I first got into poker in late 1999, enticed by the characters on Late Night Poker and long before the likes of Stars/Full Tilt were thought of, took my first steps towards emulating Devilfish on Pokerroom.com. At the time, the only option was Limit Hold Em cash games and after learning the game at the play money tables, made a stab at it for real. Never played for massive stakes but had a few decent cashes in tournaments and found a bit of a niche on the $2/$4 – $3/$6 limit tables. I took an Open University degree in Mathematics and Statistics during the mid to late 00’s which meant poker took a bit of a back seat but towards the end of the course, started to get back into the game at a local pub game in Norwich. I subsequently ended up running this and after we decided the Nuts Poker League wasn’t the right place for the game, I ended up running my own small league between about a dozen venues. Unfortunately, Norfolk isn’t a hotbed for poker activity so play was limited to the local pubs, a local “social club” that “did a bit of poker as well” (think the Gutshot before it got closed down) and the odd trip to DTD/London. I moved to Nottingham to take a postgraduate teaching qualification and in this time won a few tournaments at DTD and other local casinos but as any teacher will tell you, spare time is at a bit of a premium so didn’t do this as regularly as I would have liked. Once I realised that I procrastinate far too much than is healthy for a teacher, I went into the job I currently have which I guess could loosely be described as a data analyst. Although I still enjoy a bit of tutoring on the side. In recent years, I’ve discovered APAT. I really enjoy playing non-holdem games and a friend told me about a HORSE tournament being played at Aspers. I was keen as I’d not long had my 1st trip to Vegas where I played the Sunday night HORSE at the Orleans (which I unfortunately bubbled – I did go back a couple of years later and chopped it for about $1k though), but was unable to get the time off work so set the date in my diary for the following year. In my first WCOAP I came 2nd in the 8 game and 3rd in the Open Face Chinese but I went away from that more taken by the friendliness and camaraderie between the players than anything else. Since then, I’ve played in several other APAT events with the highlights being converting the OFC bronze from my first WCOAP into a bracelet the following year (I play a lot of OFC) and 3rd in the Main Event in Vienna. I can’t emphasise enough that these events are as much about the people for me than the game. I wouldn’t be on this page today if that wasn’t the case. Poker for me has always been a hobby rather than something I’ve done seriously. I’ve never separated my poker money from my life money, tracked my results or put any real time in to study the more theoretical side of the game. I’ve had some decent results over the last couple of years and feel I have plenty of areas I can improve so I plan to change that for 2020 and as a contribution to this website, I’ve decided to blog about my progress. Advice and comments will be more than welcome!
