Following Impulses And The End Of My Poker Career

Hello everybody, thank you for taking the time to read what I felt was important to put into words. I don’t think this thread will be much poker strategy, although I will put certain hands I think are interesting and worthy of discussion.

I fell in love with poker in high school, which was around 2008. Online was still going strong in the states and after weeks of pleading with my mother and waiting for the perfect time to strike (that is, waiting for her to get tipsy enough to agree to me trading her $50 cash for a $50 deposit on her credit card) I was off and running. I read a ton of 2p2 back then, I’m not even sure a giant site like Reddit was a thing at the time? One thread that was on here was the iconic Matt thread. I’m sorry I don’t want to look for the title at the moment. It was all about this guy named Matt taking his last shot in poker, I believe he was an online guy. Taking his whole bankroll and going to Vegas to play live. He was a great player and an incredible writer. I remember being 16 and feeling like I was on the felt with him. If you have the time to read this, you should look for that thread first, I can’t recommend it enough.

Back to my story, I had a very good idea about bankroll management thanks to this very site, so even though I was a losing player, I stretched that $50 for months and months. I can’t remember the exact details (12 years is a long time for a guy with a memory as short as mine) but I eventually found a pushbot type spreadsheet on here. I tinkered with it for a few hours and hand wrote ranges for every position. Even with my small amount of experience I intuitively knew that the cash game players were much better than the sit n go players so I studied the spreadsheet a bunch and decided to make a run in sit n gos.

In real life I was a junior in high school, hated everything about school other than the fact that I got to see my friends everyday and had unlimited access to girls. Once you’re out of high school/college you slowly realize just how hard it is to meet not only women but solid male friends as well. Through what I thought was nothing more than a happy coincidence, my new best friend Chris lived with his single father. I had been living with my mother who had just divorced my father for a SECOND time a few years prior. After either a sleepover or just a daytime gaming session at his house (Halo 3), my mother came to pick me up. Chris’ father opened the door and I later found out he was shirtless and covered in paint while doing so.

My mom took me home and I was just happy to have a new friend that I felt extremely close with. I’ve never had problems making friends, at least when I was younger, but this friend felt different. It was exciting to be around him. I had a ton of fun even doing nothing but talking to each other. It felt like I was in the right place at the right time. I can’t stress enough how sure I am that he felt the same about me. Like we were linked in a way but we didn’t really know how.

Going Tarantino style and flipping back to the present, I am sitting in Bellagio in a 1/3 game. I’ve spent a good amount of hours in recent years here but it’s the only the second time in 2 years I’ve been here. I’m not the sicko you dream about being. If you ARE a sicko, I’m nowhere close to you in terms of poker skills and most likely life skills in general. Im a low stakes grinder, have been for 7 years now. For someone without a college degree, it’s a decent living. I’ve temporarily worked in general labor but never for very long. As I’m sure is the case with anyone reading this, that’s not the existence I prefer. I will write more but I feel a pull to post what I have here at the moment.