WillisNYC

I am going to take a break from my narration of my personal history today to discuss some of my most recent live play activities.  I have recently stepped up my efforts to win my way into WPT and WSOP main and circuit events.  Hence I have been traveling to Foxwoods and Atlantic City whenever those events come to town in order to attempt to ’satellite’ in to their main events.  On that front I must report much frustration.  I have entered 5 of the $1000 satellite events to date, with most of them paying around 10-12 entries.  I have finished within ten spots or less of the seats in 3 of my attempts.  Very frustrating to get that close and fail.   I have also entered several of the lower buy in events and have had little success in them as well. 

Thank god I still know how to play cash, because as soon as I bust out of an event, I go searching for juicy cash action and I usually find it!   After one of my bustouts at the Borgata WPT event, I ended up playing cash at a $2/5 NL table.  (Yes I still play $2/5 live from time to time if I don’t find the right conditions at $5/10 or if they don’t have $5/10.   Borgata is the only AC casino which consistently offers $5/10 by the way.)  This table was playing pretty normally for most cash games in AC and I was able to build my chips up to $750 or so from the initial $500 buy in.   The table had a light jovial mood with plenty of verbal jousting going on.   My favorite environment for a great, live cash game.   The action had been surprisingly tight and I had few opportunities in the next couple hours.    The preflop action was surprisingly tight for $2/5 and I started to open up my game a bit by calling some raises with suited connectors.  (Students of my game know I hate to normally call raises with suited connectors.) 

A tight, fairly solid player opened in middle position for $15, was called by one late position player and I called in the big blind with 56s.   Not a standard play by me, but I figured the price was cheap since most raises were coming in for $25 or more on this table.   Also, the original raiser and the caller had stacks as big or bigger than mine making the implied odds very good.     The flop was JQk with 2 spades.   I normally like to lead out when I have a draw, but this flop was very likely to have hit one or both of my opponents and I decide to check.   The initial raiser bets $30 into the $45 pot and is raised by the late position caller to $60.  I hope that both players stay in which would give me perfect drawing odds and I call the $60 bet.   The initial better totally screws up the equation by reraising $100 on top of the $60.   The initial raiser folds leaving me heads up.  I can now call $100 to win the $325 in the pot plus the implied odds of getting his stack if I hit my draw.  His $100 raise tells me he has a very strong made hand at this point and I put him on a set or AT for the made straight.   His anxiousness to end the hand now makes me think that a set is his most likely holding.   I have 4-1 drawing odds to hit my flush on the next card and I can get away from the hand without too much damage if I miss on the turn.  I also think that I have zero fold equity, thus I don’t even consider pushing in this position as some of my more aggressive colleagues recommend. 

When a red 4 hits the board on the turn, all these calculations are pretty meaningless.   I sit quietly considering my options for a second and look up at my opponent.  My opponent is a twenty something ‘kid’.  Three quarters of the table are twenty somethings just like himself and that has contributed to the consistent banter on this table.  For some reason, my look inspires ‘the kid’ to start talking.  ‘Sir, you have gotten yourself in quite the predicament here.  If you check, I am going to push and I don’t think you can call.   Furthermore, if you bet, whatever amount you bet, I will call. ‘  His smug smile of satisfaction disappears in an instant as I raise one lowly $5 chip from my stack in drop it on the felt in front of me.   The whole table cracks up in laughter as they all realize exactly what has happened.  ‘The kid’ begins to bluster and says, ‘You can’t do that!….Well, I am going to raise here!’   I reply, ‘No sir, you are not going to raise.  You can either place one red chip in the pot as you promised or you can call the floor right now!   I am going to bind you to your word SIR!’   ‘The kid’s’ face looks like a teakettle the instant before it is set to boil and the whole table is laughing nervously at his predicament.   ‘The kid’ asks the dealer if he can raise and the dealer says no.  “Floor!” shouts ‘the kid’.  A floorman comes over to the table.  Once he gets silence, he asks the dealer what happened.  The dealer reports the action and repeats ‘the kids’ statement word for word.  The floor asks ‘the kid’ if he said that and he confirms that he did.  ‘The kid’ starts to bluster, ‘I only said it so the GENTLEMAN could save his chips.  I was trying to be NICE!’  The floorman replies, ‘ I am sorry sir but verbal declarations when heads up are binding.  Since you two were heads up when you said that I have to ask you to call and honor your word.’   The kid asks for the floorman’s supervisor who eventually comes over and confirms everything just as the floorman did!    At this point, the ‘teakettle’ explodes, hurling obscenities, but luckily for him, at no one in particular.   He finally, reluctantly, places one red chip on the felt in front of him and the dealer turns the last card. 

The last card is the threatening, but beautiful ace of spades.  I instantly push all my remaining chips into the pot.   When ‘the kid’ starts boiling over once again, all my lingering doubts are erased and I know I have him.  I try to think through what I can say to get him to call.  I have remained calm and pretty silent through the whole episode, so I remain silent and try to look nervous as if I am on a bluff here.  My eyes dart around the table, looking at different faces, my expression unchanging.    ‘The kid’ is so furious and his mouth is berating everyone so quickly that I doubt he saw or noticed any of this.  Finally, after literally five minutes of anxious waiting the kid violently shoves his whole stack into the pot.  Half of it ends up in the dealer’s tray!  I flip over my flush and ‘the kid’ is just foaming at the mouth, he is so furious as he flings his ATo at the dealer.

I was concerned that he may try to physically attack me at this point and I kept my eyes on ’the kid’ as I raked in the substantial pot the dealer pushed in my direction.   The kid leaves the table and I breathe a sigh of relief as he storms out of the poker room.    A young player next to me turns to me saying, ‘Sir that was the most incredible play I have ever seen!  If I don’t win a cent today, that whole hand was well worth my price of admission today!’  ‘Thank you, but I wish my conscience was as comfortable with that sentiment as you are.  I really feel bad for ‘the kid’ because I really think, he thought he was trying to save me money with his statements.’ 

Regardless of my conscience, bear in mind that all verbal declarations at a poker table are binding when heads up! 

2005 ended with the feeling that my poker rocket was finally in flight.  I was able to go ‘pro’ once again and the bankroll was growing by leaps and bounds.  Jan 05 saw me at the $.01/.02 penny NL tables while December 05 saw me starting to dabble on the $5/10 tables!   My MTT numbers were growing as well.  My overall ROI for 05 was 82% with over $20,000 cash in net profit.  I had played only 556 MTTs during all of 2005 with my new focus on cash games.  That average of just about 50 per month was far less than the 150 per month I was playing while pro in 2004.   I made the money 107 times, the final table 67 times and had 19 top 3 finishes in my MTTs.   Thus my in the money percentage overall was 19.2%, FT% was 12% and top 3 finishes was 3.4%.   I played almost all my MTTs on UB where the fields only averaged about 200 entrants.  I had also made the FT of the UB $200 twice and the $500 once but never finished higher than 5th.  In 2006 I wished to continue to focus on cash, but also try to finally win one of these large buy in events which on many sites was garnering nearly 5000 players now (Pokerstars and Party.)   I also had the WSOP Main Event in my sites and was determined to win my way into that event as well. 

I started the year by playing $5/10 NL which I had only played half a dozen short sessions before January of ‘06.    I began playing $5/10 resolved to return to $3/6 if I lost 3 buy ins. Instead I began a fabulous run on Bodog which saw me win  14 out of 17 days that I played at $5/10 NL on Bodog!    January effectively doubled my bankroll and I was able to comfortably play $5/10 by the end of the month.  My February and March results were comparable to January and I was shocked to find that $5/10 play on Bodog at that time was no tougher than $1/2 on UB.  My bankroll grew by leaps and bounds!

Pokershare restarted with a new partner and rewarded all of us top ‘grinders’ from their LA WPT contest with cash and a promise to buy us into $5000 worth of WSOP events if we simply played long enough to earn the amount of points that would have completed their earlier WPT contest.  I began playing there in earnest.  Pokershare also offered tournaments where they ADDED a WSOP prize package worth $13k to the prize pool!   I didn’t even hear about the promotion until about 2 hours before the event.   My buddy called me and asked me to play because they needed a minimum of ten players for Pokershare to honor their prize pool add!  The buy in was $270 and I was shocked to see that only 13 players registered for the tourney!!    In summary, I won and was going to the WSOP ME for a total of $270 expended!   I was on the moon!   Pokershare continued to offer this amazing promotion and 3 weeks later I won my 2nd package for the WSOP ME from a total field of only 16 players!  My story of those two days can be found here: http://www.thepokercamp.com/articles/willisnyc.htm

All my recent success was garnering me a fair bit of notoriety!  WPT UK magazine interviewed me and asked me to write an article for their magazine.  They had seen my articles which were appearing with fair regularity on pocketfives.   Most of them can also be found here: http://www.thepokercamp.com/articles/willisnyc.htm   I also had several articles written for pokermentors.   All the writing served to clarify my feelings about many subjects and helped my poker game even more. 

I had little live experience, so I began trekking down to the Atlantic City casinos a couple days per month in order to get some.   I played $1/2 NL and $2/5 there and promptly started crushing those games.  My win rate was a sick $50/hr at 1/2.  I quickly discovered that ‘low level’ live 1/2 players were far worse live than online.  That is because 1/2 is as low as you can possibly play in a casino, but online, beginners can and do play far lower.   So live 1/2 players began paying my child support payments and I continued to make good money in the $5/10 NL games I found primarily at bodog.    I wrote about some of my live exploits here: http://www.thepokercamp.com/articles/WillisNYC_08.htm

Summer was fast approaching as well as the WSOP.  Pokershare was going to put me up in the RIO for three weeks during the WSOP.  I worked hard all spring preparing and decided to take a little break before going out to Las Vegas.  I took my children with me to visit my parents and then we intended to take some time traveling the southwest.   While visiting my parents I began to get the poker itch and decided to scratch it by playing the majors one Sunday while at home.  All of the poker stars were aligned for me that day as I managed to win the Paradise Poker $200 buy in that day.   Details here:  http://www.thepokercamp.com/articles/WillisNYC_11.htm

With some extra spending money in my pockets I headed out to the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, the Painted Desert, LA and Las Vegas with my 14 and 16 y/o daughters.   After two weeks of enjoying the sites and sounds of the southwest I sent them flying home to New York.  I remained behind to start playing in the WSOP events that I was registered for. 

My first event was the $5k short handed NL tournament.  It garnered around 550 starters and I was surprised to find one of the regulars from my Bodog cash games to my right on the table.  Gavin Smith sat between myself and the above mentioned Johnny Action on my right.   The early levels were marked by fairly uneventful play on my table.  Johnny and I seemed to upset Gavin’s game quite a bit since we never let him 2x limp into a pot we were involved with.    He never got anything going and busted out after a couple hours.  Johnny got the player on my right on serious tilt and proceeded to bust him on two hands that put his stack over 20k at about the 4th hour.  I was up to about 8k by that time, nothing to write home about.  After the 5th hour or so I was finally able to double up and they moved me to another table shortly thereafter.   

Some fellow in a cowboy hat was on my left at the new table as well as an Asian woman and an older gentleman on my right.   I was short stacked at this table and for the tournament in general since I had done little more than tread water and finally double up after 6 hours of play.  I was shocked to learn that we were getting close to the money already!    A Norwegian fella raised under the gun and I found myself looking down at a lovely pair of nines.  It was folded around to my button and the blinds were high enough that an all in push was the right move for me and my nines.   The Norwegian called with KJ and I was able to double up to get my M back up to around 15.    Earlier the cowboy had said, ‘New guys don’t get talked to until they win a hand.’  I winked at him after the hand and said, ‘Hi, my name is Brian Willis’  ‘Kenna James’ he replied.  Joe Awada  took this time to say hello from my right.  I thought these two guys looked vaguely familiar when I sat down!

Joe and Kenna each had over 100k in chips by this point.  The other players had about 50k, I had 35k now and the Norwegian was short stacked with about 20k.  The play was pretty tight  with some occasional pushes.  The asian woman turned out to be Jenny Kang and her constant banter was quite amusing.  Just before the money bubble was reached I stole from UTG with AJ.  Jenny was on the big blind and debated in her head a long time about whether to call or not.  She eventually did and the flop came Jxx rainbow.   She bet out and I came over the top all in.  She called with her own AJ and she proceeded to berate me about my play.  ‘How could I risk $8300 on top pair?’  (The first payout level was $8300.)  I never replied, just shook my head, gathered my half the chips and went on.  The bubble burst the hand after my all in play.    By the way Jenny, I wasn’t playing to make the money, I was playing to go deep in this tournament. 

I got up and looked around at the dinner break and there were tons of ‘big’ names hanging around in the tournament.  Phil Hellmuth was short stacked on the table next to me where Eric Lindgren, John Juanda and a couple of unknowns all had monster stacks over 200k.  It was quite amusing hearing him berate their play especially when he was busted out soon after the money bubble burst.    Vanessa Rousso, David Pham, Dustin Woolf, Robert Williamson and Marco Traniello were all around as well.   We played down to 36 players that night.  I was lucky to make day two of my first WSOP tournament since my stack refused to grow after the bubble and I was getting seriously short stacked again. 

Day two opened with the same players on the same tables as the night before. 4 of the other 5 players were all the same as when I first sat down at the table the evening before.   I never did know the latecomers name.  Very early in the first day I got in a SB vs BB battle with Kenna to my left and I was fortunate to double up early on when I won a race.  I now had a stack to be reckoned with and with another double or so I was likely to make the final table.   The action was fast and furious on the other tables as we were soon consolidating down to 5 and then 4 tables.  Our table lost the ‘new guy’ at the table and he was replaced by another with a stack over 100k.   This new stack played pretty tight for a while but after several orbits, he got involved with Joe Awada.   Preflop was about a 10k raise by Joe and a call from the new guy.   An AKx board with two hearts was bet out by Joe for about 3/4 of the pot.  New guy calls.  The turn is a blank and Joe bets 50k and is called by the new guy in the BB again.  The river comes a low heart and the new guy pushes all in for his remaining 100k or so.  Joe takes his time counting down his chips and would have about 80k left if he makes the call.   He wouldn’t be short, but he certainly wouldn’t be the table leader anymore if he called and lost.  He finally folds the hand and the new guy shows a total bluff with something like T3 offsuit.   Joe was furious and said he couldn’t believe this guy would try this total bluff so late in the tourney!

The Norwegian had remained short stacked and pushed all in from UTG for about 50k.   I had 80k now and looked down at a beautiful pair of red aces.  I push and end up HU with the Norwegian who turns over A8c.  The flop has the case Ace and two clubs.  My heart sinks as I get that really, bad, beat feeling coming my way.  The river doesn’t disappoint and brings a club with no board pair, much to my chagrin.  I managed a couple of all in steals with my newly shortened stack but it is only a matter of time if I don’t catch some breaks now.    The Norwegian gets put out by Jenny Kang and gets her stack up to a healthy level.   Joe Awada raises from UTG and I have a pair of sixes.  Not a great hand as a short stack, but not bad and I push.  Joe instacalls with pocket nines.   I don’t get lucky and go out of my first WSOP event in 19th for a little over 11k. 

 Not a bad start to the World Series but it was heart wrenching to come so close to the final and not make it.  Later I found out that Jeff Madsen is the one who pulled off the crazy bluff on Joe Awada and went on to win the whole event, beating Lindgren HU.   Jenny Kang went on to just miss the final, taking 9th.   All in all a great experience for my first WSOP event.    Next blog I will share my main event experience with you….

My 77 cent bankroll made me re-examine everything.  I was a winning MTT player, but regardless, I was sitting as well as broke with 77 cents in bank account!  I had picked up 2 part time jobs to pay my bills and I was still playing poker in most of my spare time.  My readers may recall that I mentioned a colleague of mine who claimed to be making $10k/mos playing 1/2 cash games during 2004.   I had studied and played his style ‘on the side’ last year while I was focusing on MTTs.  My results were good, but nowhere near what my friend was making/doing.   The most attractive thing that he told me was that his monthly variance was low.  He had a low month of $6000 and a high month of $13,000 during 2004.   My best month with MTTs was beating his low month, but not even up to his average of $10k.  My friend was doing what I needed to do.  He was generating steady monthly income like clockwork. 

With 77 cents in my account, I had little choice of what to do regardless.   I didn’t even have enough funds to play 1, one dollar SNG.    I sat at $.01/.02 cash table with my last 77 cents and put it to work.  My first cash table was kind to me and by the end of the day I had $12.29 in my account.  I obviously had too little cash to follow proper bankroll management at $.01/.02 but I swore to myself I wouldn’t move up to the next level until I had a ‘proper’ bankroll.  After reading some articles, I decided on 20buy ins as my standard bankroll for a given level.  Thus I needed $40just to be properly bankrolled for $.01/02. (20 buy ins)   $200 was needed to play $.05/.10.   I also decided that in order to have a ‘cushion’ I would make sure I had 25 buy ins before moving up to the next level to ‘take my shot’.  Then if I lost back down to 20 buy ins, I would drop down to the old level in order to rebuild to 25 buy ins before moving back up again.   Using this method, I could assure myself of a less than 1% chance of going broke as long as I made sure that I dropped down immediately when I hit 20 buy ins for the level I was currently on.   Thus my $12.29 now needed to become $250 before I would move up to $.05/.10.  

I grinded away nightly and was immediately rewarded with progress.  Within 5 days I had $118.13.   At two weeks I had $198.42.   I was almost there.  Two days later I was down to $54.  UGH!!  I continued to grind the penny games with 2 tables on my monitor and was rewarding by hitting my $250 goal just before the end of month one!  One level down and 4 more to go before I could reach the $1/2 level where my friend was making the $10k/mos that I needed.   I continued to play occasional MTTs ‘on the side’ during this time as well.  I would take ’shots’ at $5 and $10 MTTs hoping to ’shortcut’ to the next cash game level.  The first two months I was break even in results of these 30 or so MTTs.  By the end of February, my bankroll had grown to $400 as I was immediately successful at the $.05/. 10 cash game that I was starting to play.   However, I still had more to learn about cash games as I stagnated at this dollar amount for the entire month of March.  I needed $625 to start playing $.10/.25 and it stayed tantalizingly close for the entire month of March. 

April was the month I finally broke through.  The 2nd day of the month I managed 1st place in an MTT on UB.  I scored $1449 and decided to play another one that evening.  I took 5th in it for $516 more.   $The bankroll topped $2500 at the end of the day!  This was enough cash to move me all the way to $.50/1.00 and put me within reach of my goal to play $1/2 NL.   However I took my time moving up in the cash games.  I knew that each level would be progressively harder, so I took my time moving up.  I spent a week each, at $.10/25 and $.25/.50 before tackling $.50/1.00.   I had purchased Pokertracker and was able to keep track of my stats since I started focusing on cash games.  My bb/100 hands was over 10 during the entire month of April as I moved up the levels. 

My cash game was really flourishing as I moved up to $.50/1.00 by the middle of April.   In May, I ended up with $5700 in net profit for the month!  I withdrew nearly half the profits to buy a new computer and dual screens so I could really amp up my play!  I was now playing at least 2 cash games and 2 MTTs every evening as my efforts were really coming together.  My new bankroll now allowed me to play $1/2 and I just needed some time to prove that I could be successful at that level as well.  I spent much time talking about hands and situations with my cash buddy and all the input helped my game more and more.  I also discovered that many of my cash game strategies could be employed to great success in MTTs as well.  Harrington on Hold’ Em1 and 2 had come out by the beginning of 2005 and many of his ideas enhanced both my cash and MTT games. 

June, July and August were my ‘test’ months.  I figured if I could make $3000/mos in $1/2 cash games, part time, then I could manage $10k/mos if I quit one of my part time jobs and went full time.  (My 2nd part time job was as my building superintendent so that I was entitled to free rent!)  I averaged $4k/mos during that time span while playing $1/2 NL cash part time.   I had also expanded my horizons dramatically.  I had opened up accounts on all the major sites and made sure each account received rakeback.   I also began to focus on satelliting into the Sunday majors on all the sites and then playing those majors every Sunday.   Other than that, my focus was on cash games.   

In September I was ‘fired’ from my part time job and I was back to being a ‘Full time’ pro again.   I really buckled down and began to ’seriously’ grind $1/2 cash games as soon as I was full time again.  I spent an average of 12hours/day on the tables, 25 days a month, only taking time off when my daughters were at my apartment every other weekend.   My efforts were immediately rewarded with success, as I was able to make $11k during that first month as well as another $5k in rakeback.  I was determined to never return to working a regular job again!  The new bankroll enabled me to play $2/4 now and my success continued. 

Pokershare opened up in September of 2005 in partnership with UB and I began playing there regularly.  They were sponsoring a contest for the top ten rake generators on their site.  The first ten people to generate 75,000 points on their site (roughly half that in total rake) would receive $13,000 packages to play in the LA WPT event in January of 2006.   By the end of October I was well on my way to winning a seat, being in 2nd place overall and was just short of halfway to generating enough rake to get the trip!  I figured that I would just be able to complete the required amount of rake by Thanksgiving.  At the end of October, UB pulled the plug on the partnership and said Pokershare had violated their agreement with them.  I was devastated since I truly desired to play in some of the WPT and WSOP events.  My cash game was continuing to progress and I was now starting to play $3/6 NL.  However, being robbed of my chance to play in the WPT event seriously crushed my spirits. 

I had begun posting on PocketFives.com in 2005 and started writing articles for them.  I also joined another poker friend in starting up Pokermentors.com.  On Pokermentors I was the only cash game instructor and began to regularly take on students to teach them my cash game strategies.  The articles on Pocketfives and Pokermentors brought a steady stream of students that I charged $100/hr for my instruction.   Once again, I was forced to write down my strategies so that I could explain them to my students.  This brought even greater clarity to my games.  I continued to satellite into the major MTTs and I finally managed some good results there.  In November I made the FT of the Bodog 100k guaranteed and took home $5400.  In December I made the FT of the UB $200 buy in and took down 6th for $6750.    Overall in 2005, My MTT ROI was up to 82%.  I netted just over $20k from MTTs and combined with my cash game winnings, I now had the bankroll to take on $5/10 NL.  The last few months of 2005 were like a rocket finally taking flight!   I wondered what 2006 would bring?

I began 2004 with the dream of playing professionally for a living.  As a divorced father, with 2 kids in private school in New York, a substantial income would be needed to make that possible.  The reality was that I would have to continue the job I had, until I built a bankroll substantial enough to sustain my playing and pay my bills.    A bankroll of $400 wasn’t going to make that dream possible anytime soon.     My MTT play was improving  though and primarily through MTTs I built the bankroll up to $3000 slowly grinding away at the $5-$20 MTTs on UB.   I was also beginning to ape my buddys cash game style.   He was playing $1/$2 NL and claimed to be making $10k/month.    I had a very hard time belieiving that number, but it was obvious that he was winning consistently in the cash games. 

My MTT ‘prowess’ made me well known enough on UB to have a few people request that I teach them what I knew about how to win MTTs.   My style in MTTs was a very tight style that I learned from Phil Hellmuth’s book.   One of my students wanted everything written down so that he would be able to review everything afterwards.  Writing down the hands I would play in what position and writing about the different plays to be made at each level of an MTT really solidified my philosophy in this regard.   It improved my game because now I really needed a REASON to make each and every play that I made.   I felt that I should be able to explain everything I did and why to my students as I played.    The important thing here is the process.   I had now internalized a philosophy and could write about this poker playing strategy.  By writing down my strategy, I really improved on what I had started with and laid the strategy open to constructive criticism from my students.  The process made me open up my game a little and my MTT play improved as a result.  I was emerging from my ‘rock’ shell and started to become a real poker player.  I am not trying to say that everyone should be able to write their poker playing strategy down in order to become a better player.   Just that for me, that was and still is the case. 

My increased bankroll allowed me to play higher levels of MTTs and I started trying to satellite into the big $200 and $500 buy in events on UB.   My better play really began to garner results too.  I won 6 small tournaments on UB in May and had over a 100% ROI for the first month ever.   I played 166 MTTs that month.  29 were final tables and 10 others landed me in the money.   UB MTT fields were small in those days with most of the fields consisting of 200 players or less.  Thus, the numbers above reflect that since the FT percentage of 17% is unrealistic in todays day and age of much larger fields.   I made a little over $8000 that month and truly thought I was about to be able to make a run at playing for a living.   The $5000 I made the next month was still more than I needed to pay the bills and I decided to make a run at my dream!

The summer continued to go well and I let my advertising contracts lapse.  My bankroll had only grown to $4000 as I was constantly withdrawing to help pay my bills but my growing confidence convinced me that I could pay all my bills with my play.   If I could maintain that 100% ROI or better it, I could just survive on that $4000 bankroll.  Playing 150 MTTs a month can quickly become a grind and over the next few months, I was ground down since I was only averaging an ROI of 50% after May.   My bankroll was steadily deteriorating as I had to withdraw more than my profits in order to pay my bills.   Less money in the account gave me less breathing room and made my play more tentative since I felt I had to win to survive.  By October I had been ground down to under $1000 in my bankroll and I picked up a part time job to help with the bills.   In November, December and January the bleeding continued and I was left with 77 cents in my account on Jan 30th, 2005. 

From May to January, I was a winner every single month.  But because now I was playing for a living, the constant withdrawals depleted my bankroll faster than I could replenish it with MTT wins.  77 cents made me reexamine everything.    I just knew I could make a living at this game if I just found the right strategy.   The question was, what was it?  I was clearly a better than average MTT player, but my experience showed me that the added stress of playing for a living crushed the winning style I had developed.  My next blog provides the answer that I came up with.   And best of all, the answer started with the same 77 cents that I still had left in my account!

    I sort of stumbled into playing poker professionally.   I had sold advertising on the web since 1996 when a marketing director at one of the online casinos asked me  if I could sell ads for online poker.  This was the spring of 2003.    I told him of course since I had sold many ads to online casinos over the years, but…..what is this online poker thing?  We promptly downloaded his sites software and started playing play chips so that I could understand what I was selling.   The interface was clunky and it wasn’t real money, but I was intrigued.  I have always played games since I was a child.  I played and owned nearly all the Avalon Hill strategy board games that came out in the 70s and 80s.   The bigger, more complex the games (like 3rd Reich, a simulation of WWII in Europe or the Longest day which simulated the Normandy landings with thousands of pieces representing units as small as battalions) the more I liked and played them.    I also played chess and nearly all the other board and card games that children and adults play.  I was fiercely competitive in game play and ABSOLUTELY hated to lose.  Online, I was the acknowledged champion worldwide in Civil War Generals II which provided players with the opportunity to recreate all the major battles of the Civil War.  CWGII was the game I was ‘into’ in 2003 spending much of my free time on it.   Now, I had played poker for penny stakes as a kid in high school and I was considered a ‘good’ player when I played poker in the Army.  However, I knew absolutely nothing about Hold’ Em.  My wee bit of experience was one session at limit hold’em in an Atlantic City casino back in the early 90s and that experience had not been good!   I lost my $100 buy in at $1/2 Limit Hold Em’ in about an hour.  

The first thing I recognized was that I really had no idea how to play ‘winning’ poker.   I continued playing play chips in my free time and went to the store to get a poker book.  The first title I saw that looked like a ‘how to’ manual was Phil Hellmuth’s much maligned ‘ How to Play Poker Like the Pros’.   I treated the book like it was gospel and started playing play chips exactly as he recommended.   I started winning play chips, consistently, almost immediately.  I forget how many thousands that I accumulated, but it was a LOT.  WOW I thought, this guy Phil must really be on to something.  In retrospect, yes he was.  His book recommends that players only play a very limited amount of starting hands.  With this books recommendations, I learned to play VERY tight, semi-aggressive poker.   For a beginning poker player, this is a very good thing. 

After a month of accumulating play chips playing limit hold em, I decided to dive in and deposit some money online.   I played $1/2 limit and $5 and $10 Sit n Go’s.  My initial $100 deposit, that was matched by deposit bonuses lasted me all summer.  I wasn’t winning much, just breaking even basically, but I was learning how to play.  I logged MANY, many hours.  I am sure that I averaged at least 6 hours a day every day in my spare time from April 2003 when I first started with play chips until the end of the summer.   I was fortunate to be selling advertising from home primarily to European online casino sites.  Thus I would make my necessary calls by noon, have lunch and settle in for the afternoon and evening playing poker.    Yes, I was playing a lot because I wanted to see if I could make a go at making a living at poker.  The online ad business had become boring to me after all those years and I wasn’t making a ton of money.  If a dumbass accountant from Tennessee could learn how to play well enough to win the World Series, then I could learn how to master what was after all just another game.  A game unlike any other because it is much more about the people playing rather than just about my hole cards and the board.  However at this time in my development, it was really all about the cards, not yet about the people.  

I began to read other poker books and examined other pros ideas about how Hold’Em should be played.  Ken Warren’s book on Hold’Em had all the numbers that I was looking for and I posted them on piece of paper next to my computer.   All those numbers that I posted can be found in another article I wrote about the ‘Basics’ of poker.  http://www.thepokercamp.com/articles/WillisNYC_01.htm  I had been playing limit poker and NL SNGs on Paradise when Paradise did not have MTTs.  While playing an MTT live in Atlantic City, an acquaintance recommended UB as a place that had MTTs.  MTTs fascinated me so I withdrew my mini $135 bankroll from Paradise and deposited it on Ultimate Bet.   There I began playing MTTs in addition to my limit cash games and SNGs.   Most of the poker books recommended keeping detailed playing records so by Sep of 2003 I was recording every MTT result and my cash balance at the end of every day.    Looking back I can see that I built my $135 all the way up to $1263 in a week of playing on UB.  Most of the win was from limit cash games and I actually began withdrawing money for the first time.   A week later I was busto as I had moved up to $3/6 cash games and learned the hard way that proper bankroll management is one of the biggest keys to winning poker.    One of my $100 withdrawals was promptly redeposited as I vowed to learn and follow proper bankroll management as recommended in the books I had read. 

September turned into October and my $100 began to steadily grow as I cautiously built my bankroll once again.   Limit poker was my bankroll builder back then as I did not have the confidence needed to play NL cash games.  I was also playing lots of MTTs and slowly getting results there too as well.    October 8th saw me take 2nd for the first time in an MTT.   I was WAY ahead in chips HU, but felt like I was totally dominated and lost not unsurprisingly.  I vowed to become better at HU, read a lot about how to properly play and began playing HU SNGs on UB till I felt like I was competent enough that HU, I would not feel outplayed by anyone.     The next time that I got HU in a MTT, I was able to take it down, winning my first one in November of 2003 for a whopping $369.  Not much money in retrospect, but the win made me feel like King Kong on cocaine!  It felt at least as good as the best orgasm I had ever had.  For the record, it was the 104th MTT that I had played in, roughly 2 months after starting to play MTTs.  

Sometime in September I began to play 2, 3 and even four tables at a time on an 18 inch screen.  I had just enough room to set 4 tables up, offset with little enough overlap that I wouldn’t accidentally bet the wrong table if it ‘popped’ to the front unexpectedly.   However it was impossible to watch the action on more than one table at a time.  I withdrew some of my winnings and bought a bigger monitor with higher resolution to make multi tabling easier.  November saw my bankroll get built up to $2800 after withdrawing over $1500 and I really thought I might be on my way to making it as a poker pro.   $2800 was enough to bankroll me in 5/10 limit games (200 big bets was the guideline I was using at the time.)   Of course the higher limits beat me up once again and instead of moving down promptly, I stayed to slug it out and win back my losses.  Within 2 weeks, I was busto once again.   

Damn this poker thing is hard!   However, I had confidence that I was a winning player and just needed the right bankroll guidelines and a little luck  to get me started on my dreamed of poker career.  I also examined my records and my play looking for errors.  A fellow online player had approached me because he saw that I was getting deep in many tournaments on UB and asked if I would agree to a deal.  He would teach me how to play NL cash games if I would teach him what I knew about MTTs.  NL cash had always intimidated me, but I was happy to make the trade and see if I could overcome my fears.   I had redeposited $100 on UB again and was slowly grinding it up as I started railing my newfound friend in his cash games and he did the same with my MTTs.    I decided to focus mostly on MTTs to build my roll and was rewarded with steadily growing success as I learned ways to implement my friends cash game philosophy into my MTT strategy.   My ROI in MTTs for 2003 was a ‘whopping’ 37%.   (But hey I sure thought I was good!)

I will continue with more details on my ’start’ in online poker in my next blog.  (I finally actually go pro!)   However I wanted to share my early struggles so that all those aspiring pros and even casual players out there could see that they are not alone.   We all struggle and suffer from bankroll ups and downs as we first learn this game.  I also wanted to give folks some idea of the TREMENDOUS amount of time I devoted to poker playing.  I was also fortunate that I am quite adept at reading and implementing poker ideas.   Some folks learn better by watching and talking than by reading.  I am not one of them, but I am in the process of making a video series that will help those type of folks to become better poker players.   I haved also progressed to the point where I give other players lessons in NL cash games and many of them have improved their game quite dramatically as a result.  (Although from the blog above, it may not be apparent that I have skills to teach, bear with me through the next couple entries and I think you will see why I have learned plenty that qualifies me to teach. )   Readers should also observe how poor bankroll management in my early career, really ruined an otherwise good progression in learning this game of poker.  I was never a losing player, always able to redeposit some of my previous withdrawals in order to ‘restart’ my career each time that I busto’ed.    This never losing part comes from reading and applying the proper poker playing strategies that can make anyone a winner if they apply what they read.   However, if I had simply followed a good set of bankroll management rules I would never have busto’ed in the first place!    Believe me, proper bankroll management is the key thing that enabled me to build the bankroll to turn pro.  I wasn’t fortunate to win a huge tournament to provide me with a bankroll, I ground it up the old fashioned way, which isn’t glamorous, but it does keep food on my table, a roof over my head and provides me with some fun experiences to this day.