Elky's friend Rekrul on his poker experience

This post was taken from teamliquid.net, a starcraft community site. It is by rekrul who is one of elky's friends and fellow starcraft player here in Korea. this is his experience so far in poker.

"This is a word of warning about poker. Most people hide their losses and exaggerate how much they win. Poker is incredibly hard and everyone should not jump into it so fast. Someone on PM asked me some detailed questions about my poker career and I wrote a pretty long response so I figured I'd let everyone read it. The point of this should be to warn you all about poker and let you know just how hard it is and how long it takes to succeed. I hope it will discourage most of you and encourage a select few.

Anyways enjoy:I started poker about two years ago. Dudey (ilnp mockturtle whatever) came to me, elky, nazgul, and NTT on b.net and told us to download this poker program to watch him play a tournament. At first the game seemed rather dull to me with a lot of luck involved. But I was very very lucky to know Dudey, he bludgeoned it into my skull that poker is much like starcraft except with money. The skilled player will win. Plus he gave me an outlined detail of what hands to play preflop from what positions in order to play "tight." With this knowledge I tackled the penny tables for a long long long time. I would get furious at the 10$ pots I lost AA vs KQo allin preflop to trip queens and then I would tilt and constantly lose my money. For the first 3 months I lost 450$ playing penny tables and a little bit of .1.25 (.05/.1 did not exist at that time) on Stars. I never really dreamed that poker could be used as a source of income, especially one that would allow me to make in one month more than my parents make in an entire year combined after 5 years of university each.

Anyways I didn't play poker a lot, maybe 1-3 hours a day because I was still very much involved with starcraft at that time and was focused on winning WCG USA (which i did that year yay). After about a year of playing I had managed to cashout maybe 2-3k by playing the .01/.02 - .25/.5 tables but I still got a factory job for 8.50$/hour before getting ready to go to college. It was my first real job and I went into it thinking that it was something I had to do for my life. But as I looked around at all these hillbilly unintelligent people working at this HONDA plant I was like, what the HELL AM I DOING? I have much more potential than this, sure life is hard but it shouldn't be that hard for me.Anyways I started college and thats when I started playing poker A LOT. I would play online several hours per day and then play for 4-8 hours every night in my dormitory 20$ buyin game.

I was making enough money to get by and help pay for college books and pay for any little random items I'd want on a whim, but still I never ever envisioned myself being able to play poker pro. I still really felt like I had to do the usual thing...go to college and get a degree and get a real job and play poker on the side as a hobby for a little more income. But halfway through college I had sort of an epiphany.

Every day I would sit there and think about life and why I was at this crappy university doing stuff in school that I have no desire or reason to do. Why do all American kids follow this same path? I didn't want to be normal. This was actually right around the time that Elky told me about a spot being open on the hexatron dream team. I realized that I hated school, did not give a crap about my classes, and that all I was doing was poker. So I decided to step outside the box by dropping out of college and going to korea to play starcraft.

This was around April 04. By that time I had earned a total of around 10-13k off of poker 3k of which was from a 3rd place finish in a real life ohio championship of poker tournament. Looking back at one hand in that tournament makes me realize how little control we have in life. Life is like a river pushing you forward all you can do is sway your boat a little bit in whatever direction you want, but ultimately the river is going to pull you along (boat, river, pushing...blah puns not intended). The hand is this: at one point with 20 people left I was short stacked and had to go allin with 77 and got called by AK, AKx flop, x turn, river 7. He was the chip leader and would have busted me if I didn't land that 7 on the river.

When I came to Korea I had a total of 3000$ to my name. If I didn't have that 3k I would have never came to korea. If I never came to Korea I'm fairly sure I would have never truly succeeded at poker like I am now because I would have never had the needed pressure that forced me to succeed. Still...by the time Korea came I viewed poker as something that could keep me going here while I tried to become good at starcraft and get a salary. When my funds were running low I started playing poker again and I made just enough to survive in korea by playing maybe 1-2 hours a day.

Then as my korea report says everything went all bad and I was low on money. I went two weeks without losing at all. I played .5/1 with 400$ made that into 1000...played 1/2 made that into 3000...played 2/4 made that into 7k...then stayed on 2/4 3/6 NL for a long time. Yeah I wasn't even following my own bankroll management advice...I was very desperate and lucky that I did not take many bad beats.This is when I realized it was possible to make bank just by playing an internet card game. Plus I was seeing elky make ridiculous amounts of money too. I made 35k over the course of 2 months on 2/4NL and realized I needed to quit starcraft, use that money to move out and get my own place, and get serious about poker.

So I did that...but once again ran into some trouble. I was so free because I had my own place and didn't have any manager hovering over me that I was out drinking every night and going to clubs. When I woke up every day I was so hung over and tired that my mind couldn't really focus...I was still up overall but at one point my online bankroll was 3k and I had 12k debt with only 5k in my bank account in USA that I could use. I had spent so much money here that I was virtually broke if you considered the debt I had from poker loans during my bad 2 week streak.

Epiphany #2: I needed to stop going out for a while. I did that and began the run of my life. I was winning day after day after day. Killed off my debt and got up to 15k bankroll and started playing 5/10 NL. I was improving as a player even more than I had ever imagined. Then after some more earnings I moved up to 5/10 + 10/20NL and made over over 120k in two months.Basically what all that says is: I did not try to make myself a poker pro, I was just someone who really enjoyed it and saw it as a game of skill, a skill that I wanted to master. I had no delusions of grandeur and I still thought I was going to have to get a real job the "normal" way. But the circumstances in my life (Hating college + being in korea but SC being horrible + wanting to stay here + having no money left almost) all forced me to get good. I had lots of pressure and all I did was think about poker and how to get better. Somehow it worked out.

So this is what you need to realize: Odds are you will not make much at poker. All of my starcraft friends who have been playing poker as long as me all still are decent at best, they can win a little bit and think they are good but considering the time they put into it and the stakes they play, they are pretty bad. Of course there are other SC players like Elky who are doing very well, but the vast majority are not. If you want to win at poker this is what you need. You need extreme patience.

If theres a rule to follow when it comes to bankroll management you need to have the personality to follow it no matter how angry you get or how small of stakes it feels if you have to move down. You have to be emotionless. I can lose an 8.3k pot when i'm a 3:1 favorite and honestly not care at all. You have to be the kind of person that takes satisfaction in being mentally superior to your opponent and view a pot like that where you got allin and they lucked out as a win for you, not a loss. As long as you're playing properly and getting your money in when you're ahead thats all that matters.

And realize...I'm one of the most successful bw players at poker (well top 10 probably there are alot of players that started before me that are doing amazingly well too but they weren't really known bw players) and I have not been doing it very long. I think I'm very good and know how to win but realistically It's taken two years and I've only been good enough to pull huge money for 3-4 months. Nothing is banked yet, who knows I could lose it all somehow still? I can only really claim to be a pokergod if I can manage to keep this up for another year and make 500k atleast.

I've come so far and been through so much poker-wise yet still can only say I'm in the infancy of my 'career'.Ideal personality for poker: Calm, Emotionless, Confident, Intelligent, Realistic. But most imporant is seeing it as a game and not as a way of making money. I failed at starcraft because after a short time I didn't enjoy it. When you don't enjoy it you can't be good at it. Even though earlier I said poker is a way of making money and should not be viewed as fun, what should be fun is outplaying/outsmarting the other guy, not raking in a 5k pot. If you're a hot-head or you're not able to do simple-medium math computations in your head very fast do not play poker.

If your mind does not automatically remember every single little detail and bet amount of every hand you played during the day, don't play poker. If you have played starcraft for a really long time and could never really get the hang of the strategy in it...do not play poker. But if you think you have what it takes go for it. Just take it incredibly slow, move up as slow as you possibly can, and perhaps the 2015 WSOP final table will be 100% TL.netters.So, be careful.

There were several critical moments in my career that if they did or didn't happen I could have ended up broke. Sometimes great players go on bad beat streaks for weeks at a time and if you cannot handle this it can seriously screw up your life. I am LUCKY as HELL that I did not have any of these periods at certain points of my poker career. And I am also very very lucky to be friends with lots of other poker players so I could attain infinite loans from them in order to win back my losses. Most of you will not have this.Beware fishes.Thank you for reading and good luck.
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