were pretty hilarious now that I think of them, but you can’t expect much from a few people playing 15-20bb stack sng’s (we obviously called them tournaments, even though there were never more than 10-12 people playing. In the beginning especially, there were 4 of us playing everyday a couple of ‘tournaments’).
I was more of an internet geek having played internet games (MMO’s especially) so it didn’t take long for me to find freerolls online. The thought of someone putting up money for other people to play for didn’t make any sense to me whatsoever, but still, I would’ve had to be dumb not to try it. Sure enough, the freerolls seemed more and more catchy and I managed to make a bit of $ as well.
The rest of my poker story was swingy, eventful, but at the same time, semi-illegal, so I won't go into much detail. I basically grinded my way up from the lowest limits to playing up to nl1k (only about 200hands in which I lost a bit).
Right now, I play nl200sh as I've just had a horrible 2month losing streak at higher limits but I'm not very far from being rolled for nl400. I hope to shoot nl1k by the end of the summer again and hopefully stabilise there.
What you can expect from this blog is weekly updates, probably on Sundays because it’s basically the most boring day of the week, where I’ll ‘review’ my last week in poker (mostly), with an interesting hand that occurred that week with my full and adequate thought process. Also, as you might have noticed from the first part of the post, I’m a big metal fan so you can expect every new update to be accompanied by an awesome song from bands such as: Children of Bodom, Gojira, Pantera, Megadeth, Metallica, Anthrax, Slayer, Opeth, In flames, Ensiferum, Iron Maiden, Alice in Chains, Danzig, Sabaton, Rammstein and others (in no particular order).
What I hope to achieve by creating this blog is to meet other poker playing people, make acquaintances along the way, and share my experiences/expertise where it’s suited for me to do so. Also, I think it would be pretty nice in a few years time to look back and see how much I've grown/stagnated/regressed in thinking, writing and mindset-wise.
Well that's it for the intro guys, hope to be back with an update soon 
Cheers,
Deliver.
