Hello World

My name is Adam. I am a 23 year old semi-professional poker player. I'm starting this blog in order to chronicle my progress - both as a poker player and just in life in general. I graduated from college about a year ago and, for the next few months at least, I have a real job as well. After that who knows.

I started playing poker, like so many others, after watching Chris Moneymaker win the WSOP Main Event in 2003. Up until that point I couldn't have even told you the hand rankings outside of a few I learned from playing various card and board games as a little kid. When I started playing I noticed pretty quickly that I was better than most of my friends. At that point I figured I was the best player in the world, and couldn't lose. My first real money deposit on Party Poker was definitely a humbling experience that made me realize otherwise. I blew through my first $50 deposit (which I figured I was going to make millions off of) in about 15 minutes at the $0.25 tables at Party. Whoops. After that experience I was determined to prove to myself and to my friends that I was a winning player. I searched everywhere I could for poker strategy. I stumbled onto a pretty solid (or at least I thought so at the time) sit and go strategy from poker blogger F Train. Note that this strategy is outdated and probably isn't good for beating anything more than $5 and maybe $10 sit and go's at this point. I'm not sure if it was ever the greatest advice, but it was definitely a winning strategy in the very low limit SNGs that I decided I was going to give a shot. After about a year of up and down play where I was basically breakeven I finally started to show a small profit. During this time I had also ventured into cash games and a few multi table tourneys with a little success there as well. I had begun playing online in January of 2005 and by May of 2006 I had made about $2500. Considering the amount of time I had spent playing that was a pretty pathetic hourly wage, but I was very happy with the progress I had made.

In the middle of May 2006 I graduated from Huntington University. Soon after I took a job with a local radio station while continuing to make a small amount of money playing poker online and a couple local places that had some pretty friendly games going on in "back rooms." About a week after I graduated a friend introduced me to online casino bonuses. Basically, online casinos offered deposit bonus which you had to wager a certain amount to be able to withdraw. If the house edge was small enough that you could make a profit (including the bonus obviously) over the course of the wagering requirement, then it was a bonus that I played. In about a month I made about 10k from these bonuses. This is when I really started to take poker seriously. After I did all the really good casino bonuses I left a bankroll online of about 4k. It was about this time that I discovered Absolute Poker which had some great sit and go games. After playing there for a couple months and making about 5k I moved to Party Poker and started playing the $55 Speed SNGs. When congress passed the UIGEA last October I moved to Stars before moving back to Absolute Poker where I am currently playing.

I ended up making just over 20k in 4 months as an official professional poker player last year and I've made just under 15k so far this year. My goal for the year is 70k, and there is no reason that I shouldn't attain it other than my own laziness...which is part of the reason I'm starting this blog :)

Right now I'm 7 tabling the $44 sngs at Absolute Poker and playing 2/4-5/10 Limit hold'em when I need to mix up to keep my life from becoming too much of a grind. Sorry this post turned into my complete poker story. More about me another day. I'll try to at least post my results here every day that I play and I'll probably post other miscellaneous stuff a couple times a week as well...cheers!