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 My "Great Story" (My 1000th Post)
Introduction
I decided to add this bit for newer people who don't know me so much and don't check the full ring forum. My name is Jesse, and I'm 23 years old from Bum-fucked-Egypt, North Carolina. I'm 5'9" and about 165 lbs with a decent build. I'm a part-time Applied Mathematics major at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and I currently commute there from my parents' house about 50-60 miles away. Also, I'm known as somewhat of a trouble-maker here on FTR. If a joke is made either to/from me and you don't get it, it's likely about me banging fat chicks, my dad being a racist, or me being a multitabling bot. I currently play at PokerStars, 14-tabling full ring $100nl 30+ hours a week. This post is over 2500 words, so you better read it all.
People have said they wanted to hear "the long history on your climb to the ubertableing $100NL FR maniac you have become and the thoughts and philosophies behind it, as well as how you manage to put in the hours, hands and effort you do," so I've tried to tell this "story" the best I can.
Quick Biography
My mom and dad started dating when she was 13 and he was 21. When she was 17 she dropped out of high school because she was pregnant with me. She went back and got her GED shortly after I was born. My dad has worked in construction (framing houses) since before he was a teenager, although he did finish high school.
My earliest memories of work are of working for my grand-dad, carrying shit for 10 hours a day Monday thru Friday during the summer for a straight $5/hour under the table. Sometimes we worked on Saturday too. I was either 12 or 13 years old. I wasn't allowed to use any power tools only because if I got hurt their insurance wouldn't cover it. My dad and his two brothers are third or fourth generation carpenters, and nearly every male in my dad's side of the family that I can think of has worked as a carpenter at one point or another. My dad and one of his brothers owns their own business now, and has for five or six years since their dad retired and passed along the company.
I started playing poker around the same time I started college. I played 2nl on a $50 deposit for a long time, building it up past $200 or $300 without ever considering moving up. I read very, very little about poker strategy and playing completely off common sense. I'm also a math guy, so that helped obviously. I figured out a few things by myself, like pot odds and position, and didn't find FTR until a couple of years later.
After my first two years of college, I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do, so I decided to work for a year and figure things out. The first six months were at a crappy computer retail chain (CompUSA) about 150 miles from here in Raleigh where I lived with my then-girlfriend, and the second six months were for my dad and his brother after I left the cheating bitch and moved back in with my parents. I started back to school the following fall as planned.
During the same timeframe of when I started working for my dad and his brother, I started taking poker more seriously at the lowly stakes of $0.25/0.50 6-max limit holdem. By the time those six months was up, I was playing 50nl and starting 100nl 6-max on Prima with a killer 60% rakeback deal and was preparing to make massive bank.
Fuck Bill Frist. If it wasn't for the UIGEA going through I would be so far ahead of where I am now poker-wise.
The fall I started back to school was the same fall the UIGEA crap happened. Outside of poker, I had some hard times during this fall, including my dad offering to let me borrow $1k to help with tuition until the end of the year then demanding I repay him less than a month after classes started or he would kick me out (I still live with my parents and commute to school).
So after the UIGEA stuff I decided to pull the vast majority of my bankroll off of the internet since I'm somewhat stingy and paranoid with money (even moreso then than I am now). I donked off the $100 or so I left online, and stopped playing poker completely.
Going from -$200 to +$10000
Start at April of 2007. I had dropped to part time in my classes and was tutoring math for the college to pay for gas and food, and was barely breaking even between that and my car payment. I had kept up with things legislation-wise on twoplustwo and decided that playing on PokerStars would be relatively safe for my money.
I borrowed $200 from Renton on PokerStars and started grinding full ring $10nl in May. I grinded 10nl until I had paid back Renton's $200 and had $500 in my account. Then I grinded 25nl until I had $1250 or so in my account. Then I grinded 50nl until I had $2500 or so in my account. Then I started playing 100nl scared shitless (omfg 3-digit stacks) until I had something like $5000-6000. Then I moved up to 200nl and got my ass kicked. After that I started playing 100nl again until I got back up to $5000-6000, and of course I moved up to 200nl and went breakeven for 20k-25k hands.
Finally I started playing 100nl once again and really became focused on improving my game. In November I achieved Supernova VIP status. Around the end of the November and beginning of December I stopped sucking at poker quite as bad and starting beating 100nl for almost twice what I was before, until I got to around $10000 in my account. Now the plan is to improve a few specific things in my game at 100nl and move up to 200nl sometime in January 2008.
All of this is also enduring fairly frequent withdraws of anywhere from $200 to $700. As far as multitabling, I started out with 8 and eventually made my way up to 14. I probably focus better at 14 now than I did at 8 when I started, but adding tables is something I worked at, much like what I talk about later involving increasing your playing stamina.
There's no secret to my coming back up through the stakes; I just grinded my ass off and stuck to bankroll guidelines in the process.
On Playing Longer Sessions
I used to play tournament chess for a number of years before I started getting into poker. I was decent, and my rating (1699 USCF) put me at about the 89th percentile for tournament players, meaning I was higher rated than 89% of tournament players in the United States. When you play tournament chess, single games can last for up to 7-8 hours. Once when I was 16 at a weekend tournament, I played from 8 am on a Saturday until 1 am Sunday morning with two 45-minute breaks inbetween and then got up at 7 am and played another 11 hours starting at 8 am on Sunday. In this particular tournament, I played a total of five games. I give this example of playing hours for a tournament to show the mental stamina required. I'm going to share a method that helped me build stamina for long periods of chess play and study adapted for online poker.
If you want to be able to play long sessions with any frequency, your first priority is to be aware of how long you can go before you start getting burnt out. By burnt out, I mean you start playing worse because you really don't care anymore and you want to get up and do something else. For example, if you work a 9-5 and usually play for an hour and a half in the evenings three or four days a week, your threshold is probably around 2-2.5 hours four times a week.
So here's what you do. Start off by paying attention to how long you're normally playing each session, each week. Hell, write it down or keep a text file that lists how much you play and each day for two weeks. Don't do anything out of the ordinary, just keep up with when you play. After you know where you're at, you want to try to start adding 15 minutes to the end of each session for a couple of weeks. If you play four sessions a week, this is going to give you an extra hour of play without taking up much time on any individual day.
The idea is to start conditioning your mind to handle poker information for longer and longer times, but if you don't focus on your whole session, including the extra 15 minutes, then you're basically wasting your time and will gain very little from this process. To make the most of this extra 15 minutes, make sure that when that 15 minute block comes around that you're actively engaged and trying really hard to stay focused on the game. You won't improve your playing stamina if you slack off and half-ass through this extra block of time. Now take a couple of weeks and focus on maintaining concentration through your whole session with this extra 15 minutes added on. Once you get in the habit of staying fairly focused on what you're doing, add another 15 minutes to each session and continue the process.
It sounds pretty simple because it is, as long as you don't get ahead of yourself. If you start in your comfort zone and incrementally increase your playing time to whatever goal you have for yourself, then you'll achieve your goal with relatively few growing pains. The people who have the most trouble learning to play long sessions tend to try to jump right into playing eight hour sessions six times a week when they're used to playing two hour sessions four or five times a week. Your mind cannot adapt to that big of a change so quickly and maintain (or increase) the level at which you play the game. If you try to play this long of a session out of nowhere, you'll start playing horribly at one point or another -- look at any thread where someone has played a 24 hour session (who wasn't used to it) for proof of this.
Motivation and Schedule for Playing
I remember living in a broke down single-wide trailer with the floor rotting out in the bathroom so bad that you had to step over the hole in the floor when getting in and out of the bathtub or you would fall through. I remember chopping wood to build a fire in an old wood stove we had in said trailer when I was in the first grade, so I guess I was 6 or 7 years old. I remember real food stamps before they started putting them on that debit card system. I remember my dad handing me his empty beer bottles to throw out the window at road signs when he would ride around in his truck with a six-pack when I was four years old -- I remember this very vividly as the year before I went to kindergarten for some reason. I remember getting in fights in elementary school because kids made fun of me for not having any new clothes in a year or two. I remember fucked up welfare peanut butter tearing the bread all to hell and picking up somewhere that you can mix in a little cooking oil and it'll make it smooth.
I'm not complaining. The conditions I grew up in were much better than what a lot of people grow up in, not just in other places of the world but nearby as well, and I'm thankful for how good I had it. Also, I had opportunities a lot of kids never had that caused me to develop a work ethic that tends to be stronger than that of most of my peers, even when I myself feel as if I'm being lazy.
I typically go to bed between midnight and 1 am, sometimes later. On the days I have class, I frequently get up at 5:30-6 am and play a few hours before leaving for class. Some people would scoff at the idea of this, but it's likely they've never had to get up just as early, if not earlier, and go do real work for 10-12 hours. On the days I don't have class, I'm up by 7 and playing by 9 (usually earlier but this is the limit I set for myself) after taking a shower, eating breakfast, washing dishes, and doing some other things around the house. On a typical day that I have set aside for playing poker, I'll usually play two or three sessions lasting from around three to four hours each, usually with an hour break between each session. If I don't have the day set aside for poker, I almost always play at least one session of similar length at some point during the day. My Thursdays and Fridays are always like this if I don't have class since those are the days my girlfriend has off work.
Some people have asked about how I could maintain these hours grinding up through microstakes and low stakes games, and why don't I just "get a regular job". The answer is pretty simple. At 25nl, I effectively make more per hour than I can at any job I can get around here (my win-rate for full ring 25nl in 2007 was right at 4 ptbb/100). Now it's true that as a private math tutor that my going rates are $25/hour and up, but when you add driving times and the fact that the average tutoring session lasts two hours, it's alright pay but still lower than what I make at 25nl if you add in the cost of gas.
As a student I'm able to play a lot of poker and I manipulate my playing schedule and my life schedule so that they cooperate well. For people who have full time jobs and a family and are trying to come up in the poker ranks from scratch, please don't neglect your family trying to be like my crazy country ass. Instead, gradually work on your game a few hours a week and let your online bankroll build by itself. Trust me, with the help of the players here and a little bit of work on your own part, you'll have a profitable hobby in a relatively short amount of time. I did it working 50+ hours a week when the drive to work was around an hour and I knew approximately jack squat about poker, and if I can do it, surely anyone can.
Closing Comments
I'd like to thank everyone at FTR for the constant bullshit in the commune that keeps me entertained for 3 minutes at a time at random intervals in the day. I'd like to thank Renton for loaning me the money and others for their various staking and loan offers in early 2007. Thanks to the mods for not banning me for the thong picture and other stupid shit I've done in the past couple of years. Thanks to boost, Miffed, euphoricism and Renton again for the constant poker banter in AIM. Finally, thanks to all of the IRC people since I learned most of what I know about poker from those guys.
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Originally Posted by ChrisTheFish
