Introduction

Hey, I am 22 and in my final year studying at Bath university in England. I have played poker for about 1 and a half years and my first success came by playing £10NL online and winning £10, shortly after being introduced to the game by my housemates. In my mind I had the best hand and bet it and got paid it seemed simple and I was instantly hooked. I got myself a poker book and read about position and I started to realise there was even more skill to the game than I had hoped. Within a few weeks I was £70 down but I was keen to learn. Over the next few months I was playing in $ now and I progressed up to $100NL.

Around 6 months in and I had made $4,000 and was still playing 100NL. I felt confident in my game, and had discovered most things for myself and had only read two poker books and browsed very little on forums. I was c-betting without realising the theory behind it and was playing poker aggressively and all was well.

Suddenly everything went bad, I was losing lots and running bad. I was so convinced I was running bad that I thought I was destined to run bad forever. I had months of running bad.. I would flop straights and lose everytime. I would lose with sets to bigger sets and have people catch runner runner straight draws sometimes up to 5 times a day. I only played 1 or 2 hours a day but it continued for months. I kept taking breaks and coming back. I was so annoyed that I got my money in good so often and so often I didn't win.

Soon I had lost all my winnings and I was down $500 lifetime to poker. I was crushed and also gobsmacked by how unlucky I was. I felt cursed and I would check the odds of each hand and looking back now I can safely say I did run really bad. At the time I got teased by friends for playing a game with no skill and when anyone doubted my previous success I was so hurt inside. It motivated me to become as good as I possibly could at this game to prove I was good and to show I had a bad run. In reality running bad had caused me to go on tilt and I would estimate up to 1/4 of my losses were tilt related. During the time of busting my roll I took I think two shots at 3/6 with $120 and once ran it up to $1000 and then lost the biggest pot of my life for $1,360.90 where I had A3s and had unticked the blinds and was playing my last hand. I raised UTG and got a re raise so I decided to gamble seeing as I had made alot of $. I had planned to just check/fold without a huge flop, but we saw a heads up flop of: 3 3 10. I was pretty excited and when the turn was an ace, I called an all in and was shown QQ and bam... the river is a Queen. My world literally just stopped, I felt no pain just disbelief and just felt like how can I run bad every day I play.

After a lot of thinking the next thing that really happened after some breakeven poker was entering into a $26,000 prize pool tournament with a free ticket and coming 2nd out of 405 players, for nearly $4,000. During this tournament I sucked out with an underpair all in preflop, and with 73 against AA all in preflop when I was on a steal as a short stack and also card dead. Unfortunately I lost heads up when we had equal chips with AKs vs A9s.

Luckily for me I had been lucky in this tournament and its quite possible I would have quit poker there and then had it not been for this tournament cash. This rolled me for 100NL again and I started to play for the long term playing in tough games and learning as much as I could while not focussing on making $. I dropped $1,000 over the next month or two and overall I was up near $3,000 lifetime but happy to have improved my game. From this point onwards I became disciplined and was able to control my play better.

I then decided to profit as much as I could and I have since then put in 130,000 hands at 100NL and have graphed them below. This has pushed me into a profit of 5 figures lifetime. The graph covers my last 6 months of poker :) and it includes about 2-5% 200NL, which involved a 10 buy in downswing and resulted in me dropping back to 100NL. This resulted in a 45,000 breakeven stretch, which was mentally challenging as I am paying my rent and bills through poker whilst studying. I do have a student overdraft if need be but this is my challenge to get through the whole year with the help of poker!


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