In the Beginning

The most common questions people ask me about my poker life are in regards to how I built my bankroll. I get asked this question so much that I've decided to write a post about it which I can refer people to. Since the building of my bankroll was inextricably tied with that of Paul's, I will tell our stories together.

I got interested in poker in a very typical fashion. One night during my junior year in high school I went over to my friend Reid's house to play ping pong and some other games with a bunch of guys. I don't remember the details exactly, but they were watching the movie "Rounders" there during the night and I ended up watching most of it. There's no question that movie inspired me to play the game at an intense level. It still does. At some point before, during, or after the movie, we wound up playing some different games of poker on a really nice poker table Reid's grandfather made for him. I think I wound up winning a pretty decent chunk of money that night, and I was instantly hooked. That was the first key night of my poker career.

After that night I basically got in a pattern of calling Reid every weekend asking if he wanted to get a game going. It was by far my favorite thing to do. Eventually a lot of my other friends got into it, and the games became more common. We even played in the back of math class sometimes.

We really didn't know what we were doing. We dealt the flop in Texas Hold em before any betting. Back then we usually played a variety of dealer's choice games. My favorites were the winding, high-low draw games like Anaconda (Pass the Trash). We didn't play a lot of the standard games, and we didn't play them properly when we did.

I didn't play much at all my first year of college. Poker hadn't yet become mainstream so there wasn't a consistent game or anything. When I got back home after my first year, Reid, Nick Demarest, and I came up with this plan to host a massive, high-stakes poker and blackjack game at a hotel in Boulder. It was sort of a graduation party and we worked really hard to make it memorable - we got a ton of liquor, food, and cigars, made special invitations for everyone, required a tie. It went really well, considering how risky it was - basically everyone there was under 21 and we set off the smoke detector at the beginning. Zack Sanders (the Bag) and his friend Shady Dan were invited to the game through a mutual friend, and we played high-stakes with them. It was clear they knew what they were doing, and I got Zack's number before the end of the night so we could link up for future games. That was the second key night of my career.

We started playing a lot with those guys, who had gone to Boulder High and had a similar poker progression during high school. They understood hold em better than us and I finally got to play with some players better than me. I really started focusing on what Zack was doing, because he was winning more consistently than anyone I had seen before. I learned a lot playing with Zack.

The summer after my sophomore year in college was when the Travel Channel first started airing the WPT and ESPN first showed the WSOP. I was completely enthralled by televised poker. I was especially excited by the idea of playing poker professionally, travelling around the circuit playing in big tournaments. This was really the first time the idea of being a professional poker player ever occurred to me.

I discovered cardplayer.com that fall and started reading every issue of the magazine cover-to-cover online. I found out there was a casino about twenty miles from Macalester where you could play if you were 18 years old. One Friday night I made an expedition to the casino, after planning the excursion for about a week in advance. I played 3-6 limit hold em all night and all morning, eventually losing about 360 bucks. This was about as much money as I had at the time, and that night/following day was certainly one of the worst experiences of my life. I could probably write about 3000 words about that whole ordeal (culminating in the infamous John Ritter Incident), but I'd rather not relive it.

I read a bunch of Daniel Negreanu's Cardplayer columns after that night and got inspired to attack the game even harder. I really learned a lot, strategic and emotional, about poker from reading those old Negreanu columns. They were just what I needed at the time.

One day I put 50 bucks into PartyPoker and started playing sit n gos. I was a winner from the beginning, and managed to work that $50 up to about $1000 playing $11, $33, and $55 sit n gos. I think I cashed out $300 or something, and then wound up losing the rest of the money in the account through a combination of multi-table tournaments and limit hold em cash games.

During Winter Break of that year, the Bag heard about this tournament called the "Denver Series of Poker" held in an art gallery downtown. It had a pretty small buy-in, $30 or something, so we decided to attend. The day of the DSOP I was playing frisbee golf with Paul and some others. When he heard I was going to a poker tournament that night, he asked if he could join. The Bag and I versed him on the hold em basics on the way down to Denver, and he wound up getting 10th place (Bag and I did not cash). Afterwards Paul came over to my house, struck up an account on PartyPoker, and started playing while I went to bed.

Seven in the morning my dad woke me up to ask who the guy on the computer downstairs was. Paul had played sit n gos all night on Party, and he had destroyed them. Poker had set its hooks into Paul's addictive personality, and wouldn't be letting go anytime soon. That was the third key night of my poker career.

The next semester I went to New Zealand to study abroad. There was a casino in Dunedin that spread a limit hold em game once a week. I went, and lost. I also played a bit at the Crown Casino in Melbourne when I visited Australia during a break, and lost. Eventually I started going to an internet cafe in Dunedin to play sit n gos on Party. I slowly, painstakingly grinded up a small bankroll. Meanwhile, Paul was playing higher stakes than I had ever imagined, with mixed results.

I didn't have much of a plan for the summer of '04. I was hoping to make some cash playing poker but there wasn't really a precedent showing that would necessarily be a viable option. I didn't really have much of an idea what I'd be doing after college, either. Looking back I was at a pretty critical juncture but didn't realize it.

I started playing these 3-table sit n gos on Party. I went ice-cold and managed to lose my entire bankroll in one brutal night. I had now played online for about nine months and I was about even overall. I had lost substantially every time I played in a casino. I had no bankroll. I didn't really know what to do.

Right about this time Paul asked me if I wanted to play together with him on the old "$200s" on Party - $2-4 NL with a max $200 buyin (at the time the largest NL cash game on the site). Paul had some experience playing in these games and assured me they were beatable. I really wanted to take a shot of course - I've never shied away from high stakes. There was only one problem: I had no money.

Paul took all the financial responsibility when we first started playing those games. I can't stress this enough - I had no bankroll and no means to pay Paul back if we lost. It might have been a year or more before I was able to pay him if we lost. Basically I was using Paul's money to gamble, although we were doing it together. We made every decision together, using one avatar on one computer. We split everything 50/50.

Things went pretty well at first - I think we booked a couple wins to get started. But then there was this disastrous session where we took about seven awful beats, and by the time it was over we were down for the summer. A day or two after that I went on a backpacking trip in the Flat Tops. During that trip I did a lot of soul searching and a lot of analysis. Eventually I concluded that we had just been unlucky that one time, that we played well enough to beat those games, and that I wanted to give it another shot. When I got back to Boulder, I told Paul it was time to make some money.

It was pretty much smooth sailing the rest of the summer. We killed the games. Paul and I made a brutal combo, perfectly complementing each other's strengths and weaknesses. I played a little too scared; he played a little too aggressive. He had major tilt problems; bad beats didn't really bother me much. He knew how to bluff; I knew how to trap. It was (and still is) a formidable combination. It helped that no one really knew how to play no limit hold em back then as well. By the end of the summer "kwicky" was one of the best players on the site and I had made more money playing poker than in all other jobs I had ever had combined.

I was a little bit afraid of playing on my own when I went back to school that fall, but those fears were soon assuaged as I went on a massive heater of my own and beat the games harder than ever. Things went very well for me that fall, and I considered myself possibly the best no limit hold em player on the site by the end of the semester. Meanwhile poker soured for Paul, his bankroll crumbled, and he eventually took a leave of absence from the game.

Early in February I got 2nd place in the Super Monday tournament on Party for $22k. This was the fourth key night of my poker career. It was kind of a random result, as I played few tournaments and wasn't all that good at playing them. That score tripled my bankroll and allowed me to step up to the $5-$10 NL games on Party that opened up just a couple weeks later.

I immediately crushed those games, probably harder than anyone. Paul and I had deep-stack experience since we played so many long sessions, and the new games allowed 100x big blind buyins instead of the old 50 max. I don't think most players, even the legendary AliKings, knew what to do with all that money. I probably stacked players eight or ten times as often as I got stacked in those days. I won almost every time I played.

I've chronicled the rest in my blogs. A brief recap of the crucial events: I lost two thirds of my bankroll at the 2005 WSOP, then immediately won it back with a clutch 7th place finish in the Party Million Guaranteed. That was the fifth key night of my poker career. I then killed the $10-20 NL on Party for a year, with one nasty patch at the beginning of 2006. I've been playing a healthy diet of big buy-in tournaments since the 2005 WSOP, and have yet to make a real big score. I did win the Best All-Around Player at the Fall Poker Classic at Canterbury Park in Minnesota in 2005, but those were relatively small tournaments. I'm still pretty far in the red for my live tournament career.

As for Paul: watching me make the big run in the Party Million Guaranteed rekindled his fire for poker. We played a lot of joint sessions that summer and he was able to rebuild his bankroll much like I built mine the summer before. Once or twice later that fall he played high-stakes on my account in games that he really couldn't afford, but he crushed and soon after he was back on his own with a solid bankroll and a razor-sharp game. He started getting into short-handed play (with the help of our friend Napoleon) and annihilated it. The rest of his story (and I assume mine) is no longer about bankroll-building.

Bankrolls can be built from scratch. My friend Toph started with $100 in the summer of 2005 and was playing $25-50 NL within a year's time. Chad Batista and Adam Friedman built their bankrolls literally from $0 starting off with freerolls. But personally I'm not sure if I ever would have got anything going without the help of a friend, and I believe the same is true for him.