Welcome to Detroit Sports Forum!

By joining our community, you'll be able to connect with fellow fans that live and breathe Detroit sports just like you!

Get Started
  • If you are no longer able to access your account since our recent switch from vBulletin to XenForo, you may need to reset your password via email. If you no longer have access to the email attached to your account, please fill out our contact form and we will assist you ASAP. Thanks for your continued support of DSF.

Ask me about playing online poker (Texas Holdem)

lionsFTW

Well-known member
Joined
Aug 11, 2011
Messages
449
Like many young guys around the time of the Chris Moneymaker poker boom (circa ~2002/03) I became infatuated with Texas Holdem. I grew up very competitive. Sports at school, board games at home with the family, even making little challenges with myself whenever possible. I just love to compete.

Around 18 I wrecked my ankle and had to give up pretty much all competitive sports. This was around the same time that the "boom" was happening and naturally I took a fondness to the game as I found a new way to channel my competitive drive despite my physical constrictions.

I played in home games a couple days a week for the first 2-3 years and went to Soaring Eagle Casino whenever I had enough spare money to gamble it up. Won a little, lost a little, but overall even though I thought I had everything figured out I pretty much sucked terribly at the game.

Not wanting to give up my passion and dream of making a living being competitive/playing some type of game I decided to take a job working at a casino to deal poker so I could work on my "skillz" while getting paid.

Around late 2007 West Virginia had just sanctioned casino games at their race tracks so I applied and came on down to work with the dream of making it to Vegas and becoming a full time grinder.

While working in the casino in West Virginia I met another young guy who was also heavily into poker and he introduced me into the world of online poker. This was great! Now I didn't have to worry about playing in dodgy underground games in a state where I knew virtually nobody but the degens I met at the casino and I could even play more than one table at a time
shocked.gif
!!!!!!!!

For about a year after that I began to devote A LOT of time and energy into getting better at online poker. All my previous years of live play had made it so I wasn't necessarily a losing player but I certainly wasn't raking in the dough. Shortly after starting up I was introduced to things like tracking software (HUD's) and rakeback/bonuses (sort of like comps at a casino). I actually realized there was a ton of money to be made in this online poker biz so, naturally, I started to multi-table like a mad man. First playing two tables at a time. Then four tables. Then six. Then nine! Twelve? No problem... Finally I maxed out at 16 tables at a time but the mental strain + eye strain cut down on the amount of hours I was able to play. After some trial and error I finally settled in at nine tables after realizing this was my most efficient number allowing me to put in a maximum amount of hours per week while still playing a high volume of hands per hour.

While all of this is going on I ended up meeting a young lady and we began to date. She was completely supportive of my passion and very encouraging of me. Of course just like there is an absurd amount of variance in poker, there is an absurd amount of variance in real life and sure enough, despite preventative measures, she became preggers. Bye bye dreams and hello responsibility :-[...

I still continued to play but at a far less frequency. The funny thing about online poker is that it's a microcosm of evolution. An arms race if you will but the arms race are the players skill. I guess in the early days of online poker (I say guess because I wasn't around in the early days) that it was literally like taking candy from a baby if you had any skill because nobody knew what the heck they were doing. A number of young guys came into absurd amounts of money at a very early age. Now there's so much information available on the internet and so many "training sites" that make strategy videos that pretty much anybody with an average I.Q. and the determination to really absorb all the information can become moderately good and if you yourself don't spend an absurd amount of time trying to keep up you will get left in the dust very quickly and never be able to move up the stakes.

Unfortunately for me this happened before I could ever really sink my teeth into it. I was so late the the starting line that most serious players had already had a huge jump and I could never put in the same amount of training that some 20 year old kid living in his mom's basement could, so I was left to never move up to the higher stakes and now I basically just play low stakes for competition/fun and to make a little extra spending money.

As anybody who played online poker knows April 15th 2011 was a bad day. Not just because it's the deadline for Uncle Sam get his piece of your pie but because it was a day that the Department of Justice cracked down on off shore gambling operations, specifically the 3 biggest online poker sites. Large sums of player balances were froze, only one of the three indicted sites has payed players back in full so far but there is some light at the end of the tunnel for that. I, myself, have over 6k in actual money frozen on Full Tilt Poker and around another 4k in points (uncollected bonuses). I have written the money off and if I ever see it again I will take it as free money as I never deposited it in the first place, just won it.

So far in my online poker career I have made a little over 30k and cashed out a little over 25k all starting with a $600 deposit. I am no superstar (far from it) and I'm no fish either. I'm just a small stakes grinder who really enjoys the game. I still play on a very small site that offers poker to U.S. players (although my play is becoming less and less) and I still have hopes for it to one day become regulated in the U.S. so it can have a chance to return to it's glory days of pre 2006/UIGEA.

So to those who have made it this far, that's my online poker story. I'm willing to answer any questions and/or offer any advice to anyone interested about online poker.

Cheers,
Kevin
 
Hole. E. Shit. Yes I did and I happen to live in the same town as you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
sure do. gonna have to grab a beer and catch a lions game sometime.
 
Lmao what the hell are the chances two people from this board are from a small town in Wv
 
I've been a professional poker player since 2003 and I agree that April 15th sucked big balls. I still make a good living playing live in toledo, and I can't wait for the casino to open up in April. 20-table poker room!!! I am also hoping online poker gets sanctioned soon in the US, but I won't hold my breath.

Do you play the $5/$10 NL game at Motor City?
 
I have played it but that was probably 2008/09 the last time I did. I currently live about four and a half hours away from Detroit and have many more casinos closer to me to go choose from.

If/when I do go grind live I usually play $500nl unless there's a ridiculously soft 1knl game running but a lot of the time those games play with a mandatory straddle so $5-$10-20 is a little outside of my comfort zone when stacks get deep.

You say you used to play online! Out of curiosity what stakes and sites did you play on?
 
my old lady and I purchased a house on 6th street about a year and a half ago. stayed in Wheeling for two and a half years before that.

how about you? how long you been here and what brought you down?
 
I really like hold'em but I'm average at best. I play in a league that is tournament style which I don't like. I prefer a cash game. I have read a few books that really didn't help me. Any web sites that you know of where there are free tutorials?
 
tomdalton22 said:
I really like hold'em but I'm average at best. I play in a league that is tournament style which I don't like. I prefer a cash game. I have read a few books that really didn't help me. Any web sites that you know of where there are free tutorials?

Pretty much all of the major video training sites allow you to do a 7 day free trial, you just have to give them your credit card info and cancel the subscription on like the 6th day before they start to bill you.

Do one at a time and just download everything that seems relevant to you as a player.

Check out Cardrunners, Deucescracked, Leggopoker, and Bluefirepoker. All of those are .com's

Also if forums are your thing there is one called twoplustwo.com that is a poker forum. Just stay out of all the riff raff in the News, View, and Gossip section and you should be able to find a TON of useful strategy talk.

Cheers
 
Maize&Cheese304 said:
I've lived in moundsville my whole life. On 3rd st by sanford.

Awesome, but I do have to ask how you became a Lions fan and more specifically how the heck did you end up here if your not?
 
Cheesehead! I'm a packers fan lol. And a michigan fan. And when they changed the espn board I followed Monster over here from the get go.
 
Back
Top