Hello everyone!
I have been a professional poker player from late 2008/early 2009 up until the end of 2014. 11 weeks ago I had my first born child and decided to go back to professional internet poker 4 weeks ago so that I could be home a lot more and have more of a flexible schedule to spend time with my family.
Before I decided to turn to professional poker I had a huge decision to make, it was either enter medical school or make online poker work. When I made the decison to play poker, I was averaging roughly $4-$5 per hour which wasn't much but I was playing lower stakes. I was rapidly improving and knew what I needed to work on to improve quickly to get up to the higher stakes. I exceeded the amount I needed to win on average to make my decision of not attending medical school a good decision for me. Eventually the worst day of my life happened, April 14th 2011 came along which will be forever known as "Black Friday" in the internet poker community. The Feds effectively shut down the biggest 2 poker sites in the world, Poker Stars and Full Tilt Poker. At this point I was averaging $220 per hour and was staking big winning players that I had coached with my poker system. I also had $108,000 stuck on Full Tilt which i only recieved $67,000 of spread out over 6 years.
For a few months I was left extremly depressed with not much money saved and no source of income. I had people that were telling me that not going to medical school was a terrible choice and saying all the "I told you so" stories when nobody on earth could have predicted this would ever happen.
After roughly 4 to 5 months I got online and started looking around to see if there were any other options for American poker players and to my surprise a couple crappy sites picked up drastically after "Black Friday". I started playing again on Merge network which was a site that combined roughly 8 different sites into 1 and within a year I was back to around $100 an hour which was great, aside from the slow payments which restricted how much I was able to withdraw. The idea that you could merge all sites into 1 was a terrible idea because the first thing that happened was all the sites began poaching players from the other sites with backdoor rakeback deals that were against Merge network rules. The last deal I had was 75% rakeback and I still got bonuses so there were times I made over 100% of the rake I payed until the site owner asked to cap it at 80% because they had to pay out 20% to the Merge network. Mege network started to get scummy and began to ban winning players with no explanation at all. After a couple months of being banned myself they gave me the excuse of computer manipulation. After harrasing them for an answer, they essentially said they banned me and my best frined because at some point we had both signed onto the same computer with our accounts!!! This is absolutely crazy and not against the rules! Luckily they still payed our balances out to us which together was almost $20,000. A few months later everyone realized that they were banning all the winners and they recieved a lot of flack for it. They then started to allow the winners to play only 1 table at a time instead of unlimited.
After all of this I was just totally sick of the risks of online poker in America and decided to use some of the money I had saved to build an ATM company up and do a couple small real estate projects. These business ventures worked out well but they took a lot of my time away from the house and this is the reason I am making my return to poker. I have decided to play on Ignition casino as of 4 weeks ago. Ignition casino is the old Bovada poker room which is the old Bodog. Ignition is a safe, fast paying, low key site. Regulars do not like Ignition too much because all players are anonymous every game so professionals can not track the stats of everyone they play, which helps deter pros and keep the games very soft. I personally used to heavily rely on these softwares but quickly realized that my system works even better with everyone being anonymous because the other pros can't track me and know what I am doing as easily now. The only downside to Ignition casino is that they only allow you to play 4 Sit and Go games at a time and I specialize in Sit and Go's. The multi table tournament games are not capped at all though and you can actually play 4 Sit and Go's while playing unlimited multi table tournaments.
After playing roughly a half a million Sit and Go's in my career it gets really repetitive and boring. I have always enjoyed coaching players to keep my interest in the game and always improving myself as a player. Before I would coach players for free and make nothing off them until they started playing and winning but now with Steemit I am hoping to make a little bit of side income from posting my coaching videos. I plan to start making and interacting with people that have questions about certain Sit and Go situations.
Stay tuned for the videos and if anyone has any special video request please let me know and I will do what I can to accomidate. My first couple videos will be a little bit of live play with me talking about my basic strategy and overtime I plan to make the videos far more detailed and in depth.
If anyone is looking for the best and safest place to play while residing in the United States please check out Ignition casino using my link ; ) ![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmcye7GVBXeyeEB7bcc1mSaKRWdiAKq8aJc57FBLRoDVyq/image.png) Ignition casino accepts Bitcoin and also pays out instatntly if you want to get paid in bitcoin!
Welcome to the platform, I wish everything work out for you. It’s not easy here but not difficult neither but just ask an extra effort, engagement is the key good luck I’m @zohaibkhan Start by following people and they will do the same.
Congratulations @thegrind! You received a personal award!
You can view your badges on your Steem Board and compare to others on the Steem Ranking
Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness to get one more award and increased upvotes!
Perfectly!