1. 2008-01-27 06:39:36

   Cheating at Life

   What happens when you take a person who has the ability to be good at and accomplish almost anything and pair that person up with extreme laziness and an overwhelming lack of motivation? Well, in my case, the result is a professional poker player.

   Hi there. My name is Jeff, I am 29, and I play poker on the internets with chips and cards to pay bills and buy yummy food to eat. How did that happen? I have to start with a warning that some things I say will sound arrogant or ridiculous...well that's because I am arrogant and ridiculous at times :). As little as five years ago, playing poker professionally never crossed my mind. To figure out the how and why, I guess we have to go back to the childhood (as that is where all the answers lay (or is it lie, I never could figure that one out)) <---double parentheses are cool, which brings me to the first key to how I got here. I am a nerd...

   As a kid, I soaked up all information around me as if I needed merely to be shown that a truth existed for me to realize I already knew it. Everything came easy when it came to academics, especially math. I was also introduced to competition at an early age through sports and academic games in school. I ate it up and have basically spent my entire life playing games and beating most people at them. This I attribute to my dad because he taught me tons of games at a young age. One of those games was poker. I was probably seven years old when he taught me some basic poker games. Whenever I learned a new game, the optimal strategy of the game was as clear as day to me to the point that I didn't understand why other kids/people couldn't see the same things I did within the games. For example, when we played monopoly, I figured out at a very early age that having the orange properties were clearly the most profitable properties to own because getting sent to jail puts opponents in prime position to hit them. Other kids just wanted the big shiny properties because more expensive = special. I didn't understand why they couldn't see what was so obvious to me. Naturally, I soon figured out that it was because I was different...(yeah I was a nerd). School was just as easy for me, with straight A's coming with little to no effort because, like with games, the processes of learning, gathering, and processing information didn't need to be taught to me; they were already there. It was an unfair advantage, but it had negative results as well. I never learned how to study or what it meant to work hard to accomplish something. Every path was easy and I didn't know any better...

   Which led me to forgetting about math/science (i wanted to be a geneticist) to studying theater in college because it was different, brought me out of my nerdy shell, and was the biggest challenge, yet path of least resistance. That major obviously leads to no real world jobs, so when I started playing poker again a few years ago at a friends home game, soaking it up to the point that I wanted to play all the time, it was only natural for me to figure out a way to play that game until I didn't have to have a real job.

   I started on Party Poker playing 5 dollars at a time (the minimum buy in) at .10/.25 NL holdem. I deposited 50 bucks to do this and have never redeposited money into online poker sites. After a few months i was easily making more money per hour than my crappy real job, so the choice was clear to me. Work on poker until I was a millionaire. I'm not a millionaire yet; mostly because of what I mentioned in the very first sentence of this blog, I am lazy. But I will get there, even if I only play for twenty hours a week; hence the title of this entry...I am cheating at life. More on what I've learned while cheating at life to come...

   Posted by WeezerMoo at 2008-01-27 06:39:36

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Comments on “Cheating at Life”

1. • Posted by Jason M g 2008-01-31 22:50:31
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   • I lost again.

2. • Posted by Jason M g 2008-01-27 23:37:03
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   • Nice first post. Don't forget the game. (I lost.)

3. • Posted by Ethan g 2008-01-27 19:31:00
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   • Welcome, fellow nerd!

4. • Posted by uzjedi (unverified) g 2008-01-27 15:17:14
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   • ...cheater... "Who taught you to do this?"
     "I LEARNED IT BY WATCHING YOU!!!!!"