A history of me.

Using some of the clues from this blog and my home game blog, along with my ever increasingly foggy memories - I'm going to try and reconstruct a timeline of my relationship with this game known as teh pokerz.

My earliest memory of the game comes at around 13 or 14 - I can remember gathering with my buddies in my friend Jay's house on Ashby St. in Berkeley around a round wooden dining room table to throw down with literal nickels, dimes and quarters.  Or was it those plastic Bicycle chips?

I dimly recall trying to learn what beat what, and then trying to keep up with how the betting worked.  The games we played were almost all permutations of 7-card stud and without exception they all had wild cards and/or some wacky twist.

Follow the Queen, Hi or Lo Chicago, Black Mariah, Anaconda and Baseball just to name a few.  Most fun was Night Baseball in the Rain, which involved rolling your cards one by one, not knowing what your down cards were (I think) and craziest of all if you had the Queen of Spades in the hole you automatically got half the pot.   Good times.  All skill.

So poker as I was introduced to it and played it through high school was a blast, but truthfully it was only one thing on a pretty decent sized list of fun things to do with my buds.  I would say we averaged maybe 3 or 4 poker nights a year, increasing by one or two nights every year as time went by.

Through college poker was this way for me.  Then out of school finally, my work took me to Tucson Arizona and then Portland Oregon from 1993-1995 until I finally moved to LA in December of 95.

During this time it's safe to say that I only played poker at Christmas time when I would reunite with my compadres.  I was deeply in like with this game that I thought was poker - but I had no problem abstaining for most of the year.

This continued in Los Angeles through the new millennium.  At one stage, I dimly recall I bought a round octagonal poker table for almost $200 at a mall.  Total impulse buy, I think I played maybe 2 or 3 times on it total in my apartment.

One particular game on it sticks out - it was with my good friend Tobias and his fiancee' visiting from out of town along with another good friend Tom from across the hall.  We played our usual game, and the fiancee' (who come to find out had been playing card games since she could walk) basically cleaned everyone's clocks.  Good times.

So I would play when I could, again usually around the holidays back home.  When I would go back I would hear stories around the table of my friend Daniel's regular game in Oakland.  It sounded fantastic - higher stakes, super crazy games, matching the pot games like Guts, dealers having to throw in a dollar when they misdealt, etc.  I never got to play in the game, but I always wish I had.

My company (that I had joined in 1995) moved to a bigger office building on Wilshire Blvd. in 2000. Talking with Sven and another poker compatriot/co-worker Dan, I believe it was in 2003 when somehow Dan had gotten wind that I liked poker and he invited me to a game in Hancock Park, literally just a few blocks from work.

The game was every other Wednesday night from 7:30 to 10:30 without fail, and it was fantastic.  This is where I fell in love with poker.  It's also where I met Sven, Tony, Tommy and Fred - four of what would be my good friends.  Fred passed away a few years back, click here to read about him.

I was familiar with a lot of the game already - it was also nickel/dime/quarter and plenty of the games were wacky, although many with the same names as the ones I knew had substantial variations to them.   But new to me was Texas Hold-em and Omaha High-Low.

These two games we played full orbits of, and we played strictly fixed limit.  50c bets pre and on the flop, a dollar on the turn and 2 dollars on the river.  This is where the mild crush blossomed into full blown passion.  It was also inflamed because of two other things happening at the same time.

One - the World Series of Poker began to broadcast on ESPN.  This was the year that saw amateur Chris Moneymaker turn an $86 online satellite seat into a 3 million dollar payday at the Main Event.  It changed the game forever and it certainly changed me as well.

Two - online poker started to boom in the US, and I was completely hooked.  I never deposited, and you can read pretty much my whole online experience at the beginning of this blog.  A lot of it involved a private game between my friends down here and up north on a site called Poker Academy, but I also went on quite a run on Full Tilt, getting into real money play by cashing for a few bucks in a free roll and then being lucky enough to grind up to several hundred dollars.

With the Hancock game, the WSOP on tv and online action - I was well and truly hooked.

Of these three things, which happened pretty much in this order, it was the first thing - the Hancock Park game - that really got me into it, because after about a year of playing, which was always a ton of fun anyways, I started winning.  A lot.   Okay, so I wasn't walking away rich, but I remember pretty well turning profit after profit week after week.

A lot of this profit (on average being up anywhere from $40 to over $100 in profits every game) came at the expense of the host, who had always seen himself as God's gift to poker and who was so set in his ways that he didn't adjust his game when I and Sven and a few others started figuring him out.

And so it came to pass that one particularly memorable night Tony brought a female friend of his to the game, and it turned out she was an actual poker player with a lot of casino experience - and she basically bludgeoned our host.  The game was supposed to end at 10:30, but about an hour before that time  after he lost a particularly large pot, the host stated abruptly "Okay, that's it!"  Everyone looked at each other.  Awkward silence followed.  Yes, he really did want the game to end and everyone to GTFO.

Not only that, but he emailed the next day and said that the game was over, most likely for good.

This was 2006.  Coincidentally at my house we had begun construction on a brand new detached garage.  I knew right from the moment we started building that it would make for a great poker palace.  Now I knew that I would have to host fairly regularly to get my fix, and I knew it would mostly be tournaments instead of cash game.

Side note about the Hancock Park game - as crazy as it sounds, we never played Hold-em or Omaha correctly.  After the flop we would start the action with the last player to bet or raise, instead of simply starting to the left of the button.  Crazy right?

Somewhere, sometime just before my after work game ended - I attended a friend of a friend's home poker tournament in an apartment in Westwood.  I still remember the hand I went out on - I overplayed my QQ and my friend Stephen took all of my chips when I shoved on a board with a King on it that he of course had paired.

The reason I remember this so vividly no doubt is because I was absolutely inspired by the way the host had put everything together.  He had put the chips in individual baggies at each seat, he had a timer, he had snacks, and everyone had a great time.   I knew this was the kind of game I wanted to have at my garage.

I believe my first tournament took place toward the end of 2006.  We had one of those shitty oval poker table toppers set upon a banquet table - and there were 11 of us crammed in.   Of course the host of the Hancock game won it, but the evening was still a blast.

In early 2007 I attended my first poker tournament at Hollywood Park Casino.  It was great.  I didn't come anywhere near the money.  But I promptly structured my own tournament after theirs.  $20 buy in, unlimited $10 re-buys.  A lot of work for me but a whole lot of fun.

Over the next year, all of my regulars who weren't already there came into my game.  My neighbor Mike from down the street, another Mike aka P-Money on this blog, the inimitable Rooster and of course the one and only Barb who made the game so much more fun than I ever imagined by setting the best example of how to behave at the table.

Before this year ended I had banned the host from the Hancock game, a thoroughly unpleasant experience that taught me a lot on how to deal with players that get out of line.  Nipping it in the bud is 100% always the way to go, by the way.

I also found blogger and timidly posted this.

You'll notice that the post says "coming up in 2009".  This is because I didn't post at all in 2008.  But 2008 was a great year in poker for me and the game at Pepper Street.  It was the year we worked out all the kinks, the year when I discovered that my numbers doubled when I hosted a Hold-Em tournament as opposed to H.O.R.S.E.  It was a great, great time.  Everyone still pretty much sucked, myself included, and everything felt fresh.

In the meantime, I WAS posting nearly every month on the blog that you are reading now, meticulously chronicling my trials and tribulations in my online home game.

My appearances at HPC increased, including a 2K+ score.  I still remember dropping all those hundreds into my wife's lap afterwards.  A great day.

And from 2009 on out Pepper Street became and remains pretty much what it is today.  I built my own poker table in 2012, and got custom chips then - shortly thereafter I made the game a $40 freeze out and started everyone with 20K in chips.  The format hasn't changed since.

In 2011 I played in the WSOP for the first time after only visiting the year before.  I've gone back almost every year since.

Starting at around that time I also started making yearly excursions to Vegas just to play poker.  The very first time I did this I had my best results, no doubt because players were worse and we were also there on NASCAR weekend.  A great trip.

And it's been a mostly great, mostly healthy relationship with the game ever since.  Yes, I've overindulged at times, but I feel like I'm in a pretty good place these days.  I still yearn to go deep in a big event, but no doubt that will come, as long as I keep working on my game.

I'm glad I took the time to do this - I know my brain won't be firing on all cylinders forever and I'm grateful to have this post at the very least too stumble across and remember how I fell in love back in the day.