For most the final weeks of the year mean holidays such as Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanza, a New Year, etc. Most meaningful to some is time away from the office, job site, or classroom. Others relish the opportunity to spend time with friends and loved ones. While I do fall under most of these categories, there is also a less understood niche I find myself in this time of year. What I am referring to is the large amounts of down time to spend at the tables. When working a full time job it can be very challenging to find the time to play poker, especially for a tournament player like myself. As you probably know, poker tournaments can be very time consuming.

So at this moment I am currently spending a week at my mother and father in laws house to celebrate Christmas. I live in Palm Beach, FL so coming out to Nebraska is a major change in climate for me. As you can imagine, most of my time is spent indoors here and thus I am gravitated to the poker tables. Not to say that I skip or miss out on any of the planned family activities, but when I do have time to kill, it is spent at the virtual felt. Also, this season my wife and I are in the process of buying a house and thus I am completely focused on putting together as much money as possible this holiday break.

Let me share with you a little about my poker background. I have been playing since I was probably 7 or 8 with my parents and their friends. We played nickel, dime, quarter and yes we actually used nickels, dimes, and quarters as most of you who played before the Moneymaker craze probably did at some point as well. I am 26 now and have been playing online since the summer of 2004. I started on Party Poker playing $10-$20 sngos and had absolutely no clue what I was doing. For instance, A8 was my favorite hand for some reason or another (I know that says enough right there) and I would do everything in my power to get it allin preflop with that A8 every chance I got. So after a couple of deposits, I realized I am not as good as I thought. I started looking around online to find advice, tips, whatever I could to improve my game. At that time there was very little information online compared to now unless you were an avid member of the few poker forums that existed at that time.

So I decided to treat poker as if it were one of my college classes. I would get books, read and study them and apply what I learned at the tables. The first book I bought was Doyle’s Supersystem. It really showed me how little I knew about the game. Since that time I have probably read 20+ poker books and have learned from all of them, even the one’s I would not recommend. I was consumed by poker in my free time because I saw how much money was to be made and I absolutely loved learning and improving my game. I am a very competitive person by nature and also very driven when I want to succeed at something. However, I was a fulltime engineering student and worked about 20 hours a week at a sandwich shop. So I was already getting behind those who were devoting every waking hour to poker. I just didn’t have the time to spend on poker to really become great. I did make a steady profit throughout college and was able to supplement much of my costs at the time by playing poker.

Let me get back to the idea of playing over during vacation/holiday time. Most people don’t understand why I would want to spend my vacation time staring at a computer screen for hours a day. Many questions are raised: “How do you sit in front of that screen like that?”, “Do you actually make any money?”, “How is the gambling going?”. Questions like the first two I can handle, but the latter really eats at me. I know poker is gambling, but with all of the time studying, improving, and hard work that I have put into I don’t see at as gambling anymore at all. Granted you are hardly ever getting your money in with a 100% chance of winning, but after playing tens of thousands of games and hundreds of thousands of hands and seeing a steady ROI it just starts to feel like investing rather than gambling. Society rarely refers to stock market investors as gamblers; they are referred to as investors because they use the information available to them to make the most optimal decisions possible. But isn’t that what a good thinking poker player does? Well I look at poker as an investment in myself. The more information I can obtain, the better decisions I will be able to make. This blog is intended to allow me to get my ideas, thoughts, frustrations, and poker progress on paper to hopefully make me a better player and a better person.

Thanks for reading.

Here are my screennames in case you are interested in following my progress along with the blog.

Cake Poker(PlayersOnly): GAMB000000L or GAMB0000000L (for now)

Full Tilt Poker: Tuan Hon

PokerStars: Stephnay

PocketFives: Stephnay