If people didn’t progress as fast as I did, they never will. Brian Townsend once said that to a friend of mine. Let Max and me be a testament to the fallacy of that statement.
When I was 17 years old my Dad put $50 into a Paradise poker account for Max and me to share. We started playing sit and go’s because a site we found, called flopturnriver.com, who advocated playing SNGs and we liked them a lot. We shared most things in our lives; clothes, a car, a room, might as well share a bankroll. It’s safe to say we both sucked pretty bad then but because of how incredibly easy low stakes was, we somehow were marginal winners. I get hooked on things pretty easily. I would hang out with a different group of friends every few months, I would get obsessed with playing one video game or another, p0ker was just another obsession. I won’t bore you with some early details, but the swings were pretty insane. Multiple times the account got under $10, and we swore to our father that we would never redeposit if we lost it. I have no idea what my dad thought at the time, I know he couldn’t have possibly thought that we would somehow both make a living at this later in life.
There was one moment of truth in our poker career that I should really torture Max about more. Our account was down to $6. Max wanted to play one 5.50 SNG and see if we could build it up again. I thought it was too risky. I told Max I would grind .01/.02 cent cash games until we got our account up to $100. He scoffed at me and said fine, if I wanted to take the time. Luckily for me, I got some good luck and actually did succeed. Looking back at my early years of 6 max I have no idea how I could have possibly won. I was so aggressive and bluffy and had no clue how to play well. The only thing I did well was play tight preflop. When I analyzed this later it made me realize three important things. One, playing bad and aggressive isn’t as bad as it seems. Two, you can’t learn how to bluff well until you try it. And three, gaining skill in poker requires you not only wanting to beat your opponents, you have to want to obliterate them.
After about two years of playing, freshman year of college in the books, a few tournament cashes, multiple 20 buy in downswings, and 6 max grinding later we had about $16,000 total bankroll. We decided it was time to split it up and go our seperate ways. After we split up our bankrolls I struggled to do well. I had two losing months and a row and thought I’d have too move down. Luckily, in my birthday month of July my luck changed. I made $20,000 that month and felt like I had reached a new pinnacle.
In August, PokerStars began offering Heads Up cash games and I was totally hooked. Heads up offered a form of poker where I could be most aggressive and therefore I liked it the most. I’m not sure how well I played back then, but there were so many bad players it was hard to lose a lot. I didn’t do too well at the end of 2007, but I managed to have a pretty good year overall.
There was a time in 2007 where I felt like I didn’t know how I could possibly improve. I felt like I did everything pretty well and improving more was just a matter of having the discipline to play my A game all the time. It was not until one absolutely random day at the end of July that my outlook began to change, and my scope of poker knowledge began to expand.
My mind was drifting and thinking about poker when I began to think of a hypothetical scenario. I imagined two people at a poker table playing heads up. I could not see either of their whole cards but I was watching what they do. I thought to myself, at any given point in the action, I could say accurately who was more likely to win the hand. Instead of looking at just what one player had as something that wasn’t certain, I looked at both players hands as something that was uncertain. And I came to my first theory idea I ever had. I realized that if an entire hand range had a greater probability of winning the hand than another players hand range, that is his range was stronger than another players range, he could bluff more. And if his range was weaker than another players range, I should bluff less. It turns out there was lot more to that theory than I knew about then, but it opened me up to seeing that there was so much I didn’t know, and so much I could learn. How ranges interact with each other is still something I think about today and still something I try to improve on.
So I ended up calling my friend Ben “Sauce123″ Sulsky, told him exactly what I was thinking, and his answer was basically “Yep, your absolutely right. Your getting it Danny.”
I decided to sit down at a $2/$4 no limit heads up game and see how it would work. I sat with a regular I had played before. The first hand I raise to $12 preflop with As6c. My opponent calls. The flop comes KJ2 rainbow. I bet the flop $20, he called. Pot was now $54. Turn was a 3. I bet $46, my opponent called again. River was a 5. The pot was now $146 and I had $322 left. I decided to shove it all in and he folded quickly. It may not seem like much of a hand, but the rush I felt afterwards was amazing. I had just made a bluff that I absolutely knew was good, and not just because he folded.
It wasn’t until we both became more knowledgeable about poker that my relationship with Max really blossomed into something that was helpful to both of our games. We would run random theory thoughts off of each other and really help evaluate the merit of different concepts. It seemed like after that we both just bolted up the levels. By the end of 2008 we were both playing at the 25/50 level and had racked up a six figure year.
2009 was by far the craziest year of poker I had ever had. Two things happened in 2009 that helped me become 10 times the poker player I was in 2008. One, I played anyone. I think people really underestimate, especially in heads up, how good of a learning experience it is to play a very very good player. In golf, you could want to play with Tiger Woods to learn from him, but good luck getting him to play with a schmuck like you. However, in poker, “Tiger Woods” is glad to play you and easily accessible.
Of all the players I played, the most influential player to my game was a guy named Scott Seever, aka “mastrblastr.” Now I don’t think he was the best player I had ever played but he certainly was the most conceptually interesting. When I played mastrblastr, I quickly realized two things about him: He would put all the money in the pot whenever I failed to have a nut hand in my range, and he would never fold. Because of this I had to do two things to adjust; I had to never bluff because he’d always call, and I had to check a lot of the time with my nut hands because he would bluff so much when range strength was in his favor.
Consequently, I got my ass handed to me. And while in a lot of ways I felt like he did not play well, he did open my eyes to an important concept: If you can force your opponent to never bluff and play passively, you will win. After that match I stopped folding, and I started pushing.
The second thing that happened was I got mental coaching with Jared Tendler. Tendler was more of a therapist to me than a poker coach, but nonetheless, his coaching really helped me play my A+ game. Where his coaching really showed up is in my hand reading skills. I started to realize how game flow and timing tells could help me read hands. Some games I felt like my opponents were simply my puppets: I knew exactly what they were doing and I knew exactly what to do against them.
Ironically, at the same time I was reaping large monetary benefits of poker, I was living in the ghetto of Washington, DC in a house with 7 other people, including one guy who slept on our couch. We affectionally named our house “the crack den,” because the house was so disgusting and there were constantly people high on something on the living room couch. Living with 7 other people in the ghetto may have its downs, but it was pretty damn awesome overall and a great experience. Ahhhh how I miss late night trips to the local chinese, chicken, seafood, and subs (yes, this is all one place) take out. MMMMMMM, fries and mumbo sauce.
…
The first half of 2010 raked in enormous profits for me. But a problem was arising: No one would play me at heads up anymore besides people I did not think I had an edge on. The elite of the elite, guys like Issac Haxton or nosebleed regulars. My days of HU cash became simply waiting around for fish, something I did not enjoy nor cared to do. It was in May I decided I would stop predominately playing HU cash and move to another game: HU SNGs. I was enamored by the idea of getting “Supernova Elite” on Pokerstars. For those who don’t know, Supernova Elite, or SNE, is a bonus from Pokerstars’ VIP program which gives you a large amount of rakeback, but also gives you three free tournament entries.
With High Stakes HU SNGs, this would not be too difficult to achieve. But my first crack at HU SNGs did not go so well. I found that the HU SNG players were insanely bad at early game with deep stacks, but apparently I was insanely bad at late game with shallow stacks. After getting some minor coaching, doing some math, and playing some good players like Jovial Gent and Iftarii I was able to find a late game strategy that worked.
10 months of not so good results later I am SNE and am having a solid start to 2010. It took me 3 years of steady improvement to be the player I am today. In May I’m going to graduate from school. Me, Max, and a few friends already have a house booked for the WSOP, and I’m hoping a big tournament score is on the way. So thanks for reading, and wish us both luck at the World Series!
-Danny
