In 2005, I was a senior in high school, a competitive athlete in three sports, and an honor roll student with a 85% average with an aspiration to one day be a top level executive at a major consulting firm. Until I met poker. Not to say that poker caused me to give up my goals, aspirations, or activities, but it certainly reshaped what I enjoy in life. To me, poker had it all. It was a socialable game with friends, extremely competitive, and after all the chips were racked up, there was potential to leave with some money.

From 2005 to 2008, my poker playing was carried out in friend’s dorm rooms where no one knew anything about hand ranges, expected value, and some were even still forgetting if a flush beat a straight. But in 2008, my local casino in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada opened a poker room. With the few hundred dollars I had won off my friends, I went to the casino one Friday evening expecting to crush a much larger game and return to my friends with stories of great riches to be made.

Since my first session, I’m sure I’ve sat down at a poker table thousands of times and have forgotten the details of countless hands. But I can remember my very first session ever playing poker in a casino as if it were yesterday. I was completely lost. Players were incredibly aggressive and ready to gamble. It wasn’t as socialable as my home game with friends, and the pace of the game was much faster. After sitting at the table for 3 hours and folding, I finally was dealt 9♥9♠ and bet the AT8 flop, J turn and 8 river, effectively turning my hand into a bluff. As a novice player, I was surprised when my opponent flipped over his AQ and collected the remainder of my chips. Other players at the table smirked at me as they witnessed, yet again, a novice player losing all their money at the poker table. As I was walking away, I heard the player who won my chips comment to his friend, “I don’t know what he was thinking.”

I went home that night with my tail between my legs, but that experience lit a competitive fire deep within me. I hated the way the experienced players labeled me a class below them and I was determined to get better. I spent the next few months reading up on poker literature and experimenting with what I had learned online. I began crushing my regular home games to the point I began actively seeking out other games to get invited to. Needless to say, my grades in University fell to around a C+ average where it remained for the rest of my University career. But that didn’t matter. School wasn’t my passion – it certainly wasn’t something I enjoyed – playing poker was what I wanted to do.

I eventually went back to the casino and combined my newly acquired knowledge with a bit of run good, I was able to win consecutive sessions. Jump to three years later and I am graduating University with a Bachelor of Commerce degree with a concentration in Managing People and Organizations, I have a steady part-time job, travelled around many parts of North America to play poker (currently have played over 65 different casinos), and have established myself as an aggressive, winning player at 1/2NL and more recently 2/5NL.

But while poker afforded me luxuries most students do without – always having money to buy beer, to party, to go out to expensive dinners or to travel – being a student also gave me an excuse. Whenever people asked me what I was doing with my life, I’d just reply I was a student, and then my friend, relative, or acquaintance would smile, nod, and wish me luck with my studies. But now, I’m stuck at a crossroads and don’t know what I want to do. When people now ask me what I am doing, should I reply that I’m a part-time sales employee who is making no use of their recently attained degree? Or do I reply that I am barely supporting myself through low stakes poker? Neither answer impresses anyone, nor myself. So I knew something needed to change, I either need to drop poker and focus more on my profession, or to rise up in the stakes I am playing in order to supplement my income enough that I am satisfied with my lifestyle.
Queue Stu and “Sad Panda”, two friends of mine who were starting a gambling website detailing their adventures and discussing their day-to-day gambling successes (or failures). They mentioned this site to me and I saw it as an opportunity to become more accountable, more focused, and more successful at what I was doing. I would begin blogging once or twice a week with how I am doing in poker and how much closer I am to reaching my goal of eventually making 5/10NL my main game before hopefully taking shots at even higher stakes. Knowing that other people are reading and hopefully rooting for me will help me stay clear of the many vices that face poker players – playing games like blackjack when on tilt, spewing away chips when too aggressive, or playing poker when tired, unfocused, or inebriated.

So this will be my story from July 2012 until January 1st 2013 when I reevaluate how I have done over the last 6 months and assess if poker should become my sole source of income, or to begin playing the game more recreationally and focusing more on my profession. My goal by the end of this year will be to have played around 10-15 hours a week with an average hourly rate of $25. I’ll be jumping up to 2/5NL when the games look good and thus hopefully greatly exceed my hourly expectation. My secondary goal is to travel more and use poker to finance these excursions. I’ve been to Las Vegas 5 times, Atlantic City twice, and Montreal too many times to count, all with the intention of taking in the sights and sounds during the day, and spending my nights grinding away. Hello, my name is Paul, and this will be my story.

If you like what you're reading, send me a message and I'll keep posting my updates. All of these updates are taken from my blog site:

http://www.thebrokenchip.com/author/paul/