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Reno Part 2: Exit Juan Carlos

info@www.Pokerlistings.com — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 21:31:12 +0100

So I left off Reno Part 1 talking about how terrible my table draw was. Now I'll tell you how that affected me throughout the tournament.

I decided that I would play tight, but "tight" is relative - the way I play tight someone else might consider loose. Unfortunately the cards I got didn't allow me to play as few hands as I would have liked.

Hands like suited connectors, suited one-gappers and small pairs were being dealt to me about three or four times per orbit and this early in the tourney there was no way I was ever going to fold those. Of course, with this tough table I never got away with any bluffing after missing the flop about 95% of the time.

I was close to even though because I had hit a straight and got paid off a little bit. Soon after that I played the one hand that bothered me a lot in the first two levels. David Pham limped, Jon Little limped, David Levy limped and it folded to me in the big blind where I looked down at 2-2.

I normally would just check. Late in the tournament I might make a huge raise, but once in a while I like to throw in a goofy little min-raise from the blinds. I just do this to enhance my image, take a little bit of control in the hand and build a bigger pot.

So I made it $100 and David Pham, the king of the goofy plays, limp re-raised to $400. It folded back to me and I was loving it because he was forcing me to play a big pot knowing I didn't want to. I knew he had a wide range in this spot, and I knew that he would fight hard to win the pot as he'd been doing just that the whole time he'd been at the table.

At this point I planned on giving up if I didn't flop a set, but I knew I'd get some decent money if I did. The flop was 6-4-K rainbow. I check and he bets $500.

I thought this bet was pretty weak and thought he could have easily missed the flop considering his range (I didn't put him on a pair pre-flop, but more like suited connectors or AK-AT type hands or random junk), so I called him.

The turn was a T and I checked fast. He bet $1,200 and I thought he was definitely trying to take me off the hand with some sort of turned draw. I thought Q-Js, 7-8s or A-Q were the most likely hands.

So I called again; the river was a 9, which totally sucked because it filled two of the three hands that I thought he might have. I checked and he bet $3k.

I thought for a couple of minutes, still trying to figure out if I should call and pray he had A-Q. I decided to fold and he later told me he had had A-Q. Who knows if he was telling the truth, but I wouldn't doubt it.

This was a situation where if I had called the river and was correct (if it came anything but a 9 or A, pretty much), it would have given me a huge confidence boost and the stack to continue to dominate the tournament. Sometimes, in tournament poker it only takes one sick play to get you on your way to a deep finish.

A bit after this I got moved to table one. I remember being happy because it was on the side of the room where all the bad players were. Unfortunately I once again had a horrible draw - Erik Seidel, Zach Hyman, ElkY, Jordan Rich and Shawn Buchanan (later to be replaced by Tim West).

I continued to miss everything and was soon down to about $3,600. I raised it with 7-7 with the intention of folding to an all-in. ElkY called on the button and the big blind called; the flop was 4-5-6 and I was left with no option but to move all-in.

ElkY called and had A-A. I hit a 3 on the turn and was back up to about $7,500.

After that I bluffed all three streets against some old guy who played really tight. Later I played a hand against ElkY where I called him pre-flop with 6-4s; the flop was T 8-4x. He bet $1k; I made it $2,600; he called.

The turn was the J. He checked and I checked behind. The river was a 7, I believe, and he bet about $3,500. I looked at his stack and after giving it some pretend Hollywood, I put him in for $9k more. The bluff worked and I was suddenly up to about $24k.

After a while - I was raising a ton - I raised the third hand in a row from the hijack with A Q. Seidel called me from the cut-off and we saw the flop heads-up. It came 7-9-4 rainbow with one diamond.

I pulled a move, which I rarely do, and just checked, thinking I would probably check/fold. He bet $500 which seemed weird and small to me. I decided to peel one off and reevaluate the turn, which as it happened was a 2 that put two spades on the board.

I check and he bets $1,300. Now I felt that this bet was too big and just like in the David Pham hand I really believed he had a draw. I called again and the river was a 9s, which filled a back-door flush and paired the top card. I checked and he bet $2,800.

Now I wasn't convinced that I had the best hand. J T was a likely hand, and the 6-8s was too. Of course at the same time that's a perfect card to bluff at if you have 6-8 of hearts.

I had a quick flashback about how I got pwned by David Pham and before my brain could convince me to stop, my hand was throwing in the chips. He turned over the 6 8.

Remember how I said that sometimes one sick play can get you on the road to a deep finish? Well, one bad play can get you on the road to busting out just as quickly. Soon after the bad call on the river, I got sucked out on in a decent-sized pot. I misplayed KK, and lost a race.

And just like that I was on my computer booking a flight out. Of course it wasn't the outcome that I wanted, but that's the way of tournament poker.

For now, I don't know when I'll be playing another big tournament. It may very well not be until the World Series that I report about my results in another tournament. We'll see.

-- J.C. (www.JCAlvarado.com)

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Reno Part 1: Enter the Dragon

info@www.Pokerlistings.com — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:14:53 +0100

Last year Reno was the biggest tournament result of my life, and it remains so. Having it around the corner got me excited and ready to play. There was no way I was missing this one.

I booked my flight for Sunday night, planning on playing a satellite early on Monday, buying in if I busted and then spending the rest of the day doing some fun stuff around the hotel.

Even though Reno is not a city I look forward to spending time in, the Grand Sierra Hotel in Reno is actually a very nice hotel. It has plenty of fun stuff to do, which is great for me since I usually try not to think about poker the day before the big tournaments (unless I'm playing a satellite).

Last year I spent the day before the tournament playing miniature golf and took a dive off one of those insanely high superman swings. That helped clear my mind the day before and I think it helped me stay focused for the tournament, which eventually I would take second in for over $350,000. This year I wanted to do one better, and actually win it.

I woke up on Monday and went to the satellite area to play an $800 single-table satty. I paid for my seat and after 10 minutes five people had bought in. Out of nowhere, the tournament director gives us our money back and tells us they weren't going to wait for 10 people to sign up - apparently they really wanted to run their $100 sit-and-gos instead.

If I'm buying in for a tourney on my own I usually like to take one stab at getting in for 10% of the buy-in. Unfortunately this time the guys in charge weren't patient enough to wait for the seats to fill and I had to fork over the $7,500 buy-in.

Once I registered for the tourney I went to the golf simulators they have down stairs - those things are awesome. I've only played golf once but I decided to give this a shot with my friend.

I obviously crushed him. After playing 9 holes I ended up scoring +44 and he only had +12 or something. Turns out I'm a natural. Right?

After that we went up to a party the WPT was holding. They were airing last year's Reno final table and this year's first show of the new WPT season on GSN. I got there late and missed watching mine. I'm not going to lie: I kind of wanted to be there while I was onscreen so I could pretend to be famous for an hour or two.

When we got there the party was pretty empty. I'm sure my terrible play during that final table must have scared some people away.

I got to sleep at the time I wanted, woke up, went to the gym, showered and ate breakfast. If that's not a perfect way to start the day of a big tourney, I don't know what is.

The good feeling I had didn't take long to fade when I first sat down at the table and saw Jonathan Little was the only other player there. Then Chau Giang takes a seat; then David Levy.

I remember making a joke, saying something like "Well at least all the good players got seated to my right," and immediately after that I see David "The Dragon" Pham sit down on my left. I thought he was joking at first, then realized that was not the case. WTF?

The only reason I loved the Reno tourney last year was because the field was so unbelievably soft - what happened here? As play started there was still an empty seat at the table. I knew it wasn't reserved for a bad player, because the fish usually get there early.

Sure enough, Tuan Le strolls in and fills the empty seat. So out of the nine players at the table we had six WPT final-table players, and Captain Tom (I'm too lazy to look up his results, but he was there too).

It turns out the tournament staff in Reno royally screwed this one up. The seat assignments weren't random. Instead, they pretty much put all the satellite winners and early registrations on one side of the room and all of the direct buys on the other side.

When I looked at the tables surrounding mine I saw: J.C. Tran, Grinder, Greg Mueller, Matusow, Ivey and all the online names, amongst other big players. However, if I stood up and walked past my half of the room, I wouldn't recognize a face for the most part. It was a very bizarre image to take in.

Most of the tournament pros know your starting table in a tournament usually has a pretty heavy bearing on your results. So it wasn't a surprise when I took off my headphones to hear Mike and Mueller furiously arguing with the tournament director.

Hypothetically, if they would have told us they were making the pros play on the same tables, a lot of us wouldn't have traveled out there and bought in - it's just not very profitable.

The funny thing about that situation is the amateurs actually want to play with the pros. But I guess we're pros and can't complain when we have to play against the best.

However, I was still pretty damn pissed I had David Pham to my left. If there was any doubt in my mind he was the best "big-buy-in" live tournament player in the world, that doubt was far gone by the end of the first two levels.

David Pham is a straight-up beast, and I don't think anyone who has played with him for over four hours can argue that; he just tortures people. He is, of course, at the final table of this tournament for the second time in a row, and I would like to congratulate him on that.

I didn't get to talk much poker in this part but stay tuned for next week. I will talk about Pham slapping me around the entire time we sat together, about my table change from one death table to the next, and I'll add some fun hands along the way.

-- J.C. (www.JCAlvarado.com)

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Traveling and Hating It

info@www.Pokerlistings.com — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:39:25 +0100

I'm back in Vegas, just in time to pay my rent and the rest of the boring stuff, but I leave again in two days. I'm honestly tired of not being home at all.

It prevents me from accomplishing things that are important to me, such as working out and maintaining a healthy diet. It's very tough to sustain a healthy lifestyle as a poker player, let alone as a traveling one.

There's a great gym in my building, but it's pretty worthless when I can only use it four times a month.

Staying healthy mentally and physically this year was a very big priority of mine. I truly believe it helps my game immensely. However, after a month at the Commerce Casino I think I realized how Morgan Spurlock felt toward the end of his documentary Super Size Me.

The Commerce is an awesome place for poker, but aside from that it's comparable to hell. Unless you're eating at the table your options for food and extracurricular activities are very limited.

Most of my daily routine consisted of waking up way too late for breakfast, going down to the sports bar and eating something healthy, like tacos or a burger accompanied by a beer. Before bed I would eat a grilled cheese sandwich and sleep for about 12 hours.

By the end of the month I would get winded when I walked down the stairs, I'd feel like crap when I woke up, and I'd get tired after about four hours of play. In fact, I partly attribute my bad play during the LAPC main event to the month-long marathon of poor bodily maintenance.

Aside from all that, I feel that my game is at its best recently; I'm playing great with a different type of focus than before. I'm concentrating on things that I wasn't even paying attention to before. At the same time I'm distancing myself from things that I gave too much importance to.

Overall, the month went well as far as performance and profit goes, with one third-place finish and some decent results in the very few cash-game sessions I put in. At the end of it all though, it wasn't comparable to the results I got during the 2007 LAPC series.

My future plans are yet to be determined. I have a very vague idea but I'm still not 100% sure of everything. It's spring break for college kids across the U.S. and because I missed out on the college experience, it's very tempting for me to skip this month's events and go hang out on a Mexican beach or even just stay here in Vegas.

However, I think I need to put in some work this year and in that light, skipping a month that has three big tourneys doesn't seem like a great idea. Bay 101 is coming up in the next couple of days, and I'm about 50-50 on whether or not I'll be making the trip.

The two tournaments I am quite sure I want to play this month are the Wynn Classic, which is great because it won't involve traveling, and the Reno World Poker Challenge, which I will go to with the goal of redeeming myself in the wake of my second-place finish to J.C. Tran last year.

I'm excited to go back to the place that gave me my first taste of success as I am sure it'll bring back several good memories, and I hope it will light a fire in me to go back and get a WPT win soon.

Make sure you guys check my Web site, www.jcalvarado.com, to see my definite schedule for the next few months. I've also been doing live updates on the hands I play during the big $10k events so I'll definitely keep doing that if I go to Bay 101 and for the rest of my $10k events.

Until then, I'll be relaxing as much as I can during my short stay in Vegas.

-- J.C.

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I'm Back

info@www.Pokerlistings.com — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 21:10:47 +0100

I hadn't played a single live tournament in 2008 and I was starting to get the shakes. I love live tourneys because I can have fun and usually don't feel any pressure unless I'm deep.

And even then I still have a lot of fun.

Last year I started my run at the L.A. Poker Classic, where I felt I took my game to a whole new level. And so with a sudden urge to play, now seemed like a good time to make a run for POY.

I decided to play the $300 re-buy tournament and try to win it. I felt I played great during it but unfortunately for me my first live tournament of the year ended at the $300/$600 level with a pretty bad beat. Although being on the receiving end of a bad beat wasn't the way I was hoping to start the year, I was still very satisfied with the way I played.

On Tuesday I entered the $1,000 buy-in event and went down to the tournament room a little late. I usually play very loose at the beginning of a tournament, and when I sat down I decided I would establish my image early on.

I started with $3,000 in chips and the very first hand I saw was 7 3 in early position. I raised to $100 at $25/$50 and got one caller. The flop was T T 3. I bet and the guy called.

The turn was the 5; I bet $400 and my opponent called. The river came 7 and I checked. The guy bet most of his stack, which was about $1,500. He looked very weak so I decided to call and he mucked his hand.

So right off the bat I showed down 7-3 and raised pre-flop. I thought my image couldn't get much better until the very next hand. A new guy sat down at my table and in a very loud Israeli accent instantly says "HEY! I know you from TV! You are crazzzy man! You love to bluff."

This did two things that I love: it let the table know I was on TV, and it immediately gave me the title of The Maniac Kid. There's nothing like being table captain and having everything revolve around you - if people are talking about you it's usually something you can take advantage of; you're pwning the table!

So after the free advertisement the guy made for me, I got T-4s and I min-raised again. This time I got six callers. The flop was T-T-T and I got called down by a small pair.

All of a sudden, two hands into my tournament I had $9k in chips, and by the end of the level I had $15k in chips. A little bit later I was moved from that table to a tougher one, with Scotty Clements to my immediate left. I was forced to played a little tighter and ran into some ugly situations, like AA vs. KK and set vs. set.

The next interesting situation came along during the money bubble, where I had about $13,000 in chips at the $400/$800 level I think. I moved in twice over someone's raise and they folded, getting me up to $20k; then I re-raised a guy that had $19k behind and he folded JJ.

Once I found out they were folding these types of hands, I started to raise every hand pre-flop and put people all-in as much as I could post-flop. It was quite the performance: at one point I three-bet someone's check-raise with Q 4 on a J T 5 board. I ended up going from $13,000 in chips to $76,000 by the time the bubble broke.

After that I was on a tear and had $130,000 with 13 left. I was first or second in chips and feeling great. I lost a big hand though with A-Q vs. A-9 all-in pre-flop and became a short stack before the final table started.

The next day I was at the final table, prepared to win. The biggest value in the tournament for me was getting a win - it would officially put an end to my downswing and give me a very needed confidence boost.

Unfortunately, things didn't go my way when it got three-handed and I busted third after making a questionable bluff for all my chips.

Third place wasn't what I was hoping for, but overall I feel my play was at that "focused and fearless" level that it's at when I win tournaments. I'm looking forward to playing my first $10k of the year and for the tourneys that follow.

I HUNGRY!

-- J.C.

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Fine Line Between Flat Busto and Filthy Rich

info@www.Pokerlistings.com — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:42:14 +0100

After an awesome Super Bowl weekend, my friend and I drove to L.A. on Monday night. Let me give you a quick tip: if you're driving to L.A. from Vegas, don't ever leave at 5 p.m.

You can read all about the weekend on www.JCAlvarado.com. Anyway, we arrived at the Commerce Casino and I was too tired to play, but that did not prevent me from instantly flipping my sleep schedule to European time.

Aside from the fact that when I'm there I lose track of whether it's night or day outside, only eat at the poker table and see nothing but grumpy old degenerates every day for a whole month, the Commerce Casino is by far the best poker room there is. I just went downstairs to get a drink at 5 a.m. and walked into a room full of poker - it's unbelievable.

Now, I can understand a high-limit area being busy at all hours because there's a lot of money to be won or lost. But what really fascinates me is the low-stakes room is packed 24/7 with people that are just playing $4/$8 Limit Hold'em and games like that.

It really shows how many people just like playing the game and how the game will continue to draw newcomers to it as long as it keeps evolving and "keeps things fresh."

Today I played my first session and it seemed like I had forgotten what people are capable of in the good ol' SoCal cardrooms.

One guy in my game lost his original buy-in. I thought he was leaving but he pulled out about an $8k wad of cash from his pocket, counted out about $1,500 and sat back in. On his very first hand after that he was in middle position and he just slid his rack of chips into the middle of the table.

I thought he was kidding but when the action got to him and he left the rack across the betting line, I just started praying for aces or pretty much anything I could call him with.

He lost that buy-in too, then another, and I was getting frustrated because I couldn't pick up a hand and I was down about $500. He once again reloaded and when he had $1,300 behind he moved in without looking down at his cards.

It folded to me in the big blind and I was just hoping for anything reasonable - I might have called him with Q-8 in that spot, but I obviously wouldn't want that.

I peeled my first card and it was an ace; I insta-called. He didn't want to look at his hand until the end so I had to sweat out the board and just pray he missed when I saw that the board didn't help me at all.

On the river, the board was J-J-K-9-Q rainbow. This guy looks down at his first card and flips over a three; he peels his second one and it's a Q to scoop the $2,700 pot. Oh well.

It's tough to see a guy move in in the dark every hand and lose thousands to the whole table, and then be the one guy that doubles him up. Fortunately for me though I went on a little bit of a rush when he had $2,700 behind. I had A-K twice and pocket nines, eights and sevens three hands in a row.

The guy didn't move in every one of those hands but he did for a couple of them and I ended up taking everything back by limp re-raising him every time. After that I took a little bit more off of him and he got up and left, down about $7 or $8k.

After that fish left I was still sitting at a table with eight other fish that I had forgotten even existed. The game started to break once the guy left and although this is sometimes a bad thing, when it happens in live poker I love it.

In fact I would go as far as to say that I'd rather play four-handed vs. regulars in a live game than to sit nine-handed with a huge fish. A lot of live players just have absolutely no clue about how to play shorthanded, and I love it.

So for the next 45 minutes that the game kept going I raised every hand and bluffed every street. I might be exaggerating a little bit but if I had to put a number on it I would say that I raised 90% of my hands outside of the blinds, and bet 98% of the time when checked to me.

I made another thousand or so off of the shorthanded session without seeing a showdown. I wish that game could have kept going all night long, but the three players remaining decided to quit and I just cashed out.

Overall, I had an okay winning session but I still felt like I lost money. I mean when you have a guy moving in every hand it's hard not to feel like you should get every penny he had on him, but that's never how it works out.

I've quickly come to the realization that poker is a hollow game of insufficiency: 99% of the time you'll be left with that feeling of wanting more, like when you stuff your face with really good sushi and you feel hungry 20 minutes later.

If you win money off of a fish you usually feel like you should have won more; if you get second in a tournament (something I'm all-too-familiar with) you'll feel like what you got wasn't enough and you should have won.

I guess I need to learn to be satisfied with any positive result before I end up chasing results that will leave me flat busto - or will that drive actually make me filthy rich? I guess there's a fine line, and I just have to find it through experience.

For now I'm going to be avoiding most tournaments. I might play the $2,500s, which I had good results in last year, and I will almost definitely play the LAPC main event to try and get that $2.4 mil that I had within reach exactly one year ago. GL ME!

-- J.C.

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Playing Live Cash Games

info@www.Pokerlistings.com — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:19:12 +0100

Since online play wasn't going too well, a few months back I decided to start playing some live cash games. I thought a change of pace and scenery would be the best way to end a downswing.

Since I had been in Vegas for a couple of months and I had purposely moved into an apartment two minutes away from the Bellagio, I realized it was a waste for me to never frequent the live cash venue.

I had rarely played cash games live. I knew the games would be easier than online, but I didn't think my approach should change too much. This turned out to be a costly mistake.

I showed up to the Bellagio $10/$20 game every day for about a week and ended up losing a little under $6,000 or so, not too much for a deep-stacked $10/$20 game but certainly not what I had in mind. I realized a few things in that game that I've since adjusted when I go play live.

The main one is that your mistakes are amplified a whole lot more than they are online. For instance, when you bluff you have to be almost positive the guy is folding; you can't just bluff because there's enough money in the pot to make it a good play, which would be the case online.

You have so much more information live than you do online and for my first few months of playing live cash I didn't use this to my advantage. People play so weird that I was just thrown off for the most part.

The other problem I found with the Bellagio game was it was full of people playing deep-stacked and insanely tight post-flop. So what you'd see a lot was five or six players per flop and then only see big pots build between huge hands.

The game becomes very boring because all you can do is wait for huge hands. With six players to the flop your aces are usually going to be beat if you get any kind of action. So after a week of playing that game I decided to not go back - it was too boring, too tight and I'd much rather go home and play six tables.

In the new year, however, I made it a resolution of mine to start playing live more than before. I found a good $5/$10 game in town with no max buy-in and a lot of friendly people. I always hated the boredom of live cash games but I've really come around to loving them lately.

Not only are they much softer than any game you'll find online above the $2/$4 level, but you get a ton of added variables that make it much more exciting to play.

First of all, for now it's fun for me to drive down to the casino, grind out a few thousand and leave at 2 a.m., stop at the bar for a beer or two and come home. It feels like an actual job - a fun job.

Meeting people from all walks of life is also interesting. If I was playing a game that regularly consisted of a bunch of bitter old men, I wouldn't last a week (which is why I couldn't play at Bellagio for more than a week). But a game with interesting talkative people is actually very enjoyable.

I'm a very talkative person for the most part and always enjoy telling stories and listening to someone else's. However, the biggest appeal of playing live cash games is the thrill of the huge fish. I love it.

You don't get this too often online anymore, the late-Friday-night drunk that's going to move all-in every hand. I miss those days.

Live, though, it happens two or three times a day: drunks, rich guys and tourists make the day so much more fun. There's nothing like thinking you're going to play until 2 a.m. and then leaving the poker room at 10 a.m. because the sucker kept reaching into his wallet.

It's like the scene from Rounders - all of a sudden the game becomes a feeding frenzy.

"All the luck in the world isn't gonna change things for these guys. They're simply overmatched. We're not playing together, but we're not playing against each other, either. It's like the Nature Channel. You don't see piranhas eating each other, do you?"

No offense to the regulars at Venetian, but they're far from piranhas. In essence though it's still the same - when a drunk is in the game the game revolves around him or her, and 90% of the time they leave everything they bring to the table with the rest of us.

It sounds a bit malicious, but I guess if you choose to be a poker player you can't be too compassionate. Plus they're usually richer than me, so I don't feel so bad for them.

My only real conflict with playing so much live is that it really ruins any attempt at having a balanced schedule. I don't mind playing at night at all; I like being able to get stuff done during the day and then play at night. But ever since I started playing live my day ends between 4 and 9 in the morning. This results in me waking up at 4 p.m. almost every day.

I've been meaning to go to the bank for about four weeks, and it's just been impossible for me to get there during business hours. Eating healthily becomes an issue too as a result of the crazy hours. When should I eat breakfast? Before I go to bed or when I wake up in the afternoon?

As soon as I figure some of this stuff out I'll be much happier. For now though, I am in for a whole 30 days of complete degeneracy: I'll be spending the month of February at the Commerce Casino for the LAPC. This is the one month out of the year where I lose track of night and day.

It is also the best month of the year for boosting up the bankroll and getting an early start to a huge year. Last year I made about $185k in February even though I had a very realistic shot at $2.4 million in the WPT event.

I fully expect to do better this year than in '07, and come back home with one of those damn horse trophies I want so much!

Wish me luck!

J.C.

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From <i>Rounders</i> to a WPT Final Table

info@www.Pokerlistings.com — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 23:30:04 +0100

Well I find myself on PokerListings now and I feel like I should introduce myself. Unless you are a follower of my previous blogs you probably know very little about me.

So I'll use this first entry to tell the story of my brief career as a poker player.

It was 2004 and I had been out of high school for close to a year. I had taken the year off of school to pursue my dream of becoming a pro soccer player. The dream lasted about six weeks and I soon found myself with eight months of uncertainty before I entered college. I went back home to live with my mom in a small city in Texas named McAllen.

I decided to get a job so that I could save up for college in L.A. So as I was working the worst 9-5 available in McAllen, selling vitamins in a small kiosk at the mall, I would go home after work and watch the WSOP. Eventually it turned into the same story every 20-something professional poker player has, so I'll save you the boredom by just saying I watched Moneymaker, Raymer, Rounders and I was hooked.

The once-a-week $5 home game with my friends turned into an everyday occurrence. When none of us had a free house during the week we'd go play at the IHOP, where even the waiters would join in on their breaks. The $30 first prize was big for me back then, and soon enough I had about $200 in poker winnings just from playing with my friends.

I decided to deposit $50 online, and lost it within 30 minutes. I then used another $50 to deposit online but decided that I was not going to play the game unless I was good at it, so I used another $50 to invest in two instructional DVDs, and suddenly the gambling addiction became a profitable obsession.

When I got to L.A. I had no clue what I was doing in that city - I didn't know a soul. Luckily I met my roommate within two days and I was set up in an apartment on Venice and Sepulveda. As soon as the Internet was set up I was playing poker. My roommates were pretty shocked by what seemed to be an insane addiction. All they saw was a kid playing every day all day - my social life was fairly nonexistent and my school work was rarely turned in on time.

After about a year of grinding 3/6 and 5/10 Limit Hold'em, I had my first taste of success in tournaments. I very rarely played tourneys but I decided to take a shot at a $50 buy-in on Stars. I soon found myself playing heads-up out of 600 people against the one-and-only JohnnyBax, who at the time I couldn't imagine being at the same table with, let alone playing HU with him to win a tourney.

With a bit of luck I took it down for $6,000. The money was massive to me at the time. Now, with an $8,000 bankroll, it seemed like I was destined for greatness. I thought I was unstoppable and by December 2005 I was giving my mom a call that she never wanted, to let her know I was quitting college. It didn't go well to say the least, but fortunately I have a very supportive mom who ended up letting me do whatever I wanted.

At this point I had my first taste of my real self, kind of a foreshadowing of what I would turn out to be if I ever did make it in poker. I spent a lot of money, I took shots playing way above my bankroll and about 2 months after quitting school I was broke again. I had nothing but $135 in my online account and was pretty much forced to pack my stuff and move back home with my head down and my tail between my legs.

By the time I moved back home I had rolled up my $135 to about $1,000. I got to Texas on a Saturday night and had an all-night heart-to-heart with my mom. She questioned my "job" but after a long explanation all of a sudden she just "got it". My mom randomly walked away from the conversation, and two minutes later came out of her room with the biggest display of trust ever. She had a wad of hundred dollar bills, $5,000 to be exact. She said "This is all I have, but if it helps you get back on your feet, you can have it and don't worry about paying me back". We've never had too much money, so I knew how much this meant to her, but I took the money and promised I'd have it back to her the next month.

The next morning I woke up to play the Sunday Million on Stars, which is something I almost never did because at the time it was too expensive. I ended up cashing for about $500 and decided to use that to play an $11 re-buy with about 2,000 people. Well, at about 4 a.m. I woke my mom up with a loud yell and happily handed her back the cash she had handed me 24 hours earlier. I won $18k the first day back home. As if that wasn't enough, I won another $20k two days later, and chopped up the $11 re-buy twice more that week. Within a week I took my bankroll from $1,000 to nearly $60k and it all seemed uphill from there.

The future looked bright and smooth, but as I look back on the past two years it's more like blurry and rough. I've built my bankroll and lost it all back a few times, something I would have never imagined happening back when I was playing 3/6 Limit on a $2,000 bankroll. In life I've gone from an obsessed workaholic to the laziest human possible; I've experienced the lowest low of going broke and the high of making a WPT final table and as rough as it's been, I wouldn't change it for anything.

My outlook on the game and on life as a poker player is extremely positive because of my experiences, and I look forward to the next few years. If you follow this blog throughout the year you'll see some more ups and some more downs (hopefully not too many downs), and without a doubt you'll see me learn along the way. Hopefully I'll be able to keep it entertaining for you guys as the weeks go by.

J.C. Alvarado

To read more about my day-to-day life and more open thoughts about random non-poker stuff visit my Web site at www.JCAlvarado.com.

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