Ok here goes, i have set this up more for my own benefit than anything else as i appreciate it will probably bore most of my friends & family to absolute tears to read it !!! More than anything its just a way for me to vent the complete mixture of emotions that attempting to make a living out of poker brings with it. Those of you that play poker seriously (or even as a hobby) will know the range of emotions this game we play can put you through : frustration, joy, occasional giddyness, actually wanting to cause an opponent some physical pain, pride, wanting to play 24hours a day, never ever wanting to sit down at a poker table EVER again etc etc etc!! Also, when i have had a particularly good or bad session i usually cant sleep for a while after it so writing this blog will fill some time til the tiredness takes hold !
Right, so where am i at with my poker "career" (term used very loosely hahahaa!)?? well i started playing for the Pokerfarm in December/January after giving up my job as a store manager at Phones4u to give myself a chance to play poker full time & see how it went. The Pokerfarm are a company that stake you to play online, they give you a daily amount of money to play with & they take a percentage of your winnings (if there are any!!). After 3 months of ups & downs with them, they eventually decided to stop staking a lot of their lower stakes players from various offices around the world, including me & a few of the lads i had met through playing there. I was pretty pissed off at the time as i didnt feel as though they had kept their side of the bargain with us, promises of weekly coaching from experienced pro's never materialised & we were basically left to fend for ourselves with no long-term experience of multi-tabling cash tables online whilst under pressure to make money for them or be "released" by them. The only time i ever got any real help was when i bribed Alex to sit with me for half an hour in exchange for half of a pizza hahahaaaa!
As it turned out, leaving the Pokerfarm was the best thing that could've happened to me. I had barely made any money playing for them & was playing at the casino a couple of times a week to top up my income. I was advised to contact a company called BankRollSupply.com to get a similar staking deal to Pokerfarm, but while i was sorting that out i started going to the casino 5 or 6 nights a week playing cash poker & turning a reasonable profit considering i play relatively low stakes (£1/£1 blinds).
BankRollSupply (BRS) have since agreed to take me on, providing i watch some instructional videos & pass a few tests, but i have put that on the back burner at the moment as i believe i will make more money playing live at the casinos than doing that. Also, in the last month or two i have started playing online Multi-table tournaments, getting staked for them by a lad i have met through the casino.
So my days at the moment consist of playing online tournys from about 6pm til midnight ish then heading to one of the Manchester casinos til about 6am most mornings. its not great for my sleeping pattern though, as i sleep most of the day!! Its all very flexible though, so on thursdays & sundays when i play football i just dont play online at all & head up to the casino after a few post-football beers (shandys!).
Well, thats enough boredom for one day..... my future posts (ramblings!!) will be based on my experiences around the poker tables. Hope to post a (slightly) more interesting blog in next few days !!
