Notes: 1) The Leggo software is messed up, anytime I do a draft of one of these it automatically shows it as posted. Don't click! From now on I'll throw out a DONE! or DRAFT in caps beforehand.
2) I could do a lot better with editing. I tend to write pretty sloppily, but usually I just bang one of these out and then I'm pumped to post it so I just fire it out there. Good luck.
Part 3: Grindcore
Starting on January 28th 2007 I pretty much geared my head up to become a poker-pro. I had my island-journal filled with 6max tables scribbled with ranges and a variety of bankroll management goals. I only remember #1: Don't move up limits until you think you are the best regular at your limit and have 25 buy ins. This was at the persistent urging of Danny and Max, who had recently introduced me to the world of 2p2, and put the tools of learning winning poker in my eager hands. They also seemed ok with lending me money and so the day after my plane landed back on Cape Cod I borrowed $500 and went to work at 25nl to make $10,000 by December 31st.
Sitting down to play poker is probably the most exhilarating thing I've done in my life. Sex can definitely be better, drugs too, but for pure consistency of enjoyment without baggage or side effects, poker does it for me hands down. Poker rarely has the extreme peaks and valleys of life experience. I've never felt as whole playing poker as I have staring at the moon in Yosemite, but for pure sensory gratification the bumpy uphill ride of moving chips can't be beat. Contrary to popular belief, poker has gotten consistently more boring as I've played for more and more money. Probably more stressful in some real-world ways, but when I was starting out every hand was a puzzle, and everywhere I turned my attention possibilities abounded. In 2007, no one knew anything, the players beating the biggest games were shooting from the hip just like the rest of us, but with faster reflexes. So in this climate I thought that with enough dedication, anything was achievable. And failure would be expected, while being a successful gambler would blow my friends' minds.
I think I played 25nl for 3 days. I'm 100% sure that at no time in my now long poker career have I been a winner at 25nl or 50nl. For some reason the style of play at 50nl in 2007 caused me to tilt almost instantaneously. I think it was almost TOO soft. I was interested in a high tension battle of check raises and bluffs, and instead what I found at 50nl was tables full of passive weekend warriors idly tossing in chips from any position trying to flop something good. This infuriated me for some reason and I found myself trying to just rip every chip on the table from their lazy faces. And you can't do that, cause they were playing tight. So I found myself repeatedly getting in big pots with say 92ss which I had 3bet against someone playing 20/8, and then stacking off on a 94J flop because he had to have AK. Each session I would review my hands and realize that most of my equity at these tables came from my ability to win tons of small uncontested pots with big raises in position. And I just couldn't do it, it was like waving red in front of a bull, I'd charge in guns blaring and when the turn checkraise came I was steaming forward so recklessly I couldn't get out of the way.
On day four I played 50nl. I saw no substantial difference. On day five I played 100nl, where a few regulars were starting to mess around. So I played 200nl. I revised my bankroll management strategy by only buying in for 100$ as I could not yet envision a run of bad luck occurring where I would lose five times in a row. I began to play like a nit, and on day seven I went broke for the first time. I borrowed another 500$ from Max and Danny which coincidentally was the balance of my bank account and dropped down to 100nl. Though at the time I thought I was sure to win, this was actually one of the points in my life where short-term luck was an incredibly important factor. Had I lost this money, I would probably have never played poker again in a competitive manner for at least six months to a year and would have had to get a job. It was more or less a fluke of running white-hot on my first trip to the casino which brought me back to poker for my second go-around, and a chance meeting with Danny and Max which gave me the tools to win. Had those tools seemed to have failed I probably would have walked away disgusted, and I have no idea whether my life would be better or worse as of now. For me losing has always felt much worse than the joy I feel winning, so I would not be funneling paycheck after paycheck into poker if I had lost.
When I read high stakes players stories half the time I hear "So I won a freeroll for $500 and never looked back. Within six months I was beating 2knl." What people so often forget is that to ever reach high stakes gambling, it's almost essential that you run better than average, pretty much forever. I take the opposite view of most gamblers who attribute their success to some genius combination of intelligence, balls, and personal style, which has somehow vaulted them out of the seething millions of poker players world-wide who want to be high stakes players. I'm sure that of all the people who have studied poker I'm probably in the top 10% in terms of logic, discipline, and emotional control, but I'm sure there are hundreds just as smart as me who have failed because they did not run as well at important times. And there are some people who are worse than me who are playing higher. In any profession involving randomness, you just HAVE to get lucky to be extremely successful, there is no other substitute, and if you think there is, you're fooling yourself.
With that last $500 I got lucky. Very lucky. I started playing almost every day back at school, usually for two or three hours six tabling 100nl. I probably spent another 3 hours initially posting in forums and just studying. I also had five academic classes to daydream about poker, and really whenever I was alone and my mind was adrift poker began to sail through in slow circles. I only have a timeline of my forum posts at flop turn river to tell me how well I was doing as that old database has long since been deleted, but using my various posts as markings for my increasingly vague recollections of those early grinding memories seems to be as good a place to start as any. This is one of my first posts ever, on February 18, 2007, 30 days after I began playing online.
http://www.flopturnriver.com/phpBB2/...ns-t50896.html. It's interesting because it's such a mixed bag. I'm not concise at all, or particularly specific, or even correct, but I'm somewhat impressed that I had been check bombing rivers so early into my poker career. I suppose I always relied mostly on empirical evidence when playing poker which is the miracle of pokertracker: does this play work in practice? Then I'd try to pick out some kind of explanation of why that might be the case. Especially when beginning in poker it's easy to get stuck in some circular morass of theory-talk. There was just so much to think about.
In most Well threads people ask the question "Did you have any 'Aha!' moments as a poker player?". My basic answer is that there is danger in 'Aha!'. Usually these moments are bi-products of doing something terrible and high variance and being rewarded for it one or two times in a row in spectacular fashion, after which it becomes habit. One interesting discussion occurred a long time ago where someone made the hypothesis that the success of prominent feel players like Hallingol, Gus etc was primarily due to the fact that when learning poker they had been lucky enough to be rewarded consistently in the right spots and so stumbled upon a winning strategy by virtue of situational variance. I don't think that's true, but it illustrates the point that our minds are especially attuned to finding situations where we make incredible "reads", when in fact we were likely hitting the bottom of someone's range and creating logical deductions after the hand to justify the positive feedback we had just received. This Aha! moment is probably a perfect example, though at the time I was convinced I was Einstein.
http://www.flopturnriver.com/phpBB2/...ss-t51339.html. What occurred here looking back was that I flopped a huge hand, decided to slowplay it, and then got angry when the river came terrible. The Aha was that my anger caused me to look at the hand closely (I vividly remember this) and overcome a sort of mental block to read hands in a different way. Up to this point I had been looking at hands forward in time: a preflop action where I would put my opponent on a wide range of hands, after which I would see how the board and action narrowed that range of hands, and then I would figure out how many hands in his range beat me by the river. My hatred of folding caused me to ask the question backwards in time: What hands would he play this way on the river which have my bluffcatcher beat? Or in this exact hand "Is he on the level where he thinks an overbet with a flush will look weak? And do I think he might be capable of a bluff?" I thought he was full of sht, called and won, but it's entirely possible that these hero calls have cost me more than they have made.
I continued to play and study all through spring of 2007. I remember running around 5 pt bb/100 for my first 3 months of poker or something similarly ridiculous. It seems unlikely I was playing well, but my aggression and just joy and concentration I projected at every session carried me through. By mid March I was playing 600nl, I don't remember what my roll was, but I'm sure it was at least 16k or so; I was pretty conservative in those days. By April I was taking shots at 5/10, which was really the first point at which I had met any significant resistance on my way up. I want to stress again this is probably because of running insanely hot, but that's how I felt. My first 5/10 shot I remember getting aces cracked in some situation where I took a funky line and lost to exactly what my opponent was representing. This continued to happen when I took more and more 5/10 shots and began to play there regularly coming into the summer. I encountered many more opponents who wouldn't just give me their money, I was still using my psychological warfare super-aggressive style, relying on them to spazz out so that I could click the call button with impunity. The 5/10 regulars were much more Tight-aggressive and had defined ranges and less betsizing tells in various spots, though they still made many mathematical mistakes. Eventually I began to stay out of their way most of the time, and actually started game selecting picking the 6 best stars 5/10 tables to play at. Even so I only ran 2 or 3 ptbb/100 for the summer, but I played enough hands that my roll binked over the 100k mark by late July.
In late June I took my first Vegas trip at the tender age of 19 with a bunch of players I had met through flop turn river and Max and Danny. I almost completely ignored all aspects of Vegas aside from the poker room that trip. I had a spot of floor-space in a friend's room at the Flamingo where I would cocoon myself in strands of the grimy, drooping window shades for warmth, catching 4 hours here and there. The rest of the time I'd be playing, I think perhaps my only experience of Vegas outside of the poker room were insomniac tilt filled strolls down the strip popping into the different hotels. I'd cashed out maybe 10k total at this point, so I was playing 5/5, and even that seemed surreal and magic.
The best session of that trip happened at the 5/5 game at the Flamingo, which for the Flamingo was huge, even drawing scattered slot refugees to peer from the rail over their cigarettes. It was also capped, I believe at either $500 or $1000, but on this night a confluence of factors created a great live game. The first was that myself and fellow FTRer Gabe (Gp333) had started drinking beers. This led to a last-longer live play bet, where the first one to leave the table had to pay 100$. And shots. Being 19, free alcohol was just too good to pass up, and by 2am we were downing Patron. The final piece of the puzzle was a short, squinchy faced Indian guy in a tweed suit who possibly coked out of his mind had left his accountant's convention to play poker. He played an unconventional style, limping maybe 75% of hands 7 handed, occasionally throwing in a raise with the top 5% or so of his range. He also completely discounted the importance of the flop, preferring to stay in until the turn anytime he was in position, had a runner draw, or one overcard. Any favorable sign on the turn brought him smiling to the river, seemingly regardless of the action. Rarely would he stoop so low as bet himself, but when pressed he would raise with TP, strong draws, sets, and a variety of missed garbage which he would bluff on the river. While Gabe and I were getting hammered he managed to decimate the stone-faced Flamingo 1/2 regulars taking a shot, causing their cowboy hats to almost visibly rise on plumes of steam above their bald heads.
This was the strangest thing. At the Flamingo apparently every single fcking regular was a retiree cowboy, playing laughably nitty and frowning for ten hours a day. Well the pair of them at the 5/5 table finally cracked around 2am that night after losing perhaps a combined $2500 and seeing Mr. accountant sitting on a $4500 stack. A few terrorist-laced racial slurs were uttered (though this specific Indian guy was in fact a HUGE douchebag this was totally gross and out of line), the floor was quickly called, and after a speech of hilarious length and eloquence the three of our gladiators sat down to fight for the honor of their race throughout the night. This was the perfect opportunity for Gabe and I! Though I was feigning serenity, impartiality, and concentration, I was actually spinning a bit and lacked the discipline to fold top pair regardless of the action. I began to just make gigantic overbets against Mr. accountant whenever I flopped top pair, betting 3x pot on flop, 2x on turn, and 1.5x or checking on rivers. This yielded great results. After managing to pair over pair cooler Mr. accountant on two separate occasions I found myself with a $5500 stack at 5/5. These were all 5$ chips which I arrayed into a massive pyramid into which I could almost be interred so my bankroll could follow my into the afterlife. Unfortunately a few hands later I managed to get top two against Mr. Accountant's flopped set, putting in 4 bets on the flop and 3 on the turn, ending with a 7200$ pot getting shipped his way. That's 1440 individual red chips, which he gleefully started tossing up in the air, actually making waves through the sea covering the entire felt. Play was suspended so his shaking, pudgy hands could create swooping towers and fantastic bridges, all the while he prattled on about this being just reward for his genius and the agony he felt sitting across from this bunch of racist pigs. It was kind of awesome, I was really drunk. I played the rest of the night, stopping at 6am to do an Irish car bomb with Gabe, and after fresh cowboys started arriving at 9 or so, we headed out.
In late August I started regularly playing 2000nl, with my bankroll peaking slightly under 150k during this period. Aside from my current gropings at 500/1k, I've never had more trouble with a limit than with 10/20nl on pokerstars. I was driven and convinced of my own poker greatness after my first six months, intent on becoming the next SbRugby. At 10/20nl a collection of regulars significantly better than me were assembled, most of them having been playing successful 10/20 since the Party era. The dynamic duo who particularly confounded me were Punketty and JMC. They were on just about every day, and no matter how much I tried to induce them into giving me their stack with my seemingly ingenious array of slowplays, overbets, and hero calls, I just kept losing to them. And it was around this time as I started what was to be my final semester at Umass that I hit my first soul-crushing downswing.
