I most cases I’ve used my handy-dandy blog to make updates that have little to do with my personal life. But, in keeping with the category marker that lists this as “personal life”, I’m going to talk a little bit about the end of an era. I don’t remember exactly when it happened but poker started for me when I was probably 16, about five years ago. Once I had learned the game it took forever to find people who also knew the game and liked to play it as much as I did. For a couple years my hometown friends and I would play Texas Hold’em in various places and with variable blinds and structure. My addiction became quite apparent to me; I knew what was going on but I couldn’t stop, that is until my friends did. Even after play ended and we all went back home I still wanted to play more, it’s hard to categorize it as much more than an addiction.

In the Fall of 2006 my former roommate Sean introduced me to the wonders of Bodog poker. It was and still is an online gambling site with everything from sports betting to poker. I nervously put I think 40 dollars on my first deposit and played $2 and $4 tournaments. I didn’t do half bad at the beginner tournaments. I was still by no means a pro at the game. Over time through playing with friends at home who knew more than me about the game and my friend Sean, who I’d say was a fairly technical and mathematical player, I started looking at the game differently. I took delight in my small victories here and there and proudly would cash out 20 dollars at a time on Bodog. Eventually I placed in a large multi-table tournament and got a couple hundred bucks. Bodog did not have a high limit on withdrawal of money, so each week I made enough to take about $30 off. This was my tiny supplemental income for the fall of 2006.

Over time though, less people joined the site, and more people started leaving to other poker sites. Bodog simply declined to having maybe 3,000 players on their entire site during peak hours. I sort of stopped online play until this past summer (2007) when I watched all of my friends at home play on the poker site Full Tilt Poker. It was the new thing, the 2007 World Series of Poker Main Event winner played on Full Tilt. Even now it gets more popular with up to 60,000 players on it at peak hours in the evening. So in July I put $75 on Full Tilt because I was still cautious about losing my money. I pissed around in small $2 and $5 tournaments with my bank roll fluctuating between 50 and 80 dollars. Then one random day I said, “Oh fuck it!” and played a 45 person $10 tournament and won it. Suddenly I had $171 dollars from that tournament.

I was elated, over-joyed. I finally won a decent amount of money (at least in standards I was accustomed to). With my bank roll at about $220 I became over-confident and the next day entered into a $50 multi-table tournament with about 250 people in it. Through some act of God I was decimated three times, almost dead with no chips, and I would double up and double up and win coin flips to fight back. I reached the point in the tournament where every left walks away with money. I distinctly remember screaming “YES! YES!” over and over again while Ryan Miller came to my house and watched me freak out with every hand I played. It was intense, I had a shot of winning first, of walking away with $3,200. This turned out to not be the case, but I did make about $30 on the whole experience.

The old tournaments of $2 and $5 became a thing of the past as I spent the rest of summer marching my way up. The new levels I played during August were $20 and $30 games, usually 2 or 3 at a time. I ended up winning the same 45 man $10 tournament 2 more times. It all came down to a 180 man $24 I played my first night in State College. I must admit, I thought I would probably be knocked out fairly soon and I would go hang out with Brian and Russ on my first night back from summer vacation but instead I sat for four hours on my futon in the living room watching strange TV shows with the A/C blasting right on me. I came in 4th out of 180 to make $432.

My bank roll sat at $998, from $75 about a month and a half ago. I kept thinking to myself, “This is it, I’ve finally become a good player. I’ve finally reached a level of proficiency in the game where I can keep doing this.” I figured I would try cash tables instead of the tournaments which I had embraced so tightly over the past couple months. It turns out I had success there as well. My bank roll eventually pushed above $1,200 in mid-September. I took off $500 to buy an xbox 360 and Halo 3 and just because I like multiples of 5. I felt nearly invincible. Poker was taking up the majority of my free time. The year before, my sophomore year, was filled with way more activities than my junior year. With all the free time I’ve been playing 2-4 hours of poker every day since the school year started in August. Online poker fed my addiction. Whenever I wanted to play poker there were instantly thousands of players at my finger tips willing to meet my needs (that does sound a bit sexual…).

After my peak though slowly led disaster. I got the idea of playing multiple tournaments at the same time from my friend Ryan Miller. I would watch him play 8-10 tournaments at a time. I tried to copy that. I would get in 5-6 $6 or $10 tournaments. But near the end of September my bankroll went from $700 down to $300. This happened in the matter of about 10 days. I was baffled and bewildered by such a sharp decline. Surely my evolved and solid play was not to blame. I would play in six tournaments at a time and fail to cash in any of them. I went 15 tournaments without winning a single one. I thought I was doomed until I sat in a 45 man $20 tournament. It was exactly like the $10 that I had won three times before only the prize was doubled. I got to the final table of 9 on my own merit, but I became admittedly lucky with the last 4 remaining players and crushed them all quickly and soundly. I had another big cash, finally, $342. I thought it was fate that I won 432 and then 342.

I kept playing these massive $24 tournaments with usually over 1,200 people in them trying to win. A victory there would be usually over $4,500, and from there I figured I would start playing $100 sit n go’s and take away $300 each win. I just needed that first huge win, but it never materialized. I’ve come within 25 people before, but someone always had a 3 outter up their sleeve for me. I know it’s a game based on luck, but it seemed that every time I was be annihilated in a tournament near the end, it was because an A9 would beat me KK with a rivered A. I never slammed on the breaks with my stakes. I continued to play $20 dollar tournaments until I hit about $200 on my bank roll. With that I became super cautious and took another $100 off.

The last three months have been spent bouncing around low stakes games trying to get something to happen. I forgot to mention that at the end of the summer I broadened my poker mind by learning Omaha Hi/Lo, Limit play, Razz, and Stud Hi and Hi/Lo. I had always really known just No-Limit Texas Hold’em and Pot-Limit Omaha Hi (fairly well). I’ve spent the last few months playing these different games in tournaments and cash tables. I’ve tried to play small multi table tournaments to try to get something to happen. I try to get back to the higher stakes I used to have. To just try to break above $200 again. My addiction never really stopped. Instead of spending hours playing $30 games, the last few months have just been hours and hours of these small games. Dozens of screams, upsets, and heartbreaks all in one day so I can finish up with a $2 profit. My addiction has become so draining on me that it will ruin the rest of my evening if I take a super bad beat.

This really all culminated today. Today I started with $99.85, still never hitting zero. I still to this day have been playing with the original $75 I put on in mid-July. I sat at two $1/$2 limit omaha hi/lo tables with $30 on each. I took some tremendous bad beats in each of them. I never hit any of my draws, but everyone would hit them against me. Each hand I folded pre-flop though ended up becoming the nuts at the end of the hand, too bad I was never involved in the first place. I lost all 30 on one table and was down to 3 on the other table. I just started to get super-pissy so I played like an idiot and strangely got back to $30. I knocked some short stack out for another $6 and left the table. I sat at another table with $30, went down to $15 and then left to eat something and take a break and calm down.

I could get nothing to happen for me today. I also made a couple costly and stupid plays. I eventually found myself at just a regular Pot-Limit Omaha Hi table with $15 dollars. About the third hand in I flopped top two pair with a flush draw on the board. Knowing someone would bet I simply checked. One player bet pot for $4. I instantly bet pot for a raise of $13. He instantly called me on a flush draw. He hits. I swear loudly. I then took my $2 and went up to $17 and then lost it all. Full of rage and the inability to control my emotions I plunked down my final $44 dollars on an Omaha Hi table. I made a few dumb calls and was down to $23. At about the breaking point I pick up AA5T in the Small Blind and wait patiently for the asshole to my right to raise, because he had been aggressive ever since I sat at the table. This is what happened to my final $23 on that fateful hand.

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Basically, the guy got lucky. I was 69% to win against him pre-flop. He called my pot raise pre-flop after he raised as well. In the end though, it took until today, February 23, 2008, for my bank roll to hit zero on Full Tilt. Before I wrote this entry I uninstalled Full Tilt and now I sit here confused about what to do. Aside from the times I’ve been home for breaks and vacations, I’ve played 2-4 hours a day of poker. It’s been an addiction that has gotten worse because of the accessibility of online poker and the always open tables for me. This does put things in perspective for me though. At the height of my lackluster success I was still at best a decent/above average player, but never anything spectacular. I know I’ve talked myself up, and this experience up as something monumental in my life. A matter of $2,000 bucks over the course of 7 months, big fucking deal. I’ll be the first to say that it really wasn’t that much money, and I ended up being not that good of a player.

The real thing is that no matter what the amount of money or what my skill level, poker has been something that really gets my heart beating faster. Gambling, raw percentages, pot odds, implied odds, outs, and the prospects of scoring huge cashes some day really has dominated my junior year of college and half of last summer. I spent countless hours doing something that I intend to not do anymore. Poker has never been a good thing for me, but yet I still want to play it. It’s going to be hard but I’m going to resist the reinstallation of Full Tilt Poker and putting more money on. Even if I wanted to, I don’t have the money right now to put on. I was looking to get up to 150 today so I could take off the minimum 100 and still have 50 because I need the money. Poker is an evil thing, a cruel thing, and at the same time such an exhilarating experience but it is an experience I can’t take anymore.