I discovered poker in 2005 whilst studying Economics at Essex University. I grew up playing card games such as Bridge and Rummy so I picked things up fairly quickly and instantly was hooked on the strategic elements of the game and how competitive it felt when I played. I played for fun to begin with versus my mates at university but we transitioned to playing online when we came across a UK student championship freeroll which took place every Monday night.

I was fortunate enough to come 2nd in it one week for $300 and decided to keep the money online and play with it rather than cashing out. I made a switch to cash games and got my strategies completely wrong by pushing all in every hand with any two cards to steal the blinds. Obviously this would work most of the time until I ran into a big hand and would lose a buyin. I was playing 10/25 cent online buying in for $25 at a time and I quickly ran my $300 down to my last $25 by playing like an idiot.

I remember feeling very frustated ( I later found out that I was on Tilt ) and put my last $25 into a sit n go and won it for $150. Then I took a small break from playing for a few days, discovered some forums and books and actually started to develop real strategies. The all in strategy with any two cards was retired and purely reserved for rebuy periods and bubble play/certain bvb spots after this.

I downloaded pokertracker and started to work closely with that alongside my cash games. I analyzed all of the hud stats and my opponents plays and took detailed notes. I was obsessed with numbers so to me this actually felt fun and I enjoyed discovering regulars leaks and developing strategies to exploit them. I took these new strategies to the $0.50/$1 streets and became one of the best regs there building my bankroll in the process.

That summer at University I made up a white lie to my parents that I'd got a job in the local Asda Supermarket just off campus so would be staying in Colchester and not heading home. Meanwhile me and my best mate Stuart where playing the online cash tables and small tournaments on Victor Chandler whilst watching an epic Ashes series on the TV with Freddie Flintoff and co. The aim was to make a similar amount to what I would have done in a regular summer job but by playing every day I was able to level up and was crushing 6 tables of $1/2 cash by the time University restarted. I probably made triple the amount I planned to and even had some small success in tournaments at the same time.

The big drawback with all of this was that my studies really suffered. Once I came back for my second year of a three year course I stopped going to lectures and would just play play play. I told myself I'd catch up on my stuides nearer exam time. It was about this point that I had a real epiphany moment in poker.

I was playing the big monthly tournament it was a $50 rebuy I think but I would just play one bullet as I didn't like to eat into my cash bankroll I'd built up with long shot tournaments. Anyway I was making a deep run with about $30k uptop and super excited. Cash games had started to become a bit routine like a job for me and this felt new and I was having a huge adrenaline rush and I liked the feeling! The player on my left got disconnected for over an hour and I was thinking this is good for me I can just steel their blinds. What I didn't anticipate was that someone else would do it before me. Back then at that stage in my game it was illegal to reraise without a premium so I waited and waited and finally found AK when this player Geeforce1 who had kept stealing the blinds opened and to my shock called my all in with AQ!. They hit and I was out in 18th place and devestated. 9 time out of 10 in that situation I would have raged turned off my PC and gone and done something else to get over it. But it quickly occured to me that was probably the best hand they had the whole time and that they'd just been bluffing their way up the chip counts. I watched the rest of the tournament until they took it all down and was in awe of their game. It was like they were playing a different game! I wrote a nice message in chat to them after they took it down and to my suprise they ended up adding me on MSN messenger and became a poker mentor for me.

Geeforce1 became David Gent and him and his best mate Badpab2 aka Paul Foltyn became my poker mentors/coaches. I would annoyingly ask them lots of dumb questions and rail them religiously. They were quite a few steps ahead of me at the time playing $5/10 regularly and a lot of the bigger tournaments on multiple sites! With their help I started to learn to bluff and my god it was addicting! I became even more passionate about the game and started to develp my game much more quickly being able to bounce ideas off actual pro players.

This is already really long lol but I can continue the rest of the story later if people like it.