Poker bio

So, if I ever have to ( / have the honor to) do a "well post" on 2p2, I don't have to think as hard about the early stages of my poker carrier. I also already forgot things so I think it's good to save what's left.

My first contact with poker was a long time ago when I was a small kid. We had a book with all kind of card games, and one of them was poker. We tried to play it, but nobody really understood it, and the 20 chips we had were going in the middle anyway preflop, so we didn't really understand how it worked. We didn't try to play it again later, my most -EV move ever.

I got back in contact with poker in the 5th and last year at the university. I think it was somewhere around march 2006. Together with my two best friends, a brother of one of them we played a night and I found out it's a lot more fun with more than 20 chips. I learned key concepts like 'the nuts' and I found it a deep thought that when you have top pair, somebody needs to have top pair or a bigger hole card (or two pair+) to beat you.

The next fortunate series of events was that I downloaded some pdf's about poker (mainly Lee Jones), and the guy from who I downloaded (so now you see why peer-sharing programs are better than torrent-like systems) asked me if I played poker, and I found out he was playing online and made some nice profits. I had no intention of playing online and thought that bots could easily take your money (I read the story about winholdem shortly before), but he told me about "shasta's", 10 man limit SNGs at Everest Poker. No cost to enter, and a whopping price pool of $0.05 for the winner, $0.03 2nd and $0.02 for a 3rd finisher. I played those with Lee Jones next to it; flopping a set, looking for 'set' in bookmarks, seeing it was quite a good hand and raised away. Slowly I got some feeling for the game and made it to about $0.80.

Playing the SNGs was quite boring; people played really bad so tight play made it to the money. I also kept on playing tight HU and would put me into embarrassment if I could see it now but the others were equally bad so I don't think it really mattered. Finally we had enough of it and made a small bot playing those games. The first version just raised AA KK QQ AK, and kept on raising till showdown. Things did go horribly wrong with QQ on a AKx flop but it made money anyway. We tried to improve the bot, but due to a programming error it folded every single hand - it still made money. Combinations of virtual machine's, macro express scripts etc made it to a bot which obeyed work, eat and sleeping times and we soon had more money than we ever dreamed of - something like an amazing $5.

Before that, I then took my $2 BR to play at FR limit $0.01/$0.02 stakes. Luckily, the first sessions were good; I don't know if I could handle downswings then. I ran to $18, down to $11 and slowly up from there. The step to $0.02/$0.05 was a big one for me; I adjusted to much for the higher level (trying to bluff, etc) which obviously didn't work.

In the summer I finished my thesis. I know I had about $350 in september 2006.

- to be continued -