In the summer of 2005 I decided to work on my online cash game skills and decided I would try to find a soft site.

I deposited money onto Pacific Poker because I believe they had decent promotions at the time and I wished to get in on this “free” money and they had worse players than party/pokerstars. I started out playing the 10c/25c NLHE games and the players I remember were extremely loose. Playing on a 6max table, there were almost 4 or 5 players to every flop. This helped the fish stay alive a lot better since they made your variance shoot through the roof and playing something like 72s preflop with 4 other players really decreases the amount of money ur losing since schools of fish help each other out via pot odds.

The fish were somehow beating me out and I was a losing player at these limits and couldn’t really figure out why. I probably also didn’t have the adjusting skills that I do not and probably wasn’t making the right modifications to my play so I was just leaking money slowly to the fish. I decided to move up to 25c/50c NLHE games to recover my losses while I was on a big downswing (standard tilt move) and I started beating the game luckily. I think my standard game was better geared towards this limit as people tended to fold more and not see the flop as much in big groups. I started to finally win at cash games online for the first time.

I had also continued playing $10 and $20 dollar sngs quite a bit at pokerstars where I continued to grind a pretty good ROI. At this time it was probably around 2006 and I was in my first year of university. Walking around campus I saw this promotion being put on by PokerRoom which offered a $50,000 freeroll tournament for players across Canadian universities. All you had to do was qualify by playing in a preliminary free tournament online that they hosted once a week for 10 weeks I think. Each week they let the top 10% of players qualify for the 50k freeroll.

I told a couple buddies of mine about it and we all qualified and agreed to chop the profits we made equally. I think I was a lot better than they were at the time but didn’t really mind giving up an edge since I could use a nice bankroll boost if one of them did final table it, I’d still get a piece and donkaments are so volatile that I wanted to decrease some variance. Plus they’re good friends of mine so it wasn’t a big deal. The day of the tournament, Poker room decided to postpone the tournament. Im sure the reason was that there were far fewer players than they were expecting (I think there were 1000 players) and forking 50k out of their wallets for such little exposure made the company feel uncomfortable. However, with all the complaints they were pretty much forced to put on the tournament which paid 25k for first and making the final table would get you 1k. So my buddy Ben who doesn’t play too much ended up busting pretty early. My friend Evan who still plays tournies quite a bit and doesn’t really do cash games ended up going deep in the tourney with me. Now I think the players were quite horrific being it was a freeroll and just playing solid poker and picking up hands would make you crush these games.

It was down to around 16 players I think when Evan ended up busting out and picking up $300 or something. I ended up final tabling it with a slightly below average stack. A guy opens from UTG with a short stack and I rejam over the top with TT and another guy moves all in as well , then ANOTHER guys moves all in as well and I know I need a T to win but it doesn’t get there as everyone shows AA,KK,JJ so I busted out like 8th and picked up a $1000 for my efforts but had to give 66% of it to my buddies.

Somehow I ended up playing at Ultimatebet and depositing money on there where I started playing 100NL. At this point in my poker journey, I had decided that playing 50 hours at a limit and having a decent win rate should be enough reason to keep moving up to the next limit. Keep in mind I think I was playing only 2 tables and only played two tables for the longest time. Nowadays I play 4-8 but still can’t really handle any more than that. So the 50 hours was probably only about 10k hands so a really small sample but I was confident I was better than the players at these limits. So I think in 2006/07 I ended up going from 100nl up to 600nl moving up one limit at a time. This was the golden era of poker and I remember having a ridiculous win rate at 3/6nl. I think over 100 hours of playing I was making 400 dollars an hour. And this was like 3 or 4 tabling I believe as well.

In the winter of 2007 I finally had my first brush with stiff competition and was being outplayed at a limit for the first time when I took shots at 5/10NL.