No one *chooses* to become a professional poker player, it just kind of...happens. At least that's generally the case. My situation was a little different, though -- I *had* to become a poker player. I mean, what else do you do when you're laid off from your first job during a recession and no one is hiring?
I graduated from Cornell with a degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering with an emphasis in Transportation Engineering/Logistics. I will admit that I wasn't particularly passionate about this major and that I was barely able to escape with my sanity intact, but I made the best of a bad situation and I am extremely happy that I finished because doing hard things is an essential part of growing as a human. Anyway, after graduating, I spent the summer training for a triathlon (I had gotten into tris my last year of college and was able to take a triathlon PE class that Cornell offered), which was a fantastic way to decompress from what felt like years of torture.
In addition to this fun little respite from the ass-kicking I had just completed, I also spent this time playing a little poker, both online and live. Now, while I was far from a professional at this point, I wasn't exactly a novice. You see, as anyone who went to college in the early 2000s can tell you, poker was absolutely BOOMING at this time. Online poker was exploding, the World Series of Poker was on ESPN, and there were at least a dozen other poker television shows airing at this time. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that a third of all college-aged men were playing poker at some frequency, and it was probably higher at Cornell. On any given night, one could find a game in either a dorm or a frat house.
Looking back, there are many moments in my life where I realized how much luck there is in life. Among the many, many things that poker can teach us, an appreciation for variance (read: luck, swings) might be the most important. One of these moments came to pass during my far from atypical poker game with friends. I was in a friend's dorm waiting for the game to begin and was introduced to a guy named Jordan. Now Jordan was known to be one of the more accomplished players and could often be seen playing online in his room, usually massively multi-tabling. We began to chat and he asked me what form of poker I liked best. I have to smile as I write this, but I had to ask him "What do you mean?" He then took the time to explain the different variants, live/online, tournament/cash, limit/no-limit, etc. I explained that I was relatively new, but that I was kind of a math guy. He encouraged me to look into a form of poker called "Sit and Go", basically a single table tournament that began when 9 or 10 players registered and that played down until only 1 player was remaining, with the final 3 players splitting the prize pool in a 50/30/20 fashion. He recommended this particular variant because there had been recent work done in "solving" this format, which turns out to be incredibly mathematical. To help me in my development as a SnG player, he encouraged me to explore to forum TwoPlusTwo.com. Now, I could write an entire *treatise* on TwoPlusTwo, but suffice it to say that my life was sent on a different trajectory because of Jordan's introduction to this forum. If you wanted to be a winning poker player in the early 2000s, you almost HAD to be on TwoPlusTwo.
Anyway, this is how I became...decent? at poker
Describe effect of recession on my job
Juxtapose that with effect of recession on gambling
Took severance into casino to play 4-8 LHE
Explain normal hourly expectation and/or daily win
Meeting David Mitchell and my first "stake" 3/30/08 (sharkscope)
Tournament and cash game success from discussing strategy with a peer group
Selling action to bigger tournaments, grinding the WSOP and WSOP-C
Qualifying for the national championship 2 years in a row
Discovering mixed games and becoming a specialist
Statistical analysis of my play,
No comments:
Post a Comment