I have been thinking about this alot lately and i keep coming up short on answers. Right now, my life is good. Wife and kids, fantastic. Family is good. Friends are awesome. Im fit and healthy which is cool. I even have a few £ in the bank for a rainy day was is nice. I live a life that is almost certainly better than most people so why do i question myself about 'what do i want from life'
Ok, this is gonna sound selfish but my perfect day would be waking up and having a spliff and coffee for breakfast while reading the news. After that i like to sit at the computer and weed for next 14 hours while someone brings me food every 4 hours. I would like to end my perfect day with a 30 minute shower, tug on the monkey and and fall asleep while watching Still Game on youtube.
Would like make me happy?, deffo not but for one day it would be nice. I'd miss the wife hovering about and the kids annoying me asking for stuff all the time. I enjoy my own cooking and beating the bishop gets boring after a while. Maybe we are programmed to just always want something we dont have. You remember when you were young and you liked a girl/boy/mixed thing gender for months and when you finally got her/him/it to go out with you, you sort of changed your mind really fast and were not bothered anymore. I guess we can blame our DNA.
Way back in the day when online poker was starting to get very popular i had already been playing in home games at friends and friends of friends homes for a few years. When i started to play online i just pure destroyed the small stake sit and go's. I started to find them boring playing 2-8 games at once to win a few dollars and then i tried playing the $100 (0.5/1) cash table's. I remember losing almost a grand over the next month playing at the weekends but it did not put me off. I enjoyed playing and i was learning more about the game through books and online forums, I cant learn from watching video's, they bore me. After a few more months and some more lost dollars i built my poker style. So the way i play is when i join a table i play every hand for the first 15-20 hands and make alot post flop rises are re-rises. That takes about 10-15 minutes to pay that many hands and by that time you will look like an aggressive player to those playing attention, now is the time to switch over to ABC style. ABC poker is basically playing your cards and not the player. Only taking on bets on draws when you have pot odds and playing a little sneaky as well. Alot of check, rising and pushing all in on the river card when you think your winning.
My game turned around and i was turning $100 on Friday evening into $1000 by Sunday evening. I played until i get to $1000 and stopped, sometimes i would run hot and get there on Friday night playing drunk ozzy players. I lost sometimes as well but the gains far outweighed the losses and after around 6-7 months of making more playing poker at the weekend then i did from my day job, i quit and became a full time poker player. I split my money up into 2 accounts, one account had enough to pay bills and buy food for 6 months and the other was poker bankroll. I drew up a short game plan with things like how many buys ins i need before moving up a level, how much to withdraw each month to pay for stuff, ect. Then i just want for it
Continued playing the $100 games and beat them up for a few months. I noticed early on i had most success playing between 10pm and 12 midday. My days where mainly multi tabling small field torneys under 100 players during the day and then switching over to cash games in the evenings until i fell asleep with my laptop. I got bored of playing the torney's, i cashed out in around 1 in every 5 and made a few dollars but it's alot of work and sometimes they can last for 4-5 hours. I decided to double my stacks and play the $200 tables, piece of piss. I cleaned up there as while, just played tight and played my hands. I soon jumped upto $400 game and this were i was challenged for the first time, i noticed after only playing for a few weeks at this level alot of regulars players would never call my all ins cause they knew i only ever did that when i had the nuts. I started to bluff these players alot and bluffing is very much fun but soon they started to call and re-rise me. To cut a long story short, i was about 4 months into being a full time poker player and if i wanted to continue to go up in levels, i would almost have to study the game so i could work out perfect odds in head, factor in implied odds and learn to not tilt. I had to also start to play the player more in the level as $400 is a decent chunk of change to play with for most people and it's not piss away play for fun money. I had to start it take it serious and start to educate myself.
I bought tons of books from amazon, become super active on poker forums, started to use tracking software to see mistakes in my game i could fix. I even swapped over were i was playing to PKR.com from pokerstars. PKR is a 3d based poker site and the thing about it is when you want to see your hole cards you click the view cards button and your avatar looks at the cards for 4-5 seconds and then puts them back down. The great thing is everyone else at the table can see when you are looking at your cards. This is called a poker tell and PKR is the only site that has this feature. Now i have extra information, i can see when someone im playing against is looking at their cards, maybe checking to see if they hit a flush are they made there straight telling me they have not a made hand yet. Maybe they dont check at all and just keep betting which would normally mean they have something super strong like A-A/K-K, if you have 2 pair are better, you pretty much know you can get all that guys money by pushing all in such donkeys never fold A-A. Armed with my extra information while perfecting my new playing style i was beating the games and week on week made a profit. My bankroll grew as did my confidence and i decided to man up one night and take a gamble on playing the $1000 tables. I started with the min buy in of $400 quickly get it up to around $900 and then it happened.
I was dault A-J and put in a 4 BB rise trying to steal the blinds, i dont remember what position i was in but everyone folds and the big blind min rises it and i called. This guy overbet alot and was playing very loose so its hard to know what he had but i just had a gut feeling that he had fuck all and my starting cards were better then his. The flop came and i missed, he bet and i called. I turn came and damn it, still no ace are jack, no draws, no nothing. The 4 cards out nwere not connected in any way at all, the board was drier then your granny's kite. He bet again, the pot was upto to around $700 and i thought about it for around 5 seconds. I just had the feeling he had nothing at all and was trying to buy the pot so i grabbed my balls with 1 hand and re-raised him with the other. This guy was bullying the table and i decided to take a stand. He came back and went all in really fast, under 1 second. My heart was racing and i was pumped up, i snap called him with ace high. The cards went over and he had K-J, no pairs. I bounced out of seat pouncing the air with joy, i had made a hero call and i was right, all in with ace high to win my biggest ever pot at the time of $1900ish. One more card to come, KING.... He wrote 'thank you' in the comments which put me on tilt and quit playing. Want i thought was gonna be my biggest win turned into my biggest lose. I only really lost $400 from my bankroll but learnt that these guys were no that much different for the $400 cash game players. Time to break my action plan rules but fuck it, move up are move on. if they destroy me at $1000 level, so be it.
I started to play to $1000 cash games pretty much every day after that and was making really good money. I continued to learn new stuff, change my style and improve my game. This lasted for around 7-8 months and it was good. I had plus/minus swings in the thousands and it did not bother me at all. I could wake up, lose $3000 in 30 minutes and go out with a mate to play golf without even thinking about it. It's not that i had lots and lots of money, i became dumb to gaining and losing large amounts of money on the daily. If i had a really good day and won like $5000-8000, i would not think about it all, i started to see money as tokens you need to play the game of life. I started to play about in the $2000 cash games and these were much harder than the $1000 cash games. I lost alot of money learning to change my style so i could beat these players but i lost more than i won and over the course of around 6 weeks i lost most of my bankroll. I cant beat them and it was annoying the fuck out of me so i moved back down to the $1000 cash games and they were now harder as well, i was winning but just barley. I ended up going back down the $400 cash games were i thought i would win more by killing them players but they had got better well. I thought i as getting bad run of cards and i thought it would only last a few weeks but it did not and towards to end i was confused between thinking was i get bad cards are was i playing bad. I was playing ABC poker anymore, i took a break for a few weeks and returned to play ABC. I was winning but not enough and everytime i moved up tot he $1000 in i was losing more than i was gaining. I lost my confidence and you cant play poker with no confidence. I still had a few thousand in my bankroll so i cashed it and took a friend up on an offer. He made recently moved to Crypus to start a business and had a spare bedroom he offered, i phoned him up and told him i'd be over to visit for 2 weeks. I ended up staying for 4 months and we had a great time. I was still playing poker from time to time but only super small games mainly to pass the time.
Not really to be honest, it was basically playing poker all the time sometimes i would play for over 100 hours per week, my longest sesh is 32 hours long and played through more than 4 millions hands in -14 months. My stats showed that i was a winning player but only because i had withdraw money out to pay for bills and buy things. It was a good experience but it ran it's course and dont think i ever looked at playing poker as a long term thing, i thought i would have got 5-10 from it but i was way off. It just all become very routine and almost like a job. I fault like a robot sometimes with all my actions on autopilot and it deffo made me much less sociable.
I think that as we grow and things change through life, what you want changes with that. We can be happy and content for a while but than we need a new challenge to keep the blood pumping.
Sorry to dragging the ass out of it, this was supposed to be a 15 mins post.
