I think this first post is going to come across very awkardly because, despite being able to talk about poker for hours on end, I’m not exactly sure where to start.  It’s strange to introduce myself as most of the people who will bother to try and read this already know who I am, at least in a very vague sense.  I do feel obligated to start there though in case you misclicked your way here and have some strange variant of OCD that forces you to read everything you find.

My name is Mike, I’m 25, and I run good at life.  I was raised by amazing parents who instilled in me the value of hard work and provided me every opportunity to succeed if I met them halfway with that work.  In high school I did everything from playing the male lead in my school’s productions of “To Kill A Mockingbird” and “I Remember Mama” to playing football and running track, to helping lead music for our YoungLife club.  If you had told anyone I knew in high school that I would wind up as an accountant, they would have laughed at you. 

However… I went to Baylor in 2001 intending to get a BFA in theatre performance and a minor in business and graduated in December 2005 with a BBA and Masters in Accounting.  I’m not even that good at math.  I’m very right brained, something you would normally find in artists, musicians, or salespeople.  When I took a job in public accounting, easily one of the least rewarding professions of all time, it was clear that this was not a long term career move.  Luckily, after 2 years I made a move to another accounting type job that actually lets me go home to see my wife, build relationships with people, and do some independent thinking.  As far as accounting jobs for someone my age, it’s about as good as it gets. 

Speaking of my wife, she’s fantastic.  We met in youth group at church in high school and started dating between freshmen and sophomore years of college.  She’s beautiful, creative, and has an amazing sense of humor that’s as close to mine as anyone on earth.  Basically, I run good at life.  Also, she’s an entrepreneur and the owner and head designer of kaleighkarin.com, a company that does the digital design of wedding and other albums.  We recently bought and completely remodeled our second house.  We have two terriers: magnadoodle and pirate.  I told you I run good at life.

So none of this has any bearing whatsoever on poker, but now maybe you feel a little like you know me.  As to my poker history, I started playing with my fraternity in college, in a $5 game every Thursday night.  Having a freakish love of competition between friends, I started reading poker books.  As a big fan of Daniel Negreanu, I decided to make a deposit on fullcontactpoker.com the first day it opened its online poker room.  I played a $5 tournament that night as my first real foray into the online world and won it for around $400.  What a freaking luckbox, am I right? 

Eventually, during my first year of work in public, having worked 70 hours as of a Saturday night, I went up to Oklahoma to give live poker a shot for the first time.  Borderline overwhelmed, I sat at a 2-5 NL table.  Somewhere between flopping a set of queens my first hand and soulreading someone calling them down with queen high when I put him on jack high, I got over my intimidation pretty quickly. 

I’ve gotten to do some cool stuff through poker, including playing at the second FCP Protégé final table in the Bahamas, playing at Bellagio with James Woods, and having some moderate success at the World Series of Poker this year, where I finished 13^th in a $1,500 7 card stud hi/lo split 8 or better event.  “You went to the WSOP and played what?”  Yeah, I know, strange choice if you don’t know that I often prefer non-hold ‘em games.  I’ll get into why another day.

So what am I doing now? Well, doing that whole new house thing the right way this time meant spending my whole bankroll between down-payment and remodel.  For the next 4 months I’ll be playing primarily on Cake with the help of a backer, and I’ll be posting my journey and results here, as well as discussing whatever I feel like related to poker or not.  This is already quite long, so I’ll just post this graph as a teaser for my next entry, tentatively titled “The Different Types of Bad”.  I think there are comments you can leave, so feel free to tell me I’m retarded and can’t write!