BryantRC
Two Pair
Let's do this! Hey everyone! My name is Bryant. I'm in the Opelika/Auburn Alabama area (Lee County). I am working towards starting a home game and eventually a robust poker club here in Lee county Alabama. I will be using this thread to document this journey. I'm going to start by sharing my personal poker story. I fell in love with poker in the early 2000s watching it on TV. I remember seeing MoneyMaker's big win. I started playing NL Texas Holdem online with play chips and really enjoyed it. I played for several years learning the game without ever putting any money on the line. I was raised in a very conservative Christian home and had a healthy fear of gambling addiction. I also was trying to support a family of 6 on just my income so I couldn't afford to risk money. One day I decided to put $50 in and see what happened. In about 3 hours I ran that $50 up to $1100! I started slipping back down and at $900 I decided to quit while I was ahead. I cashed out and used that money to pay down some bills. I never put another dollar in a poker website after that, even up to this day. I always felt that playing for real money online was far riskier than in person because it was harder to get a good read on an opponent. It kinda just becomes a numbers game online which is far less interesting or exciting to me. Not long after that I got bored with online play chip poker. After that amazing cash win, play chip poker completely lost it's appeal. For many years after that I told my friends the story of how I played that one time and quit while I was ahead. 15 years later around 2020, my 19 year marriage had ended and 4 of my 5 kids were nearly grown. I still enjoyed watching poker online but I hadn't played hardly since that last/first win. I was living with a room mate who I learned, liked to play poker. Unfortunately, he also had a pretty bad alcohol problem. I quickly realized he was a pretty good poker player when sober but he was rarely sober! He also had plenty of disposable money. I tried not to take advantage of him but he insisted on playing regularly and I regularly won against him heads up. I started out keeping track of my wins and losses but after I got up on him several hundred dollars I lost track and didn't care. I'd be embarrassed to know how much I actually won from him heads up. We both had a lot of fun though. Eventually, he moved and I didn't have any way to play again. We are still good friends and love reminiscing about those late nights at the kitchen table. Early 2023 I randomly connected with a local poker community and was able to start playing again. This was the first time I had sat down at a real poker table to play "real" poker. It was awesome. These guys were far more experienced than me. I loved the challenge and became obsessed with learning as much as I could about poker. I started studying poker seriously for the first time. I still could not afford to just be lighting money on fire every month so I tracked my bank roll meticulously. I struggled to just stay even for a while but eventually my bank roll started growing. To date my largest win in a single evening of poker is $794 profit but that was an exception. I mostly play smaller stakes with less than $100 in front of me. I'm well up in to the thousands now on my bank roll and have decided to reinvest some of it in to hosting my own game. I came here researching chips and everything poker. I've ordered some chips and cards. I bought a small used folding poker table of FB market place. I'll be sharing pics and updates here as I go. In the mean time, I'm going to do a small photo dump now sharing some of my wins this year. These pics represent some awesome memories! Enjoy the chip porn!
