How long have you been playing poker for, Matt?..
Well my poker career all began when the Animals Liberation Organization were demonstrating about how animals were being used in laboratories to test products. I was a lab monkey, at first it was make-up that was tested on me but after 3 years of dedication and hard work i was promoted to the tobacco department where i became a chain smoking monkey just so scientists could tell the human public what they already knew anyway but wasnt going to deter them from lighting up anyway. After the demonstrations it was decided that we could go free and so i decided to quit smoking - but i needed another vice to become addicted to and so i turned to poker......
I have been
TURNING UP, ADDING TO THE PRIZE POOL, FEEDING THE SHARKS
for nearly 5 years now. All started back in about 2000 or so when Late Night Poker began to take off on tv, used to come home from a night out when all my friends were plastered and i was still sober and finally there was something on tv that was worth watching. For about a year or so thats all i did - just watch. Then about half way thru 2001 i inherited a clapped out steam powered PC and decided to give the world of online poker a shot. As there was no way of downloading a site on my computer that had been built circa 1845 the only site i could play was pokerroom.com so for a year or so all i did was play the freeroll limit tourney that took place at 8pm and played some of the play money tables and sit and go's.
After a while and a few good results in the freerolls some of the players who i had been talking with suggested i play the real money tables. I decided to give it a shot, playing $5 and $10 STT's and very occasionally at weekends i would play the $20 MTT that kicked off late at night. I didnt do too badly but then one weekend i managed to get lucky by coming 2nd in the $20 MTT on a friday night then followed it up by coming 4th on the saturday - WOW over $1000 in one weekend, this poker lark was easy!! My jubilation was short lived however when i decided to move over to a cash game to see if i could build on my success and i sat at a $10/$20 limit table (i think all the games on pokerroom were limit). Not much happened for the first 20 minutes, i'd lost a few small pots but not too much but then i got involved in a pot with a pair of 8's.
It had been raised and called in 3 spots and the flop came down K-8-K giving me the full house. the betting went bananas with all 4 players getting the maximum number of bets in. The turn was a 4 it was raised then reraised i reraised a third time, the next player passed the original raiser reraised again the next player then passed so it was just the two of us. I didnt have many chips left at this point so i went all in - he called and turned over K6 o/s. I sat infront of my computer saying "No King, No six - No King, No six". The river came a 4 and for a split second i was elated until the $600 pot sped across the table to my opponent when i realized he had the higher full house - i had forgotten about the 4's giving him extra outs. So nearly a third of my bankroll that i had spent the weekend building had gone in 20 minutes. It was at this point that i decided cash games were not for me!!
It was about half way thru 2002 when i was introduced to live tournaments - purely by chance. I was in work when i went down to one of the sales departments to talk to someone about a consignment that was being delivered into our site for export when i noticed a copy of pokereuropa on one of the desks. I got talking to the person that the magazine belonged to and it turned out he was an avid player as well but he did most of his playing at the Grosvenor casino at Salford on a Wednesday and Sunday night. At the time i was still taking driving lessons so it meant getting a taxi there and back so i decided that it wasnt going to be a regular thing to start with but after making the final table on only my second visit that all changed, i began playing more live than i did online because i preferred the Pot limit game in the casino better than the limit game i was playing online. The same person who told me about the live tourneys also told me that if i wanted to play a decent online site to try pokerstars.
So part way into 2003 i decided to invest some of my winnings from live poker into buying myself a laptop - nothing fancy or state of the art but one that didnt need winding up when i turned it on. I downloaded the Pokerstars software and off i went. Instead of starting off at the lower levels i went straight in at the deep end playing the $50 MTT freezeouts (afterall when playing live i used to go with the intention of spending £30 or £40 - the equivalent of a $50 freezeout). The big difference being however that on pokerstars there were 2 $50 every evening 7 evenings a week whereas the live games were only twice a week. That coupled with the speed at which the games took place was quite overwhelming at first and within my first few months on Pokerstars i managed to lose a couple of thousand dollars very quickly, something wasnt quite right!!
All my profit from live games seemed to be going into funding my losing record on pokerstars, i had to change something and quick. I was playing exactly the same game online as i had been doing at the casino and yet my results were nowhere near as good. I noticed that there were a few players on pokerstars who regularly seemed to finish in the money (riverloser and gank were two) so instead of making more deposits and losing my money i began to watch these players instead to see if i could pick up any pointers. So for 4 months solid i did nothing online but watch these players play, i would still play the tourneys at the grosvenor to build up my bankroll but i'd save putting it in pokerstars just yet. Then at the beginning of 2004 i decided i was ready to step back into the MTT online arena.
I have to admit that luck played a very big part in that on the Saturday 10th Jan 2004 i played my first real money tournament - a $50 n/l tournament that began at 10am our time. I remember it well because i was fortunate enough to win it outright. The following day i managed to win a $50 p/l tourney outright, then on the monday i managed to make it 3 tourneys in 3 nights when i won a $50 omaha tourney despite not knowing what i was doing for the first 5 levels. I had entered it in error thinking it was a hold'em pot limit tourney and just couldnt get the hang of it during the first hour at all. It was only during the first break that a friend IM'd me on MSN to explain that i had to use two cards from my hand with 3 cards on the board!! that explained why i didnt win with a nut flush when the ace of clubs in my hand with the four clubs on board lost to someone with 2 pairs!!!
When we got to the final table someone laughed when asking me how on earth i'd made it this far but it was i who had the last laugh.
The rest of the month continued in the same vein and by the end of it i had amassed 6 outright wins (something i know was very lucky and would never be repeated again as have only managed 17 outright wins in the two years since - not including deals). This game me the bankroll i needed to be able to pick and choose which tournaments i wanted to play in and also lifted any pressure of having to constantly finish in the money to avoid going broke, i've never looked back since. There was a period about 12 months ago when i had allowed my bankroll to drop too low after going to the WPT event at the atlantis which nearly proved fatal as i carried on playing games that my bankroll couldnt sustain and the pressure of having to win regularly began to get to me and i had to stop playing for a while because my game began to suffer. I took a break, bought some more dollars so that my bankroll was big enough to continue playing at the levels i had been playing in the past and havent looked back.
Around the time that my online game seemed to be improving was the time when Salford decided that they were no longer going to provide dealers. I didnt like the "self-deal" game and so at weekends decided to travel upto blackpool to play their weekend £10 tourneys. I have to admit that i much prefer playing the live game to online and that the standard of players at blackpool appeared higher to me that where i'd played before so i did enjoy it. However the 2 hour round trip every night with the fact that my results online were getting better meant that my venturing into the live tournament arena began to get less and less. Also now with most of the festival tournaments being 2 day events it was hard for me to get time off work as i'd used up all my hoildays going to the Atlantis and to Vegas for the WSOP and so now i am mainly an online MTT monkey. Its something i am looking to change this year - but only time will tell
and thats about it in a nutshell, the life story of a poker playing monkey. The plan this year is to join Snoppy in giving up work and joining the professional ranks but i'd better finish this peice otherwise i fear that day may come quicker than i had planned!!
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