About

I first played poker as a kid.  A friend of my dad’s named Dane taught me 5-card draw when I was 7 or 8 years old. He also gave me my first taste of liquor (Jack Daniel’s, from the bottle naturally) that same summer. The first time I remember playing, and winning, was at a friend’s house in the 7th grade after raising hell on Halloween night.  We trick-or-treated and stole candy from younger kids and then gambled sweets late into the night. I ended up with every King Size Butterfinger, Peanut Butter Cup, and most of the Kit-Kats playing draw games with tons of wild cards. After that, I played poker once every few years until the late 90s when I ended up playing in some semi-regular home games with friends and getting interested in online poker around the same time. Both the home games I played in were dealer’s choice games; mostly crazy variant games like Chicago High/Low and Spit, but with some Stud and Hold ‘em thrown in too.  Pure guys-night-out drunken gambling. Fun, but not really skill-based… to say the least.My first online poker experiences were play-money Sit-and-Go No-Limit Hold ‘em tournaments on PokerRoom.com around the same time (1999).  I messed around at bit and didn’t think much of it until around 2002 or so when I kept hearing more and more about the online poker phenomenon and the people making actual money playing online.  I started thinking about the game a little more seriously and built my play-money bankroll up into the hundreds-of-thousands from the 10,000 a day that they’d let you muck around with.  PokerRoom offered daily freeroll multi-table tourneys back then with maybe 800 or 1000 maximum entrants.  Their marketing department had come up with a clever twist, of course. If you cashed in one of the freerolls, you couldn’t claim your winnings unless you earned “Player Points” by playing real-money games.Eventually, I cashed and my seemingly unstoppable play-money performance gave me enough confidence to make a real-money deposit of $200 to try and earn my freeroll winnings (and the “First Deposit Bonus” too).   Infrequently and timidly, I played some Lucky Dollar $1+.10 and $2 “Frenzy” rebuy tourneys and eventually my freeroll winnings and deposit bonus expired before earning the requisite Player Points… I continued to play those Lucky Dollars until I ended up making a final table.  I think I ended up in 5th or 6th, but the prize–under $100 I’m sure–buoyed my confidence yet again. Armed with under $300, I added the rare $5+.50 S’n'G to my play.  My bankroll hovered around $300 for a long while until a run of cashes in $1 buy-in tourneys, including a 1st and a 2nd place finished bumped me up to the $5+.50 multi-table tourneys, where I mostly lost. I was still winning S’n'Gs, though, so my bankroll was still on the rise.  Finally, I took first place in a $5+.50 multi-table for around $900.  My bankroll was up to four-figures!  I immediately cashed out $1000 and left the remainder: a little less that my $200 initial deposit.  

If you want to contact me via email, please do so at nlheblog@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading and good luck!