The Comeback Kid

I haven’t been blogging for a while as I have been sick and tired of losing and having nothing good to say.

Following the highs of winning the PokerStars Sunday Million in December 2005 (read my blog about it here), a couple of narrow misses in Feb/March 2006, another huge tournament win in April 2006 and my first WSOP in July 2006, the last few months have been a real downer.

My results were awful in the last quarter of 2006 – to the extent that I actually ended 2006 with a minor deficit – my first ever calendar year loss. I was breaking all the rules - losing money without stopping to analyse why, poor lifestyle management (working hard in the day and then playing poker burnt-out in the evening) and crossing bankroll boundaries I knew I shouldn’t. My bank balance, my health and the things I hold dear like time with my family and friends were suffering.

So I took a few weeks off poker. I traveled to Eilat for a week's holiday with a group of 170 other 20-30 somethings, forgot about poker and work for a week, met a whole bunch of new people, relaxed, partied and generally had a great time.

Re-invigorated, I returned to the online felt in mid January, but it was the same old story, and three or four punishing sessions later, I made an inspired decision. I played in a cash game...

I had turned my back on cash in mid 2005, partly for bankroll and lifestyle reasons but mainly due to an ethical choice. Without wanting to sound too moralising (after all I have made a career in the gambling industry for the last 7 years), I felt much more comfortable with the idea of winning money in a fixed fee tournament than getting involved in cash games where the reload impulse has no end. Competitive entertainment vs ruthless Darwinian aggression. It probably sounds wishy-washy, paradoxical, maybe even hypocritical – but that’s how I felt so that’s what I did.

But desperate times called for desperate measures, and keen to recoup the sustained substantial losses of the previous four months, I abandoned my ethics in the pursuit of cold, hard cash.

Initially uncomfortable with the decision, I figured it would be a short experiment, but in the course of a couple of hours I turned my entire remaining PokerStars bankroll of $700 into $2,400. A pretty auspicious start, so I thought I’d roll with it a while longer. Next day, a couple of hours more play and $2,400 was now $8,000. A day later and a step up to the $10-$20 no limit holdem tables and $8,000 became $18,000. Suddenly my confidence returned. Two days later a landmark session landed me another $8,000 profit in the $10-$20 NLH game.

I then stepped up again to the $25-$50 NLH tables on PokerStars where some of the biggest cash games on the internet are played. I had another winning session and took down a further $14,000. One session later, $7,000 more won and my initial $700 had suddenly become over $40,000. I withdrew a large lump sum and the pain and losses of four months had been wiped out in a week.

I dropped back in limits, but soon won enough to graduate back to the higher levels, consistently beating the game. Last night, I even played my first offline cash game in over a year. With only an hour to spare, I popped into the Vic with Golden Fish and managed to double my starting stack of £1,000 with a hyper aggressive style that put the die-hard rocks on tilt for the rest of the evening leaving Golden Fish to clean up!

Obviously, I’ve only played a relatively small number of sessions, so perhaps the variance factor has yet to kick in, but to date I have taken pride from tangling with and at least holding my own with various poker luminaries including ActionJeff, Fossilman (Greg Raymer), Daut44 (Ryan Daut) and ElkY.

Perhaps, its gone to my head, as I even applied to become a member of ActionJeff’s new forum at www.gifafi.com – marketed as a forum for “top players” only. He hasn’t admitted me as yet. Perhaps he doesn’t rate me – then again maybe you have to be from the US and under the age of 22 to be considered worthy. If only I was a 22-year-old college boy, I could get away with saying “LOL, WTF is that about – I pwn”. Sadly I’m not, so Jeff, if you’re reading, do tell me what I need to do to qualify old chap.

So, all in all, it’s been a crazy few weeks on the cyber-tables for thekid08. Despite the huge profits earned, I’m still not that comfortable playing for cash, but I guess as long as the cash continues to roll in, my principles will continue to be softened by my greed.

I don’t know...we’ll see. I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

Until next time,

David Gross aka "Thekid08"