Initial Experiences

[hackers238]

Mine is somewhat similar, but I'll be sure to post once I'm out of work / by tonight.

[hackers238]

I learned to play texas holdem on a community service trip to west virginia (ahhh moms) in 8th grade. They told us to bring $200 spending money, as we went out to eat, and did fun things on the side which cost us money. Some kid taught everyone (he was the only one who knew how to play), and soon we were playing with a chipset he had brought. The second night we were playing for quarters, and by the end of the trip we all still had $150. It seems they had grossly overestimated the amount of money we'd need. So I played one of the biggest games of my life ($1/$2) with about 10 kids, and the kid who taught us won ~$700. Go Figure.

Anyways I brought the game home and started playing with my friends for fun. We were all math geeks, and started keeping meticulous stats in a message board online which I set up. Check out this link to see our all time stats 2004-2006. I'm in fourth overall +$200 (go me!).

Our moms were wary at first, but after kids started hosting games and our parents saw how much fun we had, they let up. We explained how the most you could lose in one night was $5, and this was about the same cost of seeing a movie, so they were cool. We only played $5 SNGs at that time, I'm not sure if we knew ring games existed. Eventually my whole town got involved (as you can see our overall standings include 100+ people, and it was quite the social event.

Around my 17th birthday, I held WeSOP, or the Westminster Series of Poker (pronounced Wee-sop). We had 23 players and a lot of fun. On my 18th birthday I held WeSOP II, which gathered 46 players from my hometown. We rented tables, chairs, bought food, and ordered engraved trophies for first second and third place. We also filmed the final table. It was a $10 buy-in. This was also when I got $15 free online at Gaming Club Poker (remember the ridiculous deals poker sites used to have?) and turned it into $100 in a week. I cashed out $80 and busted out promptly. Then there was a phase where I turned $25 (which I recieved from making 200 posts on this forum) into $200 on stars, and sold it to my friends for 2:1. This was before we were 18, so no one could deposit. I would sell $5 in PStars money to anyone who would give me $10, and there were plenty of people willing to make this deal. Looks like I'm enough of an ass to be a business man.

In college no one played. It was very disapointing to go and meet people who didn't know how to play, or wouldn't wager more than a dollar. Over senior year and summer we used to play NL50 2-3 times a week 6-10 handed. Now I couldn't play at all and this drove me to deposit online for the first time in my life. I cleared bonuses before the US ban went into effect, and used the bonuswhores website to decide which sites to play on. I remember bonuswhores having a 50% bonus max of 100 which I cleared in about 10 hours tabling (2.5 hours quad tabling). I cleared a couple of other ridiculous bonuses as well, and made some quick money.

After that I relatively quit poker for my freshman year, and played again over the summer. Come sophomore fall I deposited $200 on stars, and lost about $50 prettly quickly at NL25. This was when I decided I really want to learn how to play well, and started posting and reading here.

I want to add that I did all of this (barring the last 2 months) without knowing how to play well. Basically I was a winning player on mostly luck. Weird how that works.

[Fildy]

in b4 "but how much did you lose?"

[Wes]

When I started making their yearly salaries every other week, my parents were no longer caring about if I turned pro.

And all my friends from high school thought it was awesome that I was making money from online poker. I guess bewilderment also set in when I told a few a rough estimate of how much I am making.

[Trinket]

How long did it take you to get to this point? What was the experience like?

[Wes]

I'm sure my career path is on here multiple times, so just search for Boobie Lover on here and you'll find it if you are interested. It took like 8 months to get to that point, although I was still making like $30/hour from bonus whoring before that so I was never hurting for cash after graduating high school literally broke.

[Trinket]

Ahhh Bonus whoring.... nice to see that I'm trying to go down the right path :P. I'll take a look - thanks!