4th grade 5 card draw. i picked up holdem after moneymaker won in wsop 03. i still suck to this day

I've always been a gambler, mostly sportsbetting, but always found Poker fascinating. Only problem was I didn't know the rules. I never had a job until I was 18, so I pretty much earned money through sports betting when I was in High School. Soon after I turned 18 I read a big article in a Danish newspaper about poker and thought I'd try it out and I deposited like €35 into a site and started playing NL50. So much for bankroll... :o)

Went broke alot of times, surprisingly, and I once wrote the support and moaned about their software having flaws. I lost to a pair when I had a Q K A 2 3 straight. WTF!? 21 now and I've gotten a little better. At least I know the rules now. Or most of them.

The details of my life are quite inconsequential... very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds- pretty standard really. At the age of twelve I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum... it's breathtaking- I highly suggest you try it.

Started in JAIL !!!!

I was a clown (yes, an actual clown...juggling and all) my senior year in high school. I started doing some real basic magic tricks and discovered card tricks too. Then I discovered marked cards and shaved/tapered decks and my buddy Kevin and I came to the conclusion that we could rig a game of strip poker with a couple of girls who seemed willing. So we had to learn how to play poker fast before the girls chickened out! 2 weeks later...."I got a full house...let's see 'yer boobies!"

And who says poker is just for degenerates!

I actually just wrote this for my blog. It's a little long, forgive me...

I was fifteen years old or just about to turn sixteen, I can't remember. I was sitting with a friend of mine in the cafeteria of my high school. A group of kids were playing hold'em, all though at the time I didn't know they called it that. My Mom's boyfriend at home watched it on TV but I never watched with him. I didn't really understand the allure till I asked if I could play.

They were playing for money, but it was all on credit. You simply announced "I bet a dollar" if you wanted to bet. I don't know what I would've done had I lost, because I was pretty broke, even for a teenager. I was always the kid who couldn't go to movies with his friends because there wasn't five bucks in the family to spare. I was always the kid who had to beg for financial aid on field trips in high school. I was always the kid everybody else's family was semi-taking care of, and I hated it.

Anyways, by some act of God, I won. Early on I really didn't understand much but it seemed like it was simple to beat these kids. I saw a lot of flops for cheap and when I thought I had a good hand I just kept betting it. It sounds stupid but the six dollars I made that day was huge to me.

Every day at school after that I would play with these guys, and soon they all became my friends. This was also huge to me. I was a real geek in high school and pretty shy. At first, I won a lot, because we played with a lot of people who had no idea what they were doing. I spent it on stupid things I always wanted to get but couldn't get because I didn't have the money. Anyways, the fish left the pond and the inevitable downswing happened, but I kept playing through it.

Soon, I found out there was a home game in my area. I went there and kept winning there. Now this was big money to me, almost fifty whole dollars when I had a winning session. Then this one guy showed up at the game one day.
His name was Eric. Eric was a star basketball player in our school and really just a winner in whatever he did in life. Very cool guy too. I'd busted a number of different people in a cash game that night, and he asked if I wanted to play heads up with him. I said sure, assuming I could beat him too.Long story short, he kicked my ass big time. I was devastated. A week later I played him heads up again, and once again he destroyed me.

At that point I decided I obviously didn't know everything about this game so I went and started reading every poker book I could find. I watched every poker program they had on TV too. I would stay up late to watch "Poker After Dark" on FSN.

My mother started really having some problems at that time with prescription pills, and my home life generally was pretty horrible, so poker became my escape. There weren't that many home games in my area so I spent most of my time just studying the game. I would take a deck out and go through situations. If you saw me in school I was with a poker book.

I met a friend at that time who into poker as much as I was. We talked about it a lot, and he was cool enough to drive me to whatever home games we could find. During our senior year of high school he convinced his father to open up a Full Tilt account for him. When I heard about him being able to play poker anytime he pleased I was sore with envy. I wanted an arena to try out everything I had learned, or I thought I knew.

My friend saw this and did one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me - he loaned me $50.00 and let me play on his Full Tilt account when he wasn't playing. We had to keep records, to see whose money was whose, but I didn't mind at all. I would play all night when he wasn't playing, and I was lucky enough to win a number of my first SNGs. I also played $0.05/0.10 cash games and just kept gradually building. At some point I luckboxed my way into a fourth on one of their daily $5.00 tournaments, which gave me a couple hundred dollars. I felt like I was in heaven.

I was lucky enough at that time to discover Pocketfives.com and read all of Fox's articles. The ones about bankroll management I really took to heart, and I began focusing on SNGs. I eventually got my own account, and soon every day after I came home from school I would play online.

Things in my family really got horrible around this time, as my mother's drug habit grew worse, and honest to god if I didn't have poker to get me through it I don't know what I would've done. Much like how many kids turn to drinking or drugs I felt poker was my self-medication at about that time. As long as I was focusing on numbers or a hand I wasn't thinking about what was going on in my real life.

Eventually, I moved out of my house and into the same friend's house who let me play on his poker account. I went fishing up in Alaska and I made enough to move into my own apartment. My goal when I moved to my apartment in Seattle was to become a professional poker player. At that time I had grinded up a couple thousand, but largely I still wasn't very consistent in my winning.

I worked the easiest job in the world as a security guard. I would work eight hours there and then come home and play poker four eight hours. I did this for a couple months, and loved every minute of it. I eventually had a month where I won a couple tournaments on stars, Ultimatebet, Bodog, and Paradise right before they shut down, and out of no where I had a bankroll. I decided since I made more in that month then I would normally make in a year at my current job at the time that I was going to quit and play poker.

The first couple months were very rough but I had some good friends who helped me get through it, and eventually I improved my game enough to the point where I could consistently win instead of having the erratic swings I once did. I play MTTs mostly now (since after 10,000+ SNGs you get a little sick of them), and while I'm not great at them I am having a fun time learning their nuances and earning money in the process. I'm no phenom but I make much more than my mother ever made as a teacher, and I have a lot of freedom in my day to day life that I really enjoy.

I still wonder what would've happened to me if I hadn't ever played in that poker game that one day. I don't know if I would've ever gotten into poker otherwise - it was never something that before I played it looked remotely interesting to me. Poker gave me an escape when times were tough and the money to do what I want in life. It's given me independance, confidence in my ability to do anything I put my mind to, and most recently an education.

I also wonder where I would be if my friend hadn't been kind enough to let me play on his account, and deal with all the "damnit are you playing right now?" discussions we went through. Thanks again Chris.

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