Tales from the Deck: Poker Stories

The Backstory

The summer after my junior year of high school, my friends had started playing a new game for money.  It was called Texas Hold 'em, and involved cards in middle, cards in your hand, and money.  That was pretty much all I knew.  I had played 5 Card Draw as a kid, and always thought I was pretty good at it, so it was pretty easy to pickup the basics my first time playing.  I still lost, though.

It was high school, but we all worked in the summer, so the games would get "high stakes" for us very quickly.  The game was a cash format with a $20 buy-in and averaged 8-12 people.  Rebuys could be for any amount and it was commonplace to see someone into the game for $200, struggling to get it back at 3:00am.

I remember I had one real bad night early on in these home games.  I lost like $200 and it was far more than I had ever lost on anything in my life to that point.  I thought I had played good.  I knew I had played good.  I thought about it for days.   I broke down hands in my head, thought about what I did wrong, and thought about what they did right.  I realized my friends had been using advanced tactics, and that I was playing the game all wrong.  After that, it was never the same.

I realized around this time that the game has pretty much nothing to do with the cards.  Sure they factor in, but the game itself isn't about them.  It is a constant game of evaluating, planning, and executing against your human opponents.  If you know when they'll fold and when they won't, you win.

I started watching them like a hawk, as soon as the game started.  I acted relatively normal, but my eyes never left my opponents, except to glance at my cards.  It was key to gauge their temperament, maybe a bad day at work would make them force hands, where a good day at work would make them relax and be patient.  It was key to watch how they acted while they were in hands with other players at the table.  It was even more important to see all of these things happen, and then connect all that information to the cards when and if they were shown at the end of each hand.  This is when I started playing poker.

I went home and started a poker journal.  I'd write down as many hands as I could remember, all the big moments, each phase of the hand, my reasoning for each decision.  I started reading books about poker.  David Sklansky had quite a few that opened my eyes to other sides of the game.  I learned the math behind hand odds, pot odds, implied odds, and committed it all to my memory bank.  I also joined a site called Party Poker once I was 18 and made my first deposit.  At this stage I didn't think much of online poker and thought it was boring overall.

After high school, it was time to take my talents to Burlington, Vermont.  I arrived to college, and casually found out who did and didn't play poker while meeting everyone.  The first week, I had reached out to most of my hall and I decided to talk with the RA's and told them that we should set up a massive poker tournament as good ice breaker for everyone.  They agreed and said they would give the winner $25 pizza gift certificate.

About 40 people came out for the game, with a good amount more hanging out and watching.  I actually was pissed, because I wanted to play for real money and it was taking forever just to get started.  So a few hands in I say fuck it, I'm just gonna try to bluff my way to some pizza or get busted and get a real game going in my room.  I push all in, get called, hit some sort of running bullshit and all of a sudden I'm the chip leader.  I get even more pissed, because now I actually gotta play in this thing for God knows how long, for a chance at 1 and half pizzas or some shit.  I turned this anger into fuel and cruised through the whole field and took it down.  Never got the pizza though, douchebag RA's...

In hindsight, this was probably not the best idea ever, as I now had a reputation as a shark.  This is great at first, as everyone wants to beat the shark, but if they lose to the shark, they never want to go swimming again.  Poker games in college when from 10 people in a game, down to like 4.  I still played often, and made some good money in college playing poker thanks to a few determined fish, but looking back I think I would have made much more if I was more stealthy during the pizza tournament.

After college, I moved back home and most of my friends moved elsewhere.  Home games were a relatively infrequent occasion at this point.  I started playing and losing on Full Tilt Poker.  My game was built mostly on everything I had learned playing live, tells were like 90% of my game, and online there are pretty much no tells.  I had to reinvent my game again.

I bottomed out my online bankroll at around -$800 at its lowest.  I felt I was getting better and the tides were going to turn.  I had been playing for a couple years and started making the jump to bigger tournaments.  I won a $75 tourney for $1180.  Over the next few weeks, I won another $1180, and another, and another, and another.  I was up over $5k profit and feeling good about life.  I decided to take a big leap and play a $535 buyin  tourney with over 5000 people with $455k to first place.  This was more money than I had ever bought into an online game by far at this point.

With 130 people left, I am in the top 10 in chips, and there is only one other player at the table with more chips than me.  I get dealt AA.  I open from early position preflop with a standard bet.  I get massively raised by the one guy with more chips, and I go all in.  He snap calls.  He shows K10.  Flop comes K108, turn is a 10, river is a 2.  I'm out "only" up $1500, devastated after grinding for hours on end in this massive tournament, only to get donked out.  He was pretty committed at that point after his raise, but given what was at stake, this was a painful loss.  I would have been chip leader with ~120 people left playing for $455k.  He went on to pocket something like $35k in 9th.

I had gotten a taste of real high stakes poker, and I liked it.  I may have been sad about getting knocked out, but I was excited about the potential I was showing.  This little hobby of mine was turning into a nice like investment of sorts and my confidence was only growing.

Next time

I'll pick it up from here and talk about the rest of my poker career.  I'll then continue the series by getting into some tips and advice that helped me be the best poker player I could be.

Steem on! :)