A Poker History of the VeganDemon [Part 1]

 

Hello everyone I am very excited to begin sharing all of this with anyone who feels like reading it, but I thought the best way to get started out would be to tell you a little about the journey that has lead me here so far.  I have been playing poker since I was 10 years old.  We used to play poker for pencils, which was the currency at my school because of a pencil fighting obsession.  

For those of you who are uninitiated to the art of pencil fighting, one person hits the other person’s pencil with their pencil while it is held taught between the other combatant’s hands.  If the pencil survives this strike, the roles are switched and this pattern continues until one person has a broken pencil and the other is the victor.  It might sound stupid, but I assure you it truly was. But in my experience, the stupidity of an endeavor has never caused pre-teen boys to shy away from engaging in it and pencil fighting was no different.

As a young man who had learned about poker and hustling in general from my father a bit after rounds of golf during the multi-hour hangout sessions with him and his friends at the country club near our house, I was prepared to take advantage of the new fad.  

I started asking for pencils instead of candy.  It wasn’t long before I was borrowing my father’s old briefcase and filling it up with all the pencils I had amassed to sell them at school to all the kids who were breaking theirs at an alarming rate.  I made 25 cents for a pencil and I could buy a pack of 25 for $2.00.  Life was great.

One night at a sleepover with some of my friends to celebrate the release of some new video game, I suggested they all let me teach them the game my dad and his friends played.  The name of the game was 5 card draw and I had played about 1,000 hands with my dad and his friends for fun while they drank pitchers of beer and settled up their bets from the golf course.

As I explained the rules, I remembered what my father’s friend had told me about strategy, “If they check, you bet.  If they bet, you raise.” I took my simple strategy into the poker for pencils streets that night and lost like crazy.  He never told me not to bluff fish on the first night they had ever played cards in their lives.  I went home and reconsidered my strategy and stayed up thinking about what might have gone wrong.  Eventually, I decided they were all lucky idiots and I couldn’t wait until I could get them to play me again. I would definitely win the next time.  Unfortunately for my future in poker, this was a mindset I carried through many years and a lot of epic ups and downs, “I am amazing, they are just lucky, that is why I lost.”  Not exactly a growth mindset.

After a few weeks of playing poker for pencils, we got tired of it.  Mostly, they got tired of me complaining as I lost and calling all of them idiots all the time (see any Phil Helmuth losing poker video for examples.)

That is when I happened to be hanging out at the comic shop my mom used to drop me off at on days I was out of school so I was busy and she could get drunk around the corner all day, and something MAGICAL happened.  They had gotten a new card game in and the owner wanted to crack some packs so we could all learn how to play.  That game was called Magic: The Gathering and this was one of the most monumental life-changing events that ever happened in my youth.

I had taken my cards back to my friends and shown them how it worked and almost overnight we were hooked.  Soon every cent went to buying packs of magic cards and everything good went into the one deck we each had made out of all of our strongest cards (not a good strategy btw.)  I became the leader of the pack because I was spoiled and my parents bought me way more cards than anyone else had.  I had finally found the thing I was good at.

I think it is important to add that I was massively overweight for my age, and for any age.  My father was all about sports and I had tried them all.  The only one I was ever good at was football, due to my size, but the parents of the other kids got me kicked out of the league “before he kills someone!”  After that, I played all the cardio-based sports and hated every second of each one.  I was in the mindset that I was a fat kid and there was nothing that could be done about that.  I had amassed quite a collection of failures before I found magic cards and started realizing some success.  It was quite intoxicating and I put everything I had into getting as good as I could at magic.

I got my deck tuned up with Force of Nature and a bunch of the other slowest and biggest creatures in the game and it worked great against my friends.  Then I took my skills to a local fire hall for a weekend of tournaments.  This was the first time I was exposed to how many layers there are when it comes to strategy games.  I was better than my friends by a mile, but I got CRUSHED at the tournament by a bunch of older people who were destroying my lands and generally doing super effective/annoying strategies against me.  

Without turning this into an article about Magic: The Gathering strategy I will simply say that getting destroyed by better players was exactly the thing to make me want to play more and more.  By the time I left that day I was clearly going to be playing that game for life.  I wanted more cards before I even left the fire hall.  That experience was taken back to my friends and I told them all about how super sick all the decks I saw were.  We formed a “team” and we started researching in Scrye magazine how we could do all the cool things the older kids were doing in Magic.  That “team” stayed together until around the age of 14 I started pulling away from the pack.

We would all go to the same tournaments every week, Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday morning.  The big deal at these tournaments was the cut to top 8 and my friends started getting tired of having to wait around for me while I made it almost every time and they never came close.  I wasn’t even close to the best, but my friends were pretty trash at the game so we all agreed that I should join another team of magic players to see how good I could become.  They were also sick of me bragging and acting like I was better than them all the time I’m sure.

The next group of magic players I started playing with were older and better than me, but they thought I was funny and they let me hang around with them.  Not to mention at this point in my life I had a bit of a reputation for organizing the best post-tournament parties and they wanted to be on the automatic invite list.  These parties were the real deal.  At 14 I was already a hard-drinking, hard-smoking wildman and all the Magic nerds wanted to join in with whatever I was up to.  I had the hook up with an older Magic Judge and I could get us alcohol, and I had connections to less legal things than that through my hard-partying older sister.

Then came something that changed the world of Magic forever.  When I was 16, Matt Damon and Edward Norton came together to battle John Malkovich in one of the greatest films ever made.  The movie rounders swept like a wildfire through the Magic community.  All at once, we started realizing that we could be practicing a different card game for all those hours and that game would pay us way better.  That game was poker!

There was always a poker game going on in the back of the room where we played our Magic tournaments.  People would bust out of the Magic tournament on purpose just because the dumb kids were ready to play for their allowance money.  There was always a poker game going at the after-tournament parties.  This is where being a seasoned drinker amongst noobs always paid off very well for me. 

There was just always poker.  The best poker players out of the group enjoyed my parties and we became pretty close.  I had something they wanted, access to the parties, and they had something I wanted, deep knowledge of poker (or so I thought at the time.)  I mean one of them had already read Supersystem!!  How pro can you get!?!?  He also told me about Paradise Poker which was an online poker site from before all the major companies took over.  There were no Stars or FullTilt, but there was paradise poker where all you had to do was make top pair and bet 3 times to turn a little money into a mega-bankroll.  We were SURE we were all geniuses.

[This concludes part 1 of my poker history.  Tune in to Part 2 and Part 3 to hear about the poker boom and beyond!]