A Poker History of the VeganDemon [Part 2]

 

    

Thanks for coming back and reading more of this poker history of the VeganDemon.  Last time I told you about learning about poker very young, finding Magic The Gathering which led me to start practicing cards with friends, and then discovering Rounders, partying, and poker as a group.  That gave us quite the head start.  We had been playing (underage) on Paradise Poker for almost 5 years when Chris Moneymaker won the WSOP main event and made it so that everyone felt the same about poker as us magic players had felt for a long time.  Why would you want to do something else with your friends other than trying to mercilessly take away all their money by outwitting them?!?!

Somewhere in between Rounders and the poker boom of 2003 other sites started popping up and we were always searching for the best bonuses and the softest games.  There also started to be a fairly obvious stratification of skills within our group.  We had one friend who I will call B.P. in order to not expose anyone without permission, who was about a zillion times better than all the rest of us combined.  We couldn’t see it back then, but he was working hard, hitting the IRC streets to talk poker with anyone who had some strategy to share and reading anything he could get his hands on.

The rest of us were fine just using our old strategy of making top pair, betting every street, and getting money.  We didn’t need any stupid, boring books to show us how to do that.  When the boom hit, it somehow got even easier.  This was also around the time we were being exposed to the early form of the PUSHBOT excel sheet that taught you how to easily win any sit and go.  The money was rolling in, and thanks to our hard-partying habits it was rolling right out too.  I could have easily paid for my college education and a down payment on a house, but who needed to do that when the money was never going to stop coming in so easily? Right!?!?!?  I mean what could go wrong with a bunch of kids having infinite money, and infinite bad habits…?

It was around that time that I discovered hippie music and the concerts that supported the movement.  I also found a girl that didn’t care that I was 350 lbs and always wearing the same Birkenstocks and overalls.  I was in love and I had found my people.  I started making tie-dyes and grilled cheese sandwiches to sell in the parking lots.  I lived in my van and traveled around wherever the next concert was.  I found brand new bad habits on a different level from the old ones and my drinking skyrocketed.  Needless to say, I was not playing poker, talking about poker, or strategizing anything at all in my life.  I was having my Ram Dass phase.

That went on until the girl dumped me and it was time to go to college.  When I showed up to college everyone had high-speed internet and new computers to play online poker with, and everyone… I mean EVERYONE had a home game of Texas Hold Em.  Some were tournaments, others were straight cash homie.  I figured “No problem, I have way more experience than these idiots I will win even if I am rusty.” 

It was true in the short term, but that just reinforced the stupid idea that I was a good poker player.  I didn’t need to work at it, I didn’t need to read books or talk to better players, I was just born good.  Not unlike me thinking I was just born fat and there was nothing I could do to stop that (don’t worry later on I have a major epiphany that allows me to make it past these rut-digging thought patterns, but I have to be honest about where I was back then.)

Soon winning turned into breaking even which then became a steady losing rate.  Of course, I was sure that it would turn around if I would just play for twice as much as I had been playing for.  This did not prove to be a sound strategy and before I knew it I had flushed away all the money I made from the early days and I was using rebate check money to fund my PokerStars account.  During all of this, my ego was getting hurt, but I refused to admit that I deserved any of my losses on a conscious level.  I would react to my hurt ego by either lying and saying I was still a winner, talking about how stupid everyone else’s strategies were, or going back to old faithful… drinking alcohol until feelings were not a problem.

When I would get down to a desperate amount of money I would just pull out the old PUSHBOT chart and grind SnG’s until I had enough money to get drunk and blow it playing way too high of cash games.  It was a pattern that I enjoyed in some dark, depressing way.  I could always grind it back up, but I would always get drunk and punt it off taking shots at the highest games I could afford.  Obviously, when I would punt off huge stacks I would mope around and drink extra for a few days and then head back to the soft SnG’s and grind it back up.  Somehow, I couldn’t see that I should just stay down where I belong.  Let’s call this the second time I could have paid for college with poker, but instead chose to do dumb stuff.

At some point I realized that I needed to chill a little and pass my classes because I knew in my mind I didn’t have what it took to be one of my buddies who were dropping out left and right to get rich playing online.  I found myself a very serious girlfriend and started working on my art (I was studying to become an art teacher.)  It hurt me deeply to see them all succeeding and getting rich while I could barely hold it together.  I still played some home games, but I swore off online poker until I got my degree (yeah right, that didn’t last past my next rebate check.)

I fell in love very deeply with my new artist girlfriend and I wasn’t so obsessed with poker anymore.  It never completely left my mind because it really did hurt my pride that I couldn’t do what my friends were doing.  One friend was getting wealthy and winning bracelets, another couple of friends were heads-up crushers who couldn’t find more than a couple of opponents dumb enough to play against them.  No one was working, everyone was dropping out, and I wasn’t good enough to do it.  Even though somehow I was drinking and partying constantly, I was getting great grades and I finished my degree without a problem, but every step of the way had a little hidden pain of my injured poker ego.

Skip forward a few years and I was still with the same girl and working the job I had trained for in college.  Unfortunately, my plan to stop partying when I got a job was not working out.  I prided myself on NEVER drinking before work, but any time I had off work was 100% focused on getting as smashed as humanly possible.  One night while drinking I loaded up some money on FullTilt (I had probably been watching poker after dark.)  I managed to run that up on the SnG’s just playing PUSHBOT style.  That led me to the decision that I would let poker be my summer job.  Somehow it never clicked in my mind that I had only ever studied one piece of poker strategy and it was the only area of poker I was succeeding at.  I was still sure it was just a long-overdue upswing for a great poker player.

It went okay at first, but SnG’s can really get boring and alcoholics don’t do well with boredom.  I fell back into the same old habits I had before of playing too high while drunk, but now I didn’t have work to sober me up.  I was drunk every waking minute for the whole summer.  My finances wound up taking huge swings and my long-term girlfriend wasn’t used to that.  She was used to a steady paycheck despite all my bad habits.  We started having problems, but we made it until the start of the next school year and I went through the pain of drying out so I was ready to get back to work.  The paychecks started rolling in again and I wasn’t drunk all day anymore.  It was better.

That year flew by because every waking second that I didn’t have work was spent blackout drunk.  I was a good teacher and I loved my students, but I started missing some Fridays to start the weekend early, or some Mondays because the weekend went on a little too long.  Eventually, my sweet artist girl said I had to get my shit straight or get dumped.  I went to some meetings and quit drinking altogether.

I stayed sober for a year until we both decided it had been long enough and I was ready to go back to drinking.  This did not go well and I was blacked out by the following weekend.  I went back and forth between completely sober and completely out of control drunk for a few years.  During one of my periods of sobriety, we got engaged and during one of my periods of drunkenness, she called it off and dumped me.  Just like poker losses, I could not see at the time how any of it was my fault.  I fell into a belief that I was the victim of all these things that were “happening to me.”  I used it as a reason to drink more.

At this time I moved in with some local poker players who didn’t mind how out of control I had become.  I would drink until I blacked out and they would wake me up telling me it was all good the next day.  They were trying to get me in better spirits so I could become their old friend again, but that wasn’t going to happen.  We started taking trips to the casino and playing online a lot.  I pretended I was winning, but I had no idea.  At that point with bar tabs, liquor store bills, and lost buy-ins I was literally afraid to check my bank account.

This was about 6-7 years ago when bitcoin was starting to gain in popularity and we found a site where bitcoin miners would go with their infinite coins and punt them off playing poker for BTC. I had also been taking an interest, during rare lucid moments, in heads-up strategy.  By that I mean I watched one video by Brian Hastings and thought I was a genius.

[Thanks for reading part 2 of my poker journey, I hope you come back for part 3 where I hit the biggest upswing of my life and impaled my life on my own ego…  fun! If you missed it go back and read part 1 where it all started]