When i was growing up I was always sort of a gamer. I was into computer games like warcraft and civilization, or board games like risk or monopoly, anything that involved strategy. Most people I knew would just play these games without any intention to try to learn anything, but I was always thinking of ways I could play more efficiently or strategies that might be more effective. In games like Warcraft Danny and I would talk about this extensively, sadly (or maybe not so sadly! I’m glad I don’t play anymore) neither of us we’re good enough with a mouse and keyboard to ever become incredible Warcraft players. I think I started playing poker around 16, I went to my friend’s house one day and a bunch of my friend were playing random poker and gambling games. I had $5 in my wallet so I joined in. I don’t even remember if I won or lost, and I really didn’t get that excited about the game. Even when Danny started playing online for play money, I would play too but I wasn’t obssessed. It wasn’t until we were down to our last $2, after blowing the $50 our Dad gave us, when we were playing in a $1 tournament on paradise poker we just had to win that it happened. We ended up miraculously beating out 1000 players and placing 7th in that tournament for $27 dollars. And I was hooked.

If I could go back to when I was 17 and change one thing, it would be my work ethic. I basically cruised in life until college, I was smart enough to get A’s in all my classes at my easy private school without studying at all, and I never had a job. Because of this, I didn’t work hard at poker early in my career and because of this it took me years before I even made it to midstakes, even though I had so much talent. I also was overwhelmed in college and ended up leaving after a year because, even though I wouldn’t admit it at the time, I couldn’t handle “so much work.” I put this in quotes because a lot of work back then, in my perspective, was 2 or 3 hours in a day.

Anyways, getting back to the story, we slowly built up a bankroll of about $1000 by the time we got to college. After our first year of college we had about a 10k bankroll, which we split, and for the first time in our poker careers Danny and I played on our own. When I was in school I only played 1 or 2 ours 4 or 5 days a week, so i decided that I was gonna step it up and play 4 hours a day 5 days a week. I was playing 1/2 and 2/4 6max. My routine would be wake up at 830, play til 1230, then for some reason i just didn’t play after that. I was living at my parents house back in Iowa and I didn’t have a lot going on so I could have put in long hours but, of course, I thought what I was doing was hard enough. It actually went very well, by the end of the summer i had made about 15k. I decided to take a semester off of school and try being a professional.

Right around that time, however, I started partying. Basically every night. A lot of my friends still lived in my home town and we never really partied in highschool, so we were basically like 16 year olds, getting way too wild and way too drunk. This actually lasted until about January, and I ended up not working at all and I was stagnant as a poker player. In January, when I went back to school, I missed all my friends and decided to focus on poker during school to keep me occupied. I actually improved a lot during this time and was beating 5/10 6max pretty consistently by the time I was out for the summer. I decided to use my extra bonus points to buy into a tournament in Costa Rica, a Pokerstars sponsored event called the LAPT (Latin American Poker Tour). I had little live experience but I played the tournament pretty well. I really never got into any tough situations and I don’t remember ever going to an all in showdown for all my money. The final table of this event was actually incredible, composed of 4 up and coming young poker players who’s careers we’re just beginning. To my direct right, Ashton Griffin, Ashman103 online who I’m sure most of you know. He busted in 7th or 8th playing like he didn’t care. Across the table was Alec Torelli, a great poker player and possibly an even better blogger, who actually ended up giving me the chiplead when he 4bet bluff shoved 22 to my AA. And 3 seats to my right, who should have won the tournament but got extremely unlucky to end up in 3rd place, was Steven Silverman, who you may know online as Zugwat. Long story short I ended up getting 2nd for a good chunk of change, a 1/3 of which went to Danny (who i exchanged 33% of my action with before the tournament started).

After that I moved back to Iowa where I lived for a year. In Las Vegas early that summer, my friend Ben Sulsky, a high stakes online poker player who goes by Sauce123, taught me a little headsup poker strategy. I picked it up really quick and I just started massacring people headsup. My winrate was probably 12ptbb/100 at 3/6 and 5/10, and at 10/20 it really wasn’t much of a drop off. I took my first shot playing 25/50 when a regular, who I had heard wasn’t really any good, 3 tabled me. That day i made 45k in about four hours. After that I played 10/20 and 25/50 exclusively. Until June of 2009 I didn’t really lose and assumed I was just so good that I wasn’t going to have more than a 5 buyin downswing. The problem, again, was that I just didn’t play enough. The other problem was that I didn’t really think I needed to improve so I didn’t really try. What ended up happening was I didn’t make as much money as I wanted to and players started catching up. The worst part was that players started game selecting more, and by June no one would play me. The only action I could get was from millionaires who I didn’t have an edge on. I started downswinging hard, and from June to the end of 2009 I actually lost money overall. I was sick of waiting around for action so I decided to switch back to 6max, where I started. I made a big mistake however, overestimating my 6max abilities and jumping into 25/50 way too soon. If I were to go back I would have started back at 2/4, played until I was crushing, then move up to 3/6, rinse and repeat. Instead I lost a lot of money at 25/50 and only moved down because my bankroll forced me too. What I don’t regret in 2009, however, was meeting my current girlfriend and moving to Berkeley, CA with my older brother and a mutual friend and I have been living since.

It wasn’t until January of 2010 when I started working with a poker therapist name Jared Tendler (I recommend him to any and all poker players) I realized that I didn’t even know what hard work was. Now I know, and since my work days have went from 3 hours to 9 and it feels less strenuous then when I was working three. I’m excited about my future in poker, I have learned so much in the past 5 months and if I keep it up I feel like I could end up playing with the best.

If I could take one thing from looking back at my poker story, It would be what I’ve been preaching ever since Danny and I started this blog. I know I say it over and over again, but it’s just so key to becoming good at anything that I’m going to say it again. If you are passionate about something, and you strive to be the best, the only way you will achieve your goals is to work hard, and work a lot. If you don’t you may look back in a few years and realize how much more amazing you could have been. I’m not disappointed in myself, I didn’t know what I knew now and you can’t change the past. Maybe it was something that I had to learn on my own. Now that I have learned it, I want to make sure no one reading this blog can learn it too.