Hey Leggo, I’m Cero Zuccarello and this is my poker blog. I’m really excited to be a part of the team here, and I hope that my videos entertain you and help you improve your game. I’m not sure what this blog will look like once it rounds into shape, but since I’m such a maverick, I’m going to use this entry to introduce myself. I’m 32, married to a poet named Erin, and we have a 4-year-old son, Dario. We live in Madison, WI, having moved back from Virginia recently to be near our families. Poker has been my sole source of income for about 8 years, though Erin has also had a full-time job for the last year. Before that, I played professionally for 2 years, during my college-ish years. In between, I managed a video store in Virginia for a year, and aspired to be a filmmaker, before realizing that poker was my greatest passion.

I started with a couple thousand bucks that I’d won playing poker for recreation, and built it up to around $100K in the first couple of years playing live 10/20 Stud 8 and some 5/10 NL around Charlottesville and Richmond, two cities with A LOT of poker action. Then, over the next year (my 3rd as a pro), I lost almost every penny of it playing much higher stakes games, in backrooms in Virginia and on the internet. I recovered it at micro limits online, and since then, I’ve managed to earn a decent middle-class income while working an average of 20 hours per week, but have not managed to sock away a lot of money or progress back through the top of mid-stakes NL (I haven’t played above 1000NL regularly for a couple of years). I am a happy person, with a family I am grateful for that provides endless fulfillment and amusement. I play guitar and am very mediocre (jealous?). I sing decently and write songs. I play video games, shoot hoops, and play a little soccer during the 6-week window that grass can grow in Wisconsin. Other than that, I fill what’s left of my free time reading, talking, and thinking about poker. So that’s me.

I plan to share some live poker stories and hands quite a bit here. I mainly think of myself as an LOLivepro (I read that term on 2p2 recently and I think it‘s awesome, and kind of fits me), as they say, though I’m currently putting in more time online than live. I am digging hanging out with Dario a lot these days, and I can tell that it means a lot to him. I much prefer live games to online, but playing live means traveling an hour to Milwaukee or 3 hours to Chicago and staying overnight at least one night, so the internet is an obvious choice for me. There may be games bigger than 1/2 NL around my town, but I don’t know about any. Too bad, because I’ve always loved private games.

I try very hard to be a well-rounded person, and that extends to poker. I try to play all games well, and love learning new games: I currently feel that I’m in excellent shape against a typical online lineup at 20/40 and below in the following limit games (ranked in order of how well I play them) Omaha 8, Stud 8, Holdem, 2-7 Triple Draw, Razz, and 7-Stud. It’s difficult say what those limits equate to live, and there aren’t a ton of mixed games where I live, but I’d guess that 20/40 online probably plays about like 100/200 live (the live/online gap in less popular games is not as wide as it is in Holdem or PLO). I know that if I was in a casino anywhere but Vegas or LA and they were spreading a mixed game, I would play anything I could afford to play, I guess up to 300/600 (not that I can afford that). I also play NL, obviously, and PLO. I’m not really sure if I’m good at that game, but I’ve done pretty well overall, probably due to other people being bad at it. Online, I play between 2/4 and 5/10 in those two games, and live, I play 5/10 or 10/25 if I can get it.

So, I play mid-stakes, but a by-product of having consistently won at higher stakes than what I currently play is that I believe I’m a favorite in many high-stakes games which I'm not rolled for. I’m OK with this and not OK with it; I’ll explain. I definitely did not get into poker to get rich; at the time that I turned pro, internet poker was just a baby, and getting rich wasn’t even a realistic goal. Money’s not very important to me in general; my main goal was to live comfortably without working anywhere near 40 hours per week doing something I enjoy. I’ve accomplished that. However, the landscape has obviously changed a ton, and now it is very possible to make enough money to retire on in just a few years . That appeals to me, if I can do it without playing full-time.

I don’t need to make a lot of money.I’m positive I would be satisfied to make 75k/year (inflation-adjusted, for the blog nits) for my entire life, from a living conditions perspective. But, I do feel the need to move up from a professional perspective. I guess I feel a need to prove to others what I believe to be true about my own talents, which is admittedly not a good reason to do…anything. Knowing that doesn’t make it not so, though, so I aspire to climb the ladder again. I would be especially proud to become a dominant winner in the biggest 8-game mix available on Stars, and I believe that’s a realistic long-term goal for myself. I LOVE 8-GAME, and believe me, the all-caps is merited. If people are interested in seeing a mixed-game video from me, I’d definitely be down, so if that is you, post comments and I’ll show them to the big cheese. Thanks for reading all of this, for those of you who’ve slogged through it all.

Cero_Z