Hello. This is my seven hundredth attempt at writing a poker journal. I started the others on various blogging sites, but now they all lie abandoned like forgotten children, consigned to the abortion-bin of internet history. I start this one with the best intentions, however I reserve the right to be as apathetic and lazy about it as you might expect from a typical poker player.
Tradition dictates that these things should begin with a chronology of one’s beats, brags and variance, the opening gambit typically recounting the tale of how one gambled for penny stakes with friends before depositing $50 on Party Poker.
At school I played 5-card draw for penny stakes with friends, and one day I deposited $50 on Party Poker. Hang on, freeze-frame that, rewind a little. Inbetween these two life-changing events, I took very little interest in cards. I have memories of my dad, uncle and grandparents playing an arcane card game called ‘Taxi’ for money in the obligatory smoky back room but I was neither allowed nor interested in joining in. My plan was to become a lecturer or teacher or something pedagogic. Maybe a researcher. Academia seemed like a nice vehicle in which to coast through life. I took computing and economics as an undergraduate degree, got a job as a web designer, and later took a Masters in critical theory (a sort of Marxist philosophy, pretentiously enough), and I was offered a PhD. But then, I discovered poker. Or rather, my younger brother discovered poker. I forget what year it was, but it was Christmas and I was watching him play limit hold’em on Party. Something clicked. And clicked again, obviously.
I deposited $50 on Party Poker. Somehow, I was a winning player from the start. I don’t think in the last five or six years I’ve ever had to redeposit money that I hadn’t already won. I had jumped into the $1/2 limit games with literally no clue on a tiny roll and somehow worked it up to a decent wedge, and before long I was playing $2/4 and $3/$6. One day I entered a $25 stud game and won $1k which is not only still my biggest MTT score to date, but in a game I still have no idea how to play! Not that I wouldn’t like to win more, but you can count the number of MTTs I’ve played my entire career on two hands. For me, they are the most boring form of poker.
Unlike limit! Yes, before long I had accounts at Party, UltimateBet, Absolute, Vegas247, Carnaval, PokerRoom and about four other OnGame skins, three or four iPoker accounts, Stars, FTP, Victor Chandler, 888, Pacific, Paradise and several others I can’t even remember. I got very good at limit poker. At one point I learnt to 20-table on Stars and made Supernova. I went to Vegas twice and played… limit!
I do often ask myself what the fuck I was thinking in those salad days when everyone else was learning NL and how to make their fortunes. But there was no moment of revelation, no shining light, God himself didn’t command me to start playing NL. One day I just did. I started low at 25nl and 50nl 6max on Stars and became one of the biggest winning 50nl regs. Over one two-month period I even won over $3k. Woo! And then, the climb to superstardom and the nosebleeds began as I grinded day-in, day-out, taking on allcomers and crush, crush, crushing.
No, wait. I didn’t. I didn’t move up. This is a recurrent theme in my poker career, and my perennial problem. I have done very well for the stakes that I play, sometimes becoming one of the best at those stakes. But then I festered, a fat and bloated shark clicking lazily about in a small pond. They say you shouldn’t be scared to move up. They would have shot me in the army.
Boredom was a big problem. I have the attention span of a goldfish, one of the reasons I can’t stand MTTs. Playing poker bores me, 90% of poker players bore me, folding is boring. I solved this to some extent by increasing the number of tables I played, 20-tabling limit and SNGs, and 12-tabling 6max but whilst superficially that helps the boredom, what actually happens is you become a robot, a base decision-engine interfaced to a mouse. So I started playing heads-up.
The thing is, poker isn't boring, something about it is thrilling intellectually. In a way it is similar to some of the more dizzying philosophy I have read and studied on the event horizon between art and science; there is something cosmic about it when the veil is lifted briefly and you glimpse the true nature of the game, perhaps because that nature is at least partly your own. “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby becomes one.” But what if you are already the monster? I had long ago ditched my aspirations for the Academy, poker was now my conceptual art, my vehicle with which to think. It was also my battleground, since theory is nothing without praxis. The mountain cannot defeat you, you can only defeat yourself. So I had new, non-academic aspirations. Poker aspirations. That, and getting into Pseud's Corner of course.
Anyway, as I was saying. I started playing heads-up. And that went well. At least it’s not boring. Have you tried playing 6max after playing heads-up? Snooze-fest. Full-ring? Oh, pass the suicide. Heads-up is where it’s at. 50nl, 100nl, yeah! I bumhunted, I didn’t bumhunt, I sat for hours waiting for fish, I pummelled them. I think I ran at about 11bb/100 for 100k hands on four different sites and that is respectable by any count. Yep, this time I was gonna move up, I’d found my game, man on man, poker player on poker player, all the homoerotic tension implicit in a group of men sat around a table for hours soaking in each others’ sweat and pheromones exploding in its purest form, bareback action baby! Is there anything more satisfying in poker than the S&M thrill of dominating another player, of owning them psychologically?
Yeah, probably. Winning lots of money for one thing. But that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, because my girlfriend gave birth to our son in January 2010. Suddenly the time I had available to play was cut tenfold (did I mention I quit my job?). I had over £20k in my bankroll, most of which I had been quietly accumulating over the past few years thanks to my status as king of the micros, but this was draining rapidly. Since my partner earns a very good salary, we took the decision that I would be the primary carer, which meant poker was going to have to take a back seat and just as I was getting into the business of being a ‘poker pro’ I would instead once again become a recreational donk. I looked forward to my new start in life as a housewife.
I cashed out most of my money for living expenses and left a couple thousand on Stars and a few small bankrolls on various other sites. I kept no money on FTP but I did used to rail my friend there and discovered that you cannot chat without any money in your account. So another friend shipped me $5 when I mentioned this on Facebook, and I could chat once more. To cut a long story short, in 2010 I span that $5 into nearly $10k on FTP, but that’s a whole other blog entry. You see, babies take lots of naps and turbo HUSNGs are over quickly. They were to be my new game, dipping in and out of them whenever I had a spare hour or two, smash n’ grab.
Which brings me rapidly to the present day. According to Sharkscope I’m currently ranked top 15 in the whole entire world for the $15 HUSNG games. I came 13th and 3rd in the two iPoker HUSNG leaderboards earlier this year. Once again I have cashed out nearly all my earnings and left myself $3.5k to work with because my girlfriend and I are in the process of buying a house. $3.5k is overrolled for the $15 games, overrolled even for the $30 games according to any sort of sensible Kelly criterion.
Do you see what I’m saying? All these brags are but the visible tip of a massive beat that lurks cold and serious beneath the water’s surface. It’s time to move up.
But maybe not just yet.
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