Micros to Macau

My name's Joe and I'm 27 years old and after quitting my job to play full time, I'll be blogging experiences with graphs, hands and life updates. I appreciate this is a lengthy intro but I felt it would be beneficial to write everything down and really commit to this blog to give me the best chance of success.

I was ten years old the first time I played poker. For reasons I can't remember, my older brother missed the trip so it was just my parents and I that flew off from London to Colorado on a skiing trip. One evening at the hotel there were a group of guys playing cards for cash and I hovered around them intrigued by the betting actions and cash pots moving between players on the table. I pestered them relentlessly, in a way only a child could get away with, until they taught me the rule and let me pull up a chair. 'It's $5 sit down' one of the lads said, on reflection, asking a ten year old to contribute money to a poker game was perhaps a little cold but as I've come to understand, poker is ruthless! I can't remember exactly what happened during that game but I'll never forget the buzz and excitement I felt as the cards were being turned and growing piles of dollar coins in the middle.

Fast forward ten years, I was travelling in Australia and picked up a series of nasty virus that left me in bed for a few weeks. I had family living in Aus so went to stay with them while I focused on getting healthy which was needed but extremely boring given that I couldn't leave the house and there was no internet. This lead me to a local library which is where I got my first proper introduction to poker through Phil Gordon's 'Little Green Book'. When I got my health back I sniffed out a local tourney, a $10 freezeout with 50 runners and placed third. The following week I played the same tournament and placed 2nd when I ran my AQ into AK HU - I was getting a taste of, as Paulo Coehlo put it, 'the principle of favorability, beginners luck'.

The following week, in September 2007, flew back to the UK to start my degree at the University of Southampton which is where I really developed my passion for the game. A friend of mine suggested we go to the local casino where they were hosting a freeroll paying 100 pounds to the winner and 50 for second. This would be my third ever tournament and somehow I managed to manouvre my way to HU from a field of 42 and this time going one further when my A9o held against his Ace duece to take it down.

From there it was all things poker, which mainly consisted of severely underolled live cash games, tournaments and highly profitable online sit n gos. I did manage to run up a cash game roll on PKR to $6,500 before clicking the blackjack icon after a night out on the beers and proceeded to churn through the entire roll in 2 lenghty and rather soul destroying degen sessions.

After finishing Uni I returned to Australia where my parents were living and they staked me $800 of my grandmother's inheritance to go after my poker dream. After running it up to $5,500, the pressures of mates seemingly doing very well in their jobs and the awkward conversations with strangers, friends and family around playing poker full time I crumbled and made the decision to use the money to go travelling with a mate and essentially join the rat race and give up the dream.

I started my IT recruitment career with an extremely naive view of the reality of a tough hire and fire sales job and spent the next 15 months working 12 hour days, often 6 days a week, chasing commission cheques and unattainable job security. During this entire period I played poker maybe 3 times in total and had completely fallen out of touch with what was going on in the poker world, this was until a trip to Vegas was planned for the summer of 2012 to see my older brother who now lives in California.

We were only in Vegas for 2 weeks and I couldn't really spend all my time at the poker tables so there was minimal opportunities to play poker. Despite having 3 more days in LA before we flew back to the UK, myself and my girlfriend Katie were penniless and disgustingly hungover. As we were wandering around Planet Hollywood wandering what the hell we were going to do, I noticed a $75 buy in tournament was due to start 15 minutes later and already had 35 runners confirmed. I was desperate to play!

Kate checked her UK bank account and, although this was supposed to be for our travel back from the airport in the UK, had just enough to make the buy in. I felt in the zone as soon as I sat down at the table and depsite having my kings crushed AIP in a 3 way monster pot vs AJ and AQ with 4 left, I managed to rebuild with some timely shoving and got myself HU. We agreed to chop $1000 each and play for the extra $200 which was shipped my way when my suited A8 held vs his KTclubs on a dry run out. BOOM. $1100 felt like the world that day! The money was spent on a night out and hotel in Hollywood with Kate and a drunken vegas tattoo of the Ace 8 of spades positioned wonkily on my chest with the words 'Never give up the dream' engraved under.

When we arrived back to the UK we both quit our jobs and decided to move to Sydney Australia and get out of England's drizzly and economically scrambled existance. Poker was definitely on my mind but I didn't have the courage or the belief in myself to have a proper crack at it.

I continued doing recruitment when I arrived to Sydney, this time in a much more relaxed environment. I was able to develop my skills to a highly competent level and began to earn some real money but every time I heard or thought about poker I got a strong feeling that I could really make a go of it. During the 3 years in Sydney, the first 2 years we lived in a house without internet so any poker I played consisted of taking my laptop down to the local pub with wifi or drunken vists to the 1/2 cash games. Despite only playing an average of once a month, I always felt comfortable and alive at the poker table. I did manage one decent score when taking my laptop down to the local bar. After arriving at 11 when the pub opened, me and my mate Joe who had also moved out from the UK, fired up the tables at 11am and grabbed a couple of beers. 6 hours and 8 beers later we were down to the final table for the stars nightly $55 and drones of drunken locals oggled the screen as we steamed (literally) through the final few players and shipped a tidy $6.2k.

It was another trip to vegas this year that really got me going. Walking down the corridor of the Rio past all the poker legends on the wall while everyone made there way to start their main event journey and the thousands of rustling chips as the play commenced. Awesome.

It was a culmination of all of the above along with a developing confidence in myself and what I want out of life that gave me the courage to go after the life that I want to live and chase my passion.

I'm now two months into life as a full time grinder and have been loving and appreciating every minute of life. My results have been somewhat humbling but given how little I'd played over the last few years I knew it was going to take some time. With the help of my coach and my buddy Ken who's also quit his job to grind up from the Micros, my game has improved dramatically. My focus will be on continually learning and improving and I'm happy with my progress in knowledge so far, although there is a long long way to go!

In two weeks time I'll have no money left outside poker and rent, living expenses, life in general will need to be covered by poker along with building the roll. It's going to be tight but I'm up to the challenge.

My plan is to do weekly updates around poker with some general life goals that are important for me to achieve in 2016.

Poker & Life Goals:

15k volume p/week min

7bb/100 over 100k hands

Get skilled at using a HUD

50%+ volume at 100nl by mid Feb

400nl reg before end of 2016

Get down to a fighting weight of 81kg for boxing

$3k+ tourney ship either live or online before April

Train sausage dog 'Omar' (named after the Wire character) to improve recall and obedience

I've had a total of 4 boxing bouts with a record of 3-1 but the last one was 2 1/2 years ago and the one before that was 4 years prior to getting fit and competing again is a big goal. My grind companion Omar needs a lot of training too, anyone that has owned a daschund previously will know what I'm talking about.

This entry has already gone on so I'll post a quick graph for this week and summary.

I currently play 50nl on Stars with some shots at 100nl.

Current bankroll: $3,797

http://imgur.com/RP8xrKO

Online play felt like 2 steps forward 1 step back but still happy with how I played. Luckily I took at shot at the 2/3 live games at the Star and and went on a serious heater building my $300 stack to $1,150 before taking a shot at a $220 tournament. Unfortunately it wasn't to be after calling off 60% of my stack incorrectly with KQ high then after some successful reshoving, ran A9s into Queens and that was all she wrote but still a very successful day.

Thanks for taking the time to read, good luck at the tables

Joe