Junior year of college is when I began my so-called path towards becoming a professional poker player. In college, friends and I always would play home games with buy-ins not much more than five dollars, and if we wanted to gamble, we would play for ten dollars each (you were allowed to re-buy, but we were all way too poor for this option).

My first foray into online poker was in freerolls where there was a potential to win $10. After about 5 million tournaments, I finally won the $10 – which I promptly lost after a heavy night of partying and way too much to drink. On Thursdays, we would continue our home games, which I would occasionally win, and, like many in college, that would be my beer money for the weekend. It would also hopefully be enough for my buy-in next week if I didn’t blow it on late night delivery food.

Between junior and senior year, I primarily partied with friends and worked. More and more I found myself thinking and talking about poker with some friends that were almost as serious as I was about the game. Right around the beginning of my senior year of school, a friend and I had some extra money to burn, so we both opened up accounts on Party Poker. I believe my first deposit on Party was something like 50 dollars, which I promptly blew on cash games that were over my head.

Come Thanksgiving, a friend I knew was placing sports bets on Bodog’s sports book. He knew I liked playing online cards, so he talked me into putting some cash into the site, which got him a referral bonus. I threw in something like 20 dollars, got a bonus, and put it on .25/.50 NL – won a lot then lost it all back. This vicious circle kept going until I eventually built a roll by placing second in one of the earlier 25k tourneys. This cash gave me about a roll of 4k.

Living in Delaware gave me the opportunity to make the trek to Atlantic City a few times a month. Just turning 21, I was ambitious and ready to play, and I decided that I would play 2/4 limit for the first time. Not knowing much about that game, I learned never to play it in any casino in A.C. Basically, it is a bunch of old people that don’t want to play slots and come down and call every bet all the way to the river for whatever card they need. I hated it and vowed never to go back to A.C and play it again. The next week, though, the bug hit, and I wanted to go back to A.C. Through talking to a few friends from my home game, I learned about 1/2 NL. I never turned back. That was my game. I beat it a few times in the casino, and I figured I’d give it a try online.

Three tabling 1/2 NL (yes I know this is poor bank roll management; I was young and stupid) and working constantly so I could go out drinking left little time for school, as you could imagine. During this time, I wasn’t taking many classes, but for the most part I really didn’t like going to school. I stopped going. *Now I am not advocating quitting school by any means; it really just wasn’t for me.* The first 3 years of college were probably the greatest of my life. I now have the greatest group of friends, and I have memories (or lack there of) because I decided to go to school. As a person, you will grow up a lot quicker by going off to school then by staying in your room and playing cards for 12 hours a day. Socially, it is a great experience, and if you are about to leave high school and think you are making a ton of money from playing, think about the other things you will miss. Frat parties, doing keg stands, not remembering nights until someone wakes you up on the bathroom floor, etc. are all life changing experiences that I think everyone should go through. If this doesn’t make you want to go to college, go visit a campus, and you will see some of the most gorgeous girls you will ever lay your eyes on.

Ok, sorry about the tangent. Well, I was a winning player keeping a small bank roll online and on occasion withdrawing some funds for rent and drinking. I did have somewhat of a tilt problem in the beginning of my poker career when playing cash games. I would lose a lot of my bankroll, and at this point I got sick of playing cash games. So with my great bank roll management skills, I began to play the highest limit sit-n-go’s available on Bodog at the time. I would consistently beat this game to turn a decent profit, but not what I was used to making by playing 1/2 NL. I turned back to cash games to keep my profit margin up, and I began to focus myself on multi-table tournament strategy. Bodog was the greatest place to learn how to play tournaments successfully. They had great guarantees for very small buy-ins and very small fields to go through. This is when I began to sharpen my skills on m.t.t’s.

At very first I was not profitable; I did have some nice scores to build my bankroll, but those did not come easily. I had to play many tourneys to understand certain situations and learn how to play those situations to my advantage. One day, as I was lying around a friend’s apartment, I came across the book, “Making the Final Table,” by Erik Lindgren. I read it, and it changed the whole way I looked at playing tourneys. The main thing I took from the book was chip accumulation instead of surviving. In lower limit cash games that I was accustomed to, winning chips is of course important, but it isn’t necessary for you to stay alive, and thus you do not have to take as many chances to increase your chip stack. In tournaments, this is the exact opposite. You must take chances, you need to steal, and you need to gamble to have the advantage going deeper into a tourney. Although this seems like a pretty basic principle, it changed my outlook on tournaments. I took more risks, and I could see the results quickly. I no longer cared about bubbling. The only thing I cared about was playing for the top spot; to me there was no other place but first place.

Fast forward to a year later. After I started playing more and more seriously, I began to turn a pretty good profit in multi-tables. I was only making about 400 dollars a week at my current job, which sucked. I had to wake up early on Saturdays and Sundays, and I hated that also. It took away from my social life as well as playing some of the larger events online. At this time, I was making a good $600 a week from poker, and that was only part time. I consulted with a few friends and asked them what I should do. Most said go for it, but some of the best advice I had gotten was a friend who said why not take the chance – it’s not like you can’t get a retail job ever again. *Again I am not advising this. This was the right decision for ME.* With that, I began my online poker career.

Hope you enjoyed reading. The second part will focus on how I began playing the larger tourneys and what I learned when living in Vegas this summer at the Bodog house.