The end was a long drawn out affair. On New Years Eve, I was down to my last £20, I spent a fairly depressing night watching the rest of the world celebrate a ticking clock on TV. Time passing wasn’t something I felt particularly jubilant about. If my life had been a chess game any decent player would have conceded that it was time to knock the King over and find a new game. Of course my life is, if anything, a poker game and Poker players live by the maxim “a chip and a chair” and that was what I was down to.

You quickly learn when playing poker that scared money rarely wins. Its almost impossible to play at your best when you’re down to the very last of your bankroll, calls you should be making are now almost impossible because if you’re wrong its all over. Then what? Back to a 9 to 5 job playing poker on the side telling anyone who will listen that you could have been a contender. The last lines of Goodfellas sum up my dread.

…And now it’s all over and that’s the hardest part. Today everything is different, there’s no action. I have to wait around like everyone else. I cant even get decent food. Right after I got here I ordered some spaghetti with marinara sauce and I got egg noodles and ketchup. I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a shnook.

I had absolutely no idea if I would even be able to get a regular job after all prospective employers might not understand the value I had added to my CV after four years playing poker and generally enjoying myself. I have always been difficult to manage and not having someone tell me what to do or where to be was something that I had become rather attached to. So on January first 2009 motivated by the fear of living a shnook’s life I took my last £20 and somehow turned it into £1200. Enough to pay the rent, enough to eat but I needed to do it all again in February and the pressure was back.

At times I can honestly say it all got to me. There were some nights that were sick with sleepless worry. The wins thankfully kept coming through February and early March and just when it looked like I was set to have a fantastic year, I was in the top 50 tournament players on William Hill, they switched Network. I played the last tournament on the old network at 01:00 on 17th March. It was a little like being in the band playing on the titanic, no matter how well I played the whole thing would be going under soon. The new network should have been just as easy to win on but for whatever reason I stopped winning. I think on reflection I can say it was a combination of self-doubt and a dislike of change. I was certainly not playing as well as I had been and by the end of May the false dawn had ended.

Now the thing about a false dawn is that it should inevitably eventually be followed by the actual dawn. I did get a job, a call center job. The pay was lousy but the hours were flexible and I figured I would just do the job long enough to build a bankroll, I could still play almost as much poker and with the pressure off I might start winning again. When the pressure was off though I couldn’t face playing at all. For the first time in years I didn’t play and more importantly I didn’t miss it. I was enjoying interacting with people who didn’t play, I found I really liked the people I was working with and the job, fund-raising for various charities was almost a karmic payback for the years I spent just trying to win money off people for my own needs without having given anything back. I decided I would only go back to poker when I was doing it for the right reason, because I enjoyed it and wanted to.

October 1st I had $1 in my account and it occurred to me that if I was good enough I should be able to turn that into $1000 before too long. The Rags to Riches challenge was born. Now I know that $1000 is hardly riches but if you can turn $1 into $1000 then you only have to do the same thing again from there to get to a million. After that? Well this time next year Rodney we will be a Brazilianaires. I will document the challenge honestly and hopefully with some good humor hereafter hope we all enjoy the ride.

“Achtung” Dan Hofinger is a London based poker player who can assist those wanting to break into live play through his own journey of bad beats and well-played hands.

Well, I played against an opponent recently who according to Sharkscope has lost $15,000 in around 500 games. Maybe he or she could make an argument for not enjoying them. I would suggest that had this player been playing another format the losses could have been considerably greater.

Why are some players so bad at SnG’s? I play the same people again and again and they never seem to cash, whilst the same old faces are carving up the prize money. What are they doing wrong? The answer is simple; timing. If you watch players who have the highest ROI in this format they are rarely active in the first few blind levels unless they have a premium hand.

Here is how I see it:
The SNG is a marine food chain, bare with me! Early on all the barracuda get busy in a frenzy of activity mostly getting fat on the scared and timid minnows. Every once in a while they find themselves scrapping with the sharks and occasionally they are even able to hurt them or even scalp them but by the time you get to the middle of these tournaments the landscape has changed. The minnows are gone and the barracuda carry on flailing about aggressively now they have grown in size and the tight passive whales are next to become involved fearing the increasing blinds so they take each other on. All the while the sharks sit and wait to see who comes out alive that’s when the game really begins. Whoever comes out on top is usually easy prey. The barracuda who have become used to being the most aggressive find it hard to adjust as the Sharks get busy and better still if the Whales survive they find themselves getting picked apart slowly. Patience wins out. Why run around chasing the small fry when you can let someone else accumulate all their chips and just take them in one go?

“Achtung” Dan Hofinger is a London based poker professional who can assist those wanting to break into live play through his own journey of bad beats and well-played hands.