Just felt like writing out where I’m at in my lifelong journey with poker

Wasn’t expecting this to be so long, sorry in advance for rambling. Non of my friends, family, or girlfriends have ever really understand what I do and I learned to just not open up too much about my poker life

This looked like the right forum to leave this, this is my first time back on 2+2 in years. Everything I’ve ever owned, bought, and experienced in my life I can pretty much credit to poker. I’m 34 now and been “blessed”? to not have or need a real job since my early 20s. This is a very hard occupation that you pretty much learn on your own and from mistakes and experience desperately staying away from the bottom, but that’s why I love the game, I enjoy figuring things out, I have a slight addiction to instability and a tendency to obsess over in’s and outs and why’s or how’s of things until I’m satisfied with an answer that makes sense to me.

There’s not really a guidebook or much shared experience of what it really takes to play the game professionally long term. We start with a little table learning basic bankroll management, and the variances of different games. We’re out in the jungle and to stay on top you have to be hungry for more everyday or adapt. I rly respect other poker players who made it strictly through poker their whole life, I have never been close with any personally because everyone I started the game off with either fell hard off the wagon or I learned not to trust them. It is really hard to trust and find the real ones in the poker world, it’s filled with degenerate temptations and great actors.

I’m at weird point in my career where I kind of had to admit defeat in a game, and it’s the hardest thing I’ve had to do. I have always made it through every up and down no matter where or who I was playing as long as I stayed true to what my risk is. I’ve been knocked down many times in games but never by a game that I wasn’t able to plow through stronger later on. I’ve gone through the highest highs and the lowest lows, feeling like I was so rich I’d believe I’d have infinite money forever and times it felt like I was a couple more unlucky hands away from handing in a resume to McDonald’s in the morning. But no matter what state I was in I’ve always been able to pull through it with the confidence to stay above and outwork the field.

When I was feeling at the top of my game and beating the highest stakes I’ve considered going for, I decided I wanted to travel with the freedom to go wherever whenever I wanted and switched to 1 site that allowed me to do that while still playing. I got beat down where I thought I’d be playing pretty quickly and decided to go with the slow grind up and stay extra safe. Every time I got back where I wanted to be I got beat back down to start all over. It was grueling but I was still able to deal with it and live a comfortable life for quite a while without the NEED to rly beat this game. I went a year and a half without really worrying while slightly beating one game slightly losing another but pretty break even overall. Somehow I still had the undeserved cockiness to tell myself I just had to work harder, the reason was laziness.. after some time I could at least beat the smaller stakes with some added decent rake back but realistically wasn’t making any progress. This was new to me, how are u supposed to know when it’s time to adapt and make a change? admit it’s not a good game for u, in my experience if this ever happened to the poker peeps I grew up around they kinda disappeared from the game.

I’ve endured very very long winning and losing streaks in my life and I’m already at a new low now and experiencing these are scary outside of your experience in new waters. I started to get desperate and paranoid unsure of myself and unsure if this is just the craziest hell run of cards I’ve never seen. U start wondering if everyone around u are cheating, and looking back at it this is far past the time to adapt, it was time for a new game months and months or a year before I got to this point. I was hopeless and tried something I assumed many around me were doing already after realizing everyone’s access to look up answers. It’s a weird world where thinking and reasoning go out the window but I felt like that happened to me before this feeling like a mindless zombie playing the way the computer expected me to play. I played 20k or so more hands while slightly under EV and just gave up and picked up what wasn’t nibbled away from me. I admitted defeat from online poker in general, I found my limit and it broke my soul

I’ve never told anyone that but I think it’s important for the community to know where online poker could be in certain places or in the future. I’ve been playing in live games for almost a year or so and I found a new passion for the game I didn’t know I had. Even though I’m at one of my lower points with $ and will probably be much lower after a couple weeks of wsop i feel good doing it, I feel hope again and I’m not as worried as I used to be about hitting the bottom. I stopped appreciating the freedoms I have in life that most others don’t at some point because I was obsessing thinking my life would end if I failed. Poker doesn’t always have to be the end all be all option