clarkatroid is not folding

This is the story of my journey from playing 50 cent stud in a las vegas casino to my current $300k online bankroll., But firstly id like to preface story this by restating my place in the poker hierarchy.

Im not a top tier player, ill never play nosebleed stakes, i doubt very much ill ever be a famous player, but i think im a reasonably well known face on the uk circuit. Im pretty sure ive plateaud' and reached my level as a player at midstakes cash,  i dont think ill ever be good enough to play higher than i do now as the games are getting tougher and my learning curve is slowing down. Ive effectively been promoted to my own incompetance, which i think happens to a lot of people at some point in their career. ie if your keep getting promoted, at some point you will end up in a job thats just too tough for you to execute competantly. George W Bush being a good example imo. That said, playing poker is very well renumerated career if you reach a reasonable standard and ive earnt over 250k a year for the last 2 years since going full time. So I consider myself a decent but not exceptional player that plays 90k hands a month. What i lack in skill i make up for by volume. So this is the story of an average (but hard working) professional poker player. A true grinders tale.

I suppose my motivation for writing this is to strip down the nuts and bolts of my journey, to lay it out so that anyone reading this can see that it isnt that hard to emulate what ive done. Im no mathematical genius, i dont have any poker secrets, im an average bloke with average intelligence that got into online poker at its infancy and hung around long enough to find ways to beat it.

I played my very first game of poker in 1999 at the age of 29, as a direct result of being sacked from my job, which i had held for 10 years since leaving school. I was totally fed up and disillusioned, had 30k in the bank, no girlfriend and no ties.

It was time to travel and see the world.

So i bought a 40k miles open ended air ticket, convinced my mate Eddie to tag along and off we went on an adventure. The plan was to have no plan, simply pick a new destination everytime we stood in the airport terminal. We had no agenda, no time constraints. When the money ran out we would come home. Id like to say we experienced the diversity of different cultures as we travelled through many different countries, but you dont end up being a poker player unless you have at least a little degenerate hard wired, and the reality was we just drank in bars, messed about with as many girls as we could, and gambled in casinos from New zealand to Nevada for 6 months solid. We had a great time

So theres no surprises that i played my first hand of poker in Las Vegas. Me and ed were staying in a 5 buck hostel at the top end of the strip,opposite the Elvis chapel. We were sharing a dorm with a couple of illegal immigrants and a 19 year old fella who had had come to vegas for the summer to fleece the casinos and make his fortune, armed with a book " how to beat the casinos at blackjack" and a raft of fake ID cards. If it  went well, he was moving permanently to Las Vegas. But vegas can chew you up and spit you out if you aint got your wits about you, and in the small hours of the next day as we straggled home, our new gambilng bum chum was slumped outside the hostel porch pissed out of his brains, brown bottle between his legs, living in a town called busto. He went home the next morning, dreams in tatters and nada in his pockets

Back to the first day, and within 2 hours of checking into the hostel, we were drinking kamikaze cocktails and playing 50 cent craps in the sahara. 6  hours after that we were 6 sheets to the wind, stood on the chairs in the sahara card room singing tom jones records. This is where i played my first ever game of poker, with the locals hustlers, playing 7 card stud with 1 dollar big blinds, in a learn while you lose type of format. The same faces turned up playing every day, waiting to bust the tourists, these same faces had been turning up daily for 25 years. These folk where the original old school grinders, practically living the sahara card room, completely unremarkable to look at, cowboys, old ladies, little old chinese men. But they were the card sharks of the day , eeking out 50 bucks here and there from the donks, and reading books inbetween. After spending a month playing and drinking with this motley crew all day, everyday, (and losing obviously), it was pretty obvious that this game had a lot of skill in it. They were amazed at our very british skill, which was being able to drink for 10 hours and still be relatively coherant and jovial. I would like to think they are still there, i cant imagine 1 dollar limit stud being much harder than it was ten years ago

And thats how it all started for me. I caught the bug

Most people go on their jollys with good novel, me, I paid $49.99 for doyles supersystem from the gamblers superstore on Las Vegas strip, and spent the rest of our vacation reading poker strategies. When i arrived back in blackpool i thought that was that as far as poker was concerned, with no viable outlet to play,so nothing happened for a year or so, but the dawn of internet poker changed all that and in december 2001 i was playing poker at the launch of a new website, pokerstars.....