Psychology got me into poker, but let me backtrack a bit more than that...
I never gambled. I don't find it morally wrong or anything (they can do what they want with their own money), but it just never interested me. I don't see the "thrill" of gambling and never have. Things like slot machines or the lottery are all rigged severely against the player and everyone knows it - but they still play?! This perplexed me as a child. As for more "fair" forms of gambling like sports betting among friends, that never appealed to me either because I figured that long-term everyone would probably about break even. Since I never cared for gambling, I never really gave the effort into learning poker - despite the fact that I did play many other card games.
It was in 5th grade (so about age 10) and some friends in school wanted more players to play "poker" with. They didn't have many players, so my friends "taught" me how to play. The teachers at my school didn't allow gambling, but they allowed us to play "poker" if we didn't bet money or anything. I said "poker" and "taught" in quotation marks because looking back years later I realize that what we were playing wasn't real poker. It was a bunch of children sitting on the carpet floor of the classroom with massive piles (not neat stacks, but piles) of the cheapest plastic chips. We exclusively played "No Limit Texas Holdem Poker" like the pros, but none of us knew how kickers worked or side pots and half of us remembered which hand beat what. I'm virtually certain (looking back on it) that the teachers allowed us to "play poker" because we were done with our work and it kept us quiet.
Anyway, that was sort of how I started - but it was just fun moving the chips around and
bluffing every other hand. We didn't really know about strategy or outs or pot
odds - we just knew that having 3 Aces was super strong; there are only 4 in the whole deck and 2 are on the board, but I have A2 in my hand! How can they beat that?!
So that experience was how I sort of got introduced to poker, but after that year we all basically stopped playing and moved onto other games like Connect 4 (which I am super great at apparently
).
Fast forward to me in college after taking psychology up through Honors level (I ended up with 4.0 by the way) and I distinctly remember the moment I decided to get into poker. It was a weekend and I'm lying in bed. I roll out of bed that morning and just randomly thought of "poker" from when I was a kid. I was pretty sure that wasn't "real poker" (I didn't know how far off we were though), but I wondered how good I could actually be at poker? I literally thought to myself: "I
bet (pun intended) I could be good at poker." I especially thought it might be a good way to test my knack for psychology and reading people.
It was that day I decided to learn poker and test out my skills as I work on my game. First things first, I need to learn the rules. I googled the rules online and studied them until I got it. I even "practiced" the rules one day by setting up a bunch of teddy bears at the dining room table and dealing
hands to see how the flow of the game worked and what cards beat what (mind you, this is a college student dealing cards for teddy bears sitting around the dining room table).
Once I got the rules down enough, I wanted a place to learn and ask questions. Ideally a forum community for poker. I researched online what
poker forum communities there were and I came across CardsChat. I didn't even discover the
freerolls until months after I joined lol. I read a ton of forums and actively posted; learning a lot along the way.
A few months after being on CardsChat, the "30 Day Course" came out with a freeroll at the end of the course. I took the CardsChat 30 Day course and took notes. I studied it a lot and also used outside resources to improve (read two poker books from cover to cover in that 30 Days in addition to the 30 Day course content as well as downloading the free odds calculator "Equilab" to mess around with on my free time).
I entered the freeroll at the end of the course and played fairly tight for most of it. Played solid, made some moves here and there and used my psychology ability when it mattered (I'm obviously better with that in person than online, but I can still sense some things online too). I keep surviving and the field keeps dwindling. A few hours into the MTT and I feel in good shape. A few hours after that, I'm ITM and then the Final Table. Before I know it, I'm heads-up and the table is closing...
after about 6 hours or so...I won! Yes, I won my first ever "poker event" and the entire thing felt almost surreal. The money wasn't spectacular, but that wasn't important to me; it was the self-accomplishment that I worked a ton on something and succeeded. How I felt, it might as well have been the WSOP Main Event I had just won
I smiled so hard for the rest of the day that my cheeks hurt by the night.
It has been about a year (as of now) I've been on CardsChat and I've only been learning and getting better. I've won a few freerolls since then and placed ITM on a few more, but most importantly is that I feel like I'm progressing as a poker player and still working on my game.
What got me into poker? In one word? Psychology. Really though, it was just a random thought I had one morning to challenge myself by trying poker and so here I am now...still loving the game and still trying to get better at it
