It's not about the money

Hey everyone 😀, my name's Harry but booby also works and I'm 31 years old from Rochester NY. I'm starting this blog in order to document my experience with Poker Detox, a coaching for profits team led by Nick Howard. I recently graduated from their "trainee" phase and got the green light for 100nl.

Some background on myself and my poker journey:

• It's 2003 and the WSOP airs on ESPN. I watch Chris Moneymaker win the main event, and decide that my dream is to become a professional poker player, run up a million dollar bankroll, play against the best in Bobby's Room, and travel the world playing high stakes. I'm 12 years old.

• From 12-17, all I do is play and think about poker while reluctantly participating in school and sports. Online, I run up a ton of bankrolls, with the largest topping out at $150k before losing it all back. The losses hurt, but I know it's just training for when I'm older and can legally play under my own name. It's not about the money right now.

• I finally turn 18 and over the next four months grind up a $500k bankroll. I'm still in high school, but can no longer pretend to care about it for the sake of my parents or teachers, so I drop out and hop a flight to Vegas. I'm officially a professional poker player now [✓] and it feels amazing.

• By the end of summer, I lose everything but $17k and get emergency mental game coaching from Tommy Angelo, fly home, then run it back up to over $1m [✓] in about a month. From there I start traveling the world playing high stakes cash and tournaments [✓], meeting many of my childhood poker heroes along the way. At 21, I sit in the 300/600 PLO game in Bobby's Room [✓] and ship a $150k pot vs Sauce. I ****ing made it.

That was 10 years ago. I accomplished everything I dreamed of when I was a kid, and it looked great on paper. But my reality felt like a nightmare. Let's rewind a bit.

• At 19, I'm involved in a scandal where I lose my Pokerstars account and even worse, my reputation. I'm devastated, and handle the situation poorly. A few months later I fall terribly ill and spend a month in the hospital with a high fever, almost dying. My body is covered in painful, grotesque lesions while my face swells like a balloon and most of my hair falls out. I'm diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called lupus, which basically means my own cells are attacking me from the inside. It takes over two years before I can physically recognize myself in the mirror.

• As I'm recovering, Black Friday happens and the $1.1m I have online, which represents 95% of my bankroll, vanishes overnight. What the hell is going on? Will I ever get this money back? No one knows what's happening. I feel angry, hopeless, and trapped in a body that is falling apart. My relationship with drugs progresses from casual to "it's complicated," then all the way to happily committed. Numbing myself becomes top priority.

• Without poker to focus on, depression and drugs begin to dominate my existence. Before it can get too bad, I decide it's time for another joyride and create an account under the screen name "P0krparty!". I have a blast, and go on some pretty big runs before Stars shuts it down. I lose a bunch of money, but this time I knew the risks. Once again, it wasn't about the money. Now with nothing to distract me, I finally take the steps to look inward, to comfort and acknowledge my inner child who is feeling lost, frightened, and abandoned by me.

• Just kidding, I go straight to heroin. After an overdose, I check myself into rehab where I finally have the space to look at my behaviors, thoughts, perceptions, and beliefs, and begin to consciously choose what kind of person I want to be moving forward. I start pruning away the toxic people, places, and other aspects of my life that no longer serve my highest good. I move back in with my parents and start practicing what I've learned.

• Poker becomes a part time gig, more of an intellectual hobby like most people view chess, but I'm happy with the direction my life is going in for the first time in over a decade. Slowly but surely, I feel myself evolving.

For the 5 years that followed, poker continued to take a backseat as I made amazing strides within myself, the kind that can't really be explained, only felt and embodied. In that time, a lot changed in poker. Solvers with GTO strategies took over and completely changed the way the game is played. I had a lot of catching up to do, so I read books like Mathematics of Poker and Applications of NLHE, and immersed myself in videos and courses on theory. After a while, everything just sorta clicked. My passion was reignited and my love for the game grew stronger than ever.

I was fired up and started grinding, but struggled to put in serious hours. I no longer had a clear "why" behind my grind, or any poker friends who took the game as seriously as I did. I needed a new challenge, something I could get excited about, and I was tired of doing it all alone. So when I came across Poker Detox with their emphasis on community support, mindset, and personal growth, I knew it was the perfect opportunity for me.

The contract is for 600,000 hands and has a pretty cool structure in place:

You start at 100nl, or "D1".
Win 20 buy ins there, move up to D2.
Win 30 buy ins at 200nl, move up to D3.
Win 35 buy ins at 500nl, move up to D4.
Win 40 buy ins at 1000nl, move up to D5.

If you hit a stoploss threshold, you move down and win 10 buy ins at the previous limit before moving back up.

Profit splits happen every 20k hands and there's a 60k hand requirement per quarter.

I played my first hand of D1 on June 1st and I'll catch you up on how it's been going in my next post.

Lastly, I just want to say that I really appreciate anyone who took the time out of their day to read my story. It was a tough one for me to tell, and I did my best to shorten it while not leaving out too many relevant details. I'm still working on the full length version that I may publish one day on a separate blog, but for now the majority of my focus will be on reaching D2 :p