How it all began...

Alright, let’s try to get this blogging thing started. I have no idea for the moment how interesting this blog is going to be but may be it will develop and help me to evaluate my progress in Poker and if not then at least I have got something more to do when it is quiet at work and I can’t think of anything else to do.
I should probably start with some history about myself just to get this a little more personal I guess. My educational career started in Germany, which is where I originally come from, in a small College in a east German city called Gera. I studied Business Management and Administration there for three years and after finishing I decided that I want to do a BA in the same subjects. As this would have taken me another two or even three years to do in Germany I decided to come to England and do it within one year. (Yeah, loving England) So a good friend of mine, his girlfriend, my girlfriend and me moved over here in a two bedroom house very close to the college. The sick thing about this is how we moved. As we did not have enough money we had to organise everything very cheap. So I borrowed a van of my brother and we got all our stuff in there including a Pearl drum kit, four bicycles, a Marshall TSL 100 with a 4 x 12” Marshall 1960 box, four guitars and a full size Poker table with 12 chairs. Of course we had our normal stuff like clothing and the other less important things in there as well. As the van was only a 3 seater my mate, his girlfriend and me drove up the 1000 miles all the way through Germany, France, Belgium and England (We arrived in Dover and went to Durham). We arrived the next day at about lunchtime after about 18 hours of travel. We spend half a day in our new house went to sleep and next morning my mate and me drove the 1000 miles back to the deep east of Germany because we had to bring the Van back and pick up my girlfriend. So another 16h or so later we arrived back in Germany. Spending half a day at the old home, went to sleep, got up next morning and did the same 1000 miles one more time with my very cosy Citroen Saxo. FFS is was completely fucked after those days and it took me a few days to recover. I’m not gonna move house in such a silly style again. Anyway we arrived in England, studied for a year, got the degree and decided we like Durham. So we stayed and now work and live in Durham.
I’m 23 now and play Poker for a little more than 2 years with more or less minor success. I’ve done the usual things like reading Theory of Poker, two German Poker books called Poker Schule and Poker Uni, Nigel Goldman’s “Make a Million with Onlline Poker” which was actually the first book I’ve read about Poker and it was a present by the author who I coincidently got to know when I lived in Spain and played Poker in a pub with some mates and he asked if he could join. We played a SNG and he busted in the first hand with K9 and left five of his books as presents on the table.

I guess my biggest success was a live tournament win in Germany. The tourney was € 15 buy in and was half shootout half freezeout. Everyone had to play a 10 seater SNG first and the winner qualified for the second stage which was a freezeout then. You could play as many qualification SNG’s as you wanted but obviously had to pay € 15 for each you played. I managed to win my first table without even having had to play HU as I knocked 2nd and 3rd place out with my QQ. For the freezeout there were 30 players left and I got had a nice rush of cards and had a big chip lead by the time I was HU. In the first hand my opponent only had one BB left and he doubled up but in the second hand I got 88 which held against his 55. More than 200 players participated in the qualification SNG’s but only the top three players got some prizes. In Germany cash prizes were and still are forbidden for Poker tournaments so you always get some kind of a different prize. In this tourney 3rd place got a set of 500 Poker Chips which is completely ridiculous. Second place got a cheap digital camera and my first price was a full size Poker table with 12 chairs and a buy in for a 888 sponsored 100.000 € guaranteed tournament with max. 1000 players in the Czech Republic. The Poker table is brilliant and I love it but it is not of much use for the moment. In the old house we used it as a large kitchen table because I had a carpenter make a wood cover for it. The tournament of 888 was cancelled 24h before the start. I had already flown over to Frankfurt and stayed at a friends house and wanted to go to Czech the next day. In the night I received the call that the tourney was cancelled as some officials did not allow the Casino to put large tents on their premises to accommodate all the players as they could not have accommodated 1000 players inside the Casino. So I spent some completely useless 5 days in Frankfurt and went back to Durham. What fucking waste of money and time this was. I was considering to claim compensation but just wanted to forget about all this bullshit and didn’t do anything. Except that I only won minor live tourneys with the biggest cash win being € 150. Not very impressive. I know. This is getting really long now and I will stop here and continue this later. I can't really risk to put everyone off reading this blog within the first post. To be continued...

Truthans