I’m sure many of you know me by now from P5’s or have played with me at the tables on one of three sites (UB, Party, Stars). I am the first one to admit many times my antics and words are out of control, unwarranted, and many times funny (as I’ve been told numerous times). My chat being revoked three times on UB and once on Stars proves my antics. If any of you ever met me in person, you would see that I am quite the opposite… mild mannered, love to go out and live it up and just like to have fun. Poker is my absolute passion, and when I’m at the table, it’s almost as if I am in another world, another person, a rabid beast, and a time bomb waiting to explode. <READMORE>

This articles’s purpose is simply to give hope. Hope to myself in my future endeavors with the game, and hope to others who want to reach a certain level in the game (skill wise and becoming a winning player). I’m not going to talk about strategy, or bankroll management or any of that stuff. With this said… Here is the Smutman’s Story.

I picked up the game a little over two years ago which is right around the time I’m sure a lot of you did. The “Moneymaker Boom” as I like to call it in 2003 spurted me to pick up the game. I was still in college and would play nickel, dime, quarter games with my buddies and drink beers and have fun. Before my senior year ended at college, I downloaded the UB software. A buddy back in Jersey told me about it and I thought I would give it a try. Not long after that, I was hooked. Granted I was only playing for play money, but I still could feel the rush from it that I had never experienced in my life. Flopping the nuts, having someone betting into me all the way to river (even it was for play money) was better than sex. I just couldn’t get enough of the action.

Soon after college ended, I went home to Jersey for the summer and made my first deposit for REAL money. Yeah, it was only $50 but the fact that I was now “gambling” with real money was exciting and scary at the same time. I started out playing $.50-$1 and lost my $50 in a matter of about 20 minutes. I had never felt so distraught in my life. Because of my addictive personality, I punched in that debit card number and pin on the deposit screen again and went through another $50…. Then another $50…. then another $50. So basically after my first day of playing REAL poker online I went through $200. For someone who was not working and just wanted to hang out for the summer, this was a lot of freggin money. As the summer progressed, I had my winning sessions, many more losing sessions and jumped up to $2-$4 although this probably wasn’t the smart thing to do because of my lack of bankroll. By the end of the summer before I started my new job in September, I was down around $2,000. I did have to end up picking up a part time job at a driving range near my house working the cash register and driving the truck to pick up the balls to pay for my poker habit. Although I was losing money, my passion for the game was like nothing I experienced in my life. Yes, it was a negative thing in my life as far as the money, but even though I was losing money it wasn’t hindering the fact that I was enjoying playing so much. It was a way to get away from the parents, the girlfriend, and every other thing in my life, and for me it was my getaway. Throughout this whole process, I felt as if I was “paying my dues”.
I started working fulltime September 15, 2003 and was making a good chunk of change as a tax accountant. When I received my first check along with a signing bonus, it was the most money I had held in my hand in my life. I went right to the bank, cashed it, and a few days later… you guessed it… right to UB. Now that I had this much cash I said to myself… alright, I know I’m a better player than I was three months ago, I have experience and I need to win back this money I lost at the tables over the summer. I had heard at the time that the higher the limit, the less donkeys, and the less people will suck out on me so my premium hands will hold up more!!! Therefore, I split time between 3-6 and 5-10 and actually to my surprise… I started doing alright. I made about a grand in a month’s time and felt like I was on top of the poker world!! Then it happened. A buddy of mine (who was the one who started me on UB in the first place) called me up and said “Dude you’re never going to believe this, I just won $750 in one sitting”. In response I said “I need some of that action, where is it at??!?!?!?!” He replied… 10-20 on UB.

I sat down at my first 10-20 table on UB around November of 2003. Looking back now in the position I am in, I wouldn’t trade it for the world because it is a time of my life where I don’t want to go back to again. After about a year playing 10-20 and losing hundreds, and then moving up to 30-60 and trying to win those hundreds back, I ended up losing thousands. I basically became a person who was living paycheck to paycheck, had no savings and was blowing ever last cent I had on online poker. I can remember two times specifically where I reached my max deposit for the day on UB which is a scary thought in itself ($2,000). There were days where I did not want to get out of bed, go to work, and felt depressed and miserable. Looking back on it now, I definitely was depressed for about a year…. And it was because of the thing I loved. Poker.

Unlike most losing players, I kept track of everything, my wins and ALL of my losses. On November 15, 2004 I’ll never forget looking at my excel spreadsheet and seeing a negative red $11,000 staring me right back in the face and laughing it’s ass off at me. Yes, in a little over a year’s time I had lost $11,000. At this time I said to myself, I love this game too much to quit (which I thought about many times) and I need to revamp it somehow. The one thing I knew that I was not doing which friends of mine were doing was reading, talking about hand histories, and basically learning from each other and constantly trying to get better. At this time I thought I knew a good amount about the game just by playing and learning different types of situations (when to bet, when to fold etc.). But in reality, I didn’t know crap in the whole big picture of poker. At work that day, I struck up a conversation with a guy I knew who played. We started talking about poker and I’ll never forget saying to him, “So what type of hands do you like to play”? And his reply was, “Well you see.. It depends on your position, your image at the table, the image you have of others, if anyone opened for a raise in front, if you are the first one in the pot, etc. So, I guess it varies. I do love Aces though”! After hearing this, my mouth dropped. POSITION!!! What the hell is that?? IMAGE!!! What the hell does that matter!?!? I knew that I liked to play any pocket pair, suited connectors and high cards. I had my work cut out to me and my quest to become a winning player had started.

After work that day, I went to the book store, and bought Super System which is the book everyone talked about, and Sklanksy’s Hold Em Poker. I read both of them within the next week… on the train to and from work, all night every night and in the morning before work. These books made me a better player and it planted the seed in my poker mind about concepts you hear all the time... pot odds, implied odds, check raising, delayed bluff etc. When I bought these books, I became a student of the game.

All of us as poker players need to know our limits and boundaries (not only in poker but in life as well). Because of watching the WSOP and the WPT, I wanted to become a No Limit Tournament Player. I did not want to play limit hold em anymore for any stakes because frankly, I was losing money at it and it was not as exciting as the few times I had played no limit previously. I was not interested in No Limit cash games because of my bankroll issues (There was $10.89 left in my account) and wanted to focus on tournaments and sit and go’s specifically. This is when things started to change for the better.

I played my first $5 sit and go and to my surprise finished second. Granted it was only $15, but I had doubled my bankroll. Comparable to what Gidders has done in his sit and go quest (which I feel is awesome by the way), I did the same thing for myself when I built my bankroll. I gradually moved up to the $10 ones and $20 ones and continued to study books, articles, television, talking with others and doing anything else I could get my arms around poker related. I basically became a poker sponge for knowledge about the game. I’ll never forget the night that proved to me that I actually can be successful at this game at, even if it is only for a source if supplemental income and my getaway. It was the Friday after Thanksgiving 2004 and it was back when UB ran its rebuy tourneys. I decided to enter a $5.50 rebuy tourney for the hell of it starting at 10 p.m. To my surprise, 1,295 people entered it. 6 hours later I was at the final table with a stack of $300K with the big stack of $2.1M wide awake even though it was 4 a.m. because to me…. This was the greatest accomplishment in my poker life. After about an hour of grinding away, I was heads up with the big stack at the start of the final. I checked the tourney lobby to see what first was paying and I almost shit my pants when I saw it was $5,500. We went back and forth for about 10 minutes and I picked up big slick in the small blind. With a weak min raise by me and a push all in from my opponent I called in an instant and my slick held up against his A-10. I yelled and gave about 4,578,272,393 fist pumps when the last pot was raked into my virtual chair, and it said Congratulations BCSmut33, you have won the tournament and $5,500.

Over the course of the next year, I’ve had some nice cashes in tourneys, including a $6,000 hit in the $200+15 on UB which I satellited into back in June. I’ve won four tournaments over the year and have 38 final tables across multiple sites. I’ve done very well in sit and go’s and have used this money to fund my MTT play when I am not cashing. I would love to play all day everyday but I feel I get a lot of action in for someone who works a 60-70 hour a week job 6 months out of the year and 40-50 the rest. Even writing this right now I am in total and complete jubilation because I am up a little over $16,000 over the last year ($5,000 for my poker career) and am now a winning player.

The point of this article is to show that even those times when you feel like you are in the dumpster and don’t want to go on with your poker life anymore, there is hope. I had hope and through continuous study, learning the game, getting feedback from others, and giving feedback when others want mine, I have become a completely different player and love where I am at right now in my game. Are there those times where I still go on complete TILT? Of course there are and it even happened last week. All I have to do though is think about where I was a year ago and look at my spreadsheet which says + $16K for the year, and I get over it and back on my game pretty quickly. The Smutman’s final words are: Know your limitations, and constantly try to improve your game. Once you’ve found that part of your game that you can excel in, focus on that whether it is for income, pleasure, or both. I’ve never been happier in my poker life and this last year has been one smutty rollercoaster to say the least. Thanks for reading and good luck to all of you.
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