gobbo + one year of pokering = winnar.

Someone on 2+2 asked me recently to post how I got started in poker and how things have happened since then. I won't be totally accurate in numbers or dates, so just believe in the general idea (general idea: I'm awesome).

Okay, so I first started playing back in early 2005. I was a pretty big participant in Magic the Gathering and most of my friends were too. Slowly but surely, most of them stopped playing magic and moved over to poker. I was getting bored as hell and decided to play too. It was either February or March. Two of my friends started up an affiliate program (ducktherake.com) and one of them offered to teach me how to play poker for free. Being the lonely guy that I am, I decided to do it.

I started out at .5/1 ring games off a 'bankroll' of bonuses and my friend staking me. I was terrible. But I won $15 my first session and thought this was the greatest thing I've ever seen. I had a lot of trouble playing just one table since I was so impatient. But eventually I was off on my own once I got the basics down.

So I had a $300 bankroll playing two tables of .5/1. I had poker tracker and a heads up display tool. That's it. At this point, I posted very very few things on 2+2 and never read other posts. I was in the micro limits. You can probably dredge up a few of my early posts there. This is about april of 2005.

So I went nuts. I started playing limit $5 sng's on party having absolutely no clue how to do them. But it was fun! I punted my bankroll completely down to like $20 and then worked it up playing SNG's I had something like 4 buyins for. It was terrible. And so was I.

A week or so later, BUSTO. I hated myself. I guess poker wasn't for me. I told myself I was done.

Except that I'm a degenerate addict, so I put $50 there to start playing .5/1 again. I went on a ridiculous rush and built that up to $280 in one night. From then on, I worked my way up the limits and never took a big risk again. Hurray!

Wait a minute, no I didn't!

So I punted my bankroll down to $120 playing .5/1 the next day and decided to play in a $20 MTT. From some ridiculous run of luck, I get 2nd in it for $3500. I was on top of the freaking world. I had never seen that kind of money before, and it was ALLLLLLLLLL MINE. So I started playing 2/4 limit and $20 mtt's. I still sucked. I reaaaally sucked. So I punted all that money down to like $600 when I finally started getting better. This is about when I started college, and I played a lot more poker than I did school work. I moved about $10 over to pokerstars to have fun with and try to get better at mtt's. I stopped playing limit and just played those. I would play a $5 mtt or a few $3 ones and lost them, then I would rebuild the money by playing in the 45 man $1 sng's. Those things were a goldmine for me at the time.

You can track my progress in the small mtt's from thepokerdb.com. I really sucked, but somehow I started doing well. I started learning from my mistakes and kicking ass while taking names and such. I finally got a big 'win' from an mtt and decided that mtt's were for me and would focus on them.

So, in the middle of all this, my grades were slipping and I wasn't really trying in college. I won a few tournaments (mostly the small rebuys and PLO tournaments) and just kept playing more and more poker and posting on 2+2. I finally won the 3r on stars to get my bankroll over $6k and after that I was basically set to go on a run. Sometimes things have been tough, but overall it's been a great experience. I dropped out this semester to hang out and play poker, and I might go back later if things don't work very well. After last night, I'm feeling good about things.

So that's basically it. I'm a lucky fish who somehow has lots and lots of mobneys now. I have tons of time to improve and hope things go as well as they have before. Have a good one, yo. I'll answer most questions that are directed at me.