Finally, a blog

I've been wanting to do something like this for quite some time but for many different reasons...the biggest being laziness I just haven't gotten around to it.

I suppose I can give a little background to catch people up on who I am.

I'm a 24 year old from MN. I started playing semi-professionaly my junior year of college and graduated graduated with a computer science degree 2 years ago. After I graduated I decided that poker was the best option, at least for a bit. I started out playing limit hold-em and have played over a million hands, mostly online. I goto Vegas/LA every couple months or so as it's nice to play live from time to time.

Being a poker pro can be GREAT, but probably isn't everything many young people think it will be, especially now with the legislation and the games being a lot tougher. It definetly has a lot of downsides and has messed up a few of my friends lives. Really easy to do if you're not careful. For me as well as many others, it's worked out well, but not without stress and other complications. I have great bankroll management so I stayed in good shape, but I went through 6 straight months of losing, all while dropping down limits. That took so much out of me emotional-bankroll wise that I've pretty much taken a break from limit hold-em for awhile and have been playing no-limit which at the lower stakes has far less variance. I had always been interested in learning it and it seemed like the best time. I've played probably 150k hands of it and been having nice success. A welcome change.

Poker is easy to play when it's going well, but as soon as it starts going poorly, it's hard to stay focused and play, let alone play well. It's also not easy to keep it from propogating into the rest of your life and not be crabby around friends/girlfriends.

I feel like I'm making it out to be bad. Quite the contrary, it's just not without negatives. It's given me tons of opportunities I couldn't have imagined if I would have gone into the computer science field. I've spent a ton of time travelling and was able to spend a huge chunk of last winter skiing out west. I've gotten to spend a lot of time on the lakes here in mn. I rarely have to wake up to an alarm. If I don't feel well, I don't have to work. I can visit my girlfriend during the week. I can pick up and go visit friends in another state for a week on short notice. I've met a ton of other successful/fun people and the networking that provides is great.

I feel like I'm rambling. Enough for now, maybe I'll come back and edit it later.