My first memories of poker was around 1998 playing with high school friends, typical games were draw and stud variations: Cincinnati, Chicago, In-Between, Guts, 5 card draw, etc. Then we had one buddy who introduced this dumb game with only 2 cards called "Texas Holdem"...he had seen on it this movie called Rounders. That never really took off with our group as there just wasn't as much action!
Fast forward 4-5 years and I watched Moneymaker win the WSOP so that piqued my interest again along with a few other guys. We would play 3-4 handed typically but sometimes we would get a full table and play $5 tournaments.
After college I found a group of guys that were doing $3 tournaments (I distinctly remember it being $3 for some reason) in their basement and they introduced me to online poker, so I put $50 on paradise poker (maybe a few times) and that was pretty much it, I was hooked! During this time I was pretty much buying or asking for any and every poker book printed. Then I found out our local casino dealt poker so I went up there and checked it out, 9 tables of LIMIT POKER with 2-3 weekly NL Holdem tournaments. Eventually, I quit my IT Support job (went to college for Network Administration) and dealt poker part time...my parents were thrilled!
. Hourly, dealing poker paid about 2x what I was getting paid for my IT support job, but I just didn't get that many hours....but that just meant more time for poker!
I did that for about 1.5 years, during that time I was playing quite bit online (Full Tilt, Stars and a few smaller sites) and qualified for both the 2005 and 2006 Main event. I cashed in the 2006 main event which was awesome! I ended up quitting my dealing job and playing online and home games for about another year while I was "looking" for a job in IT. Eventually it happened and in 2008 I got back into the IT field, bought a house, got married and started popping out kids...so that kind of ended my poker run.
Now, I play a little bit online and home game tournaments every few months. I've also started playing HU with my 11 year old son who loves it. I just ordered a new cash set with .05, so I hope to teach him some real life lessons with his own money.