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A few people have asked for summation of how I got to where I am in poker via forums or in PM’s, so I’ll try and write everything relevant to my evolution as a player and the events that brought me there and now, here.

I suppose everything started back in high school. During that period I went through five jobs that paid the standard shit wage they give teenagers for unskilled labor. My first job ever was as a ‘peanut guy’ during Badger games, which in retrospect was not so bad a job since there was no direct boss, I got to watch football, and the money was pretty good for the hours put in. At the time I was a very small guy so carrying around the bag sucked but other than that it was a good time. After that I got my first proper job as a ‘Sandwich Artist’ at Subway for about three months, which was boring but tolerable with terrible pay. After that I got a job as a dishwasher at ‘Morels’ restaurant which was very dirty work for little pay but the bosses always treated me with respect and my coworkers were fun so it’s the job I have the fondest memories of.

The following summer I got a job as a shoe salesman at ‘Finish Line’ which was, without a doubt, the worst job I’ve ever had. Although the work itself was likely the easiest and cleanest of any of my jobs, most of the bosses were colossal dick heads and the whole sales industry made me sick. I was taught to try and figure which accessories to try and sell customers based on race, age, and gender and was under constant pressure to keep my sales numbers up despite not receiving commission. Any form of small talk or fraternization with my coworkers was discouraged and occasionally punished and my head boss Dan had some of the most absurdly retarded working policies on the planet. For example, we had large columns throughout the store and while waiting for a customer to make their decision I would occasionally lean on to take the pressure off my feet. When Dan would see me doing this he would come over and nag “George I don’t wanna see you leaning! Leaning is for the lazy, there’s always something you can be doing.” I eventually quit that job after a few months and credit it to this day for jading me about the legitimate working world.

My last job after that was a brief stint as a host at ‘Damons’ restaurant during my senior year where I was a terrible and apathetic employee who eventually got the firing he deserved. Around this time I started taking a considerable interest in the gambling world and started reading about blackjack card counting and decided to start my own enterprise as the school bookie. A lot of guys in the school liked betting $5-$20 on the various college or professional football and basketball games during the course of the year, and I became their outlet for whatever they needed. I had a paper full of the lines which I would hand out to guys in my classes during school, which eventually got me called into the principal’s office where I claimed I was just having a few friendly bets with friends. They gave me a lecture and told me not to disturb class and I was sent on my way. The bookie thing never made me much money but it was enough to keep me from being totally broke through high school. During this period I was obsessed with bodybuilding and had a bit of a mean streak for anyone who crossed me so nobody really screwed around about not paying except one guy who suddenly vanished from school one day.

Near the end of 2002 I thought perhaps playing poker with friends might be a better alternative to the sports betting and we had our first game. I got absolutely killed during our first session, playing 5 draw at the time as Texas Hold’em was not yet famous. After that I went over to the local bookstore and looked for books on poker. Over the next couple of years I wound up purchasing and reading over 40 poker books, which at the time naturally turned me into a huge nit (thanks TJ Cloutier.)

For the rest of my senior year I went and played home games with friends a couple times a week for what was normally a $10 buy in and made a relative killing for me at the time (probably about $30 a night.) After a while I got a reputation as the best player in the school and games would come to me as guys wanted to take shots at me. It was a ton of fun and although I wasn’t really making any serious money (and was terrible at poker) I still look back at that phase of my poker playing with much fondness. When Chris Moneymaker came on TV in early 2003 with his WSOP win all of a sudden everyone wanted to play and I knew I wasn’t going to have to go back to work for a while. I made my first deposit online in February 2003 on Paradise poker, which was the largest site that had up to 4000 users online at a time. I deposited $75 which I turned into about $400 in $10 SNG’s before my mom found out about my gambling online and flipped out. I told her I wouldn’t play there anymore, which was true until I got to college.

In the fall of 2003 I entered college at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and within a few weeks was back online playing SNG’s, this time at Party Poker. Thanks to the WPT the game was blowing up and even when I didn’t feel like playing online I could always find a home game.

For the next year or so I kept playing smallish stakes SNG’s online and worked my bankroll up to perhaps $3000. I barely played any MTT’s and rarely played cash, and during that period I think I made one final table in a $30 buy in tournament on Party Poker, which I considered the greatest accomplishment in poker history (I got 6th.) In late fall of 2004 I played a $39 winner take all SNG satellite that fed into the weekly $360 buy in satellite for a package to the Aussie Millions in Melbourne Australia. I won the SNG and played my first major satellite not long after. I ran like God in the satellite and remember sucking out KK with 99 for a huge pot and flopping a straight against a set on the final table which held to put me in position to win. Five packages worth $13,200 were awarded and I wound up getting one, by far the biggest win of my career. I remember running around my dorm floor yelling with elation then pumping myself full of alcohol, then realizing at 4am I needed to write a paper, despite being wasted. I wrote the paper and fell asleep then dragged myself up at 10am, walked into class, turned it in, then walked straight out. I got an ‘A’ on it.

My trip to Australia was my first time out of the country outside stopping by a resort in the Dominican Republic, which isn’t exactly a culture shock. Neither is Australia really, but it was different and new enough at the time to amaze me (it still amazes me, but for different reasons.) Back in those days when I met poker pros I was stunned and almost speechless, addressing them with the utmost respect and awe. I remember Scotty Nguyen ordering me a triple tequila while watching his table then spending the rest of the trip hanging out with me and talking poker strategy. Previous to his 50k HORSE final table Scotty was one of my favorite people in poker as a result of that trip, and his alcoholism back in those days was of the much more hilarious and recreational variety.

The package entered me into two events, the $1600 AUD buy in (about $1200 US at the time) speed poker championship, and of course the Aussie Millions main event. I managed to run pretty good in the speed poker event and made the semi final stage where they broke the remaining 36 players into 6 tables of 6 which played as shootout to reach the final table. I got heads up against Swedish player Michael Thuritz. Going into heads up he had me about 70,000 to my 55,000 and was easily the better player. Despite those factors, he offered me a 15% even swap. I instantly agreed and our heads up was over in two hands when we both got it in with massive draws, his winning. I got $4000 AUD for my finish and Michael went on to win for $100,000, instantly handing over the $15,000 he owed me. What was most startling to me about the whole exchange is that when he won Michael didn’t so much as blink, but when he came over to give me the money and I thanked him he had a big smile on his face. It was a gigantic score for me at the time.

I came home and started planning my return to Australia via my school’s study abroad program. I also wrote my very first trip report, an absurdly long, terribly punctuated log that will forever show how awful I was at poker once upon a time, as well as how totally naive I was about the world. It can be read here: http://www.parttimepoker.com/poker-features/articles/aussie-dunst.htm
I mostly played small stakes limit online during this period, doing some propping to try make the income more steady. I returned to Australia in July 2005 and went to live with a woman I’d met during my previous trip (a platonic friend) and went to school at a university that wound up being a two hours each way commute. I spent every evening at Crown Casino playing 10/20 and 20/40 limit where I ran incredibly good my first couple months and won around $15,000 AUD. This hot streak birthed my Crown Casino nickname of ‘Lucky Tony D.’

About a month into my trip I asked friends over dinner whether any hot girls actually hung out in the poker room. They mentioned that there was a girl named Celina but that a lot of guys chased her. When I was eventually introduced to her in the poker room I had been out at a $1 beer night at a near by bar and was incredibly wasted. I still had the good sense to meet her briefly then immediately ignore her though, and a couple of meetings later after much flirting I asked her if she wanted to play pool with a mutual friend at a Crown bar. When we got there she asked what I wanted to bet on the game and I quickly replied “Dinner.” I kicked her ass in the game and on our first date made her buy. A week later we were moving in together (mostly for logistical reasons, as we both needed to move out of the suburbs and I didn’t have any processions.)

I attempted to juggle going to school with going to Crown every night. My studies eventually became neglected and I kept grinding the limit games. In the late part of the year I began a massive downswing from a combination of running bad and being a complete moron in regards to bankroll management (as well as playing NL games and tournaments, which I was terrible at.) I managed to piss a $15,000 roll down to about $1,000 and was feeling pretty desperate. I talked to my good friend Rob online and asked him if he’d be interested in staking me. We agreed to a $10,000 (USD) stake where I played low limit ring and short handed games online and if I lost the whole of the stake money I would pay him back $5,000. In exchange he got 33% of all profits (plus his original stake back of course.)

Around this time I asked Australia’s best limit hold’em player how he’d gotten so good so fast and at such a young age (he was 19.) He told me to go read 2+2 forums so I logged on and started posting in the limit forums. At first I found the forums difficult to maneuver with their elaborate lingo and fairly elitist tone, but I quickly realized the information they were distilling was of such a higher quality than anything I’d found in books. I began reading and posting voraciously and was on my way to developing a better overall thought process about the game.

In January 2006 the Aussie Millions were on at Crown and I asked Rob if it was okay if I played a couple tournaments. He agreed to put me into the $1000 AUD buy in preliminary event and I wound up finishing fourth for about $19,000 after taking the most absurd string of bad beats in my life (still to this day.) After that I continued to grind online and read 2+2, trying to work out the kinks in my limit game. As the WSOP approached I told Rob I wanted to shoot for winning a main event seat. I started reading the tournament section of 2+2 and playing many more tournaments online. God I was so incredibly bad, if someone wanted to laugh their ass off they could go to the archives and search for all strategy posts made by me in 2006 and have a blast gawking at my stupidity.

Bodog poker ran a promotion where they had a WSOP weekend running an incredible amount of satellites with overlay, and on my fourth try I got a main event seat. Rob won his on the last one they ran and we were off to Vegas. I was planning on going for a few weeks then coming back to Melbourne afterwards.

A few days before my departure I got an email from the Australian immigration department that told me I was in violation of my visa and needed to come to their office to prevent any chance of deportation. I emailed back that I thought the mistake was on their end since I had been going to school the entire time (which was true.) They told me the mistake most certainly was not on their end and I needed to come in for a talk. I stopped in the day before I was set to leave and they informed that while I had indeed made an honest mistake violating my visa like this (I had been staying illegally for five months, I was supposed to renew it at semester but was simply not aware because I’m a moron) was going to result in a three year ban. So I went to tell Celina that we needed to pack up our entire apartment that night and that when we got to the United States we’d have to consult ways on getting the ban overruled or simply finding another method of getting me back into the country.

When we got to Vegas Rob and I decided to put me in some of the small preliminary events. I was still quite bad back then, but compared to the fields I was easily a +EV investment. I ran very bad in my first few events, but previous to the $2000 buy in event I asked Mark Vos for a 5% swap and he agreed. Vos wound up winning the event and having to hand me over $20,000, a major shot in the arm to the bankroll I was growing for Rob. That said, neither Rob nor I was very bankroll aware at the time, and we definitely spent too much on putting me in the preliminary events, which I blanked out totally.

In the WSOP main event I both ran well and played pretty well and wound up making it to late in day 4. I eventually got AK all in vs AQ pre flop for a considerable pot but the other player hit a Q and I was sent packing in 198th, good for $43,000 and change. Rob finished only a few places further down.

After that I moved back to Milwaukee and decided to do another semester at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Celina had to go back to Australia within a few months when the US government told her they wouldn’t grant her a long term visa so I was left in Milwaukee attending school for a major I cared very little about (theatre) and little reason to go out so I wound up spending nearly all my time playing poker and reading the forums. I became a very frequent poster in the MTT sections and was quickly learning what I was doing wrong with the help of the regular posters. I had a four day period where I chopped two tournaments for about $5000 a piece then on the last day won a tournament on Bodog for $6250 and my bankroll was suddenly surging. I’d made more money in a weekend than I did playing limit in what was likely my whole life. I’d found what I wanted to do with my life.

Coming in part 2: Adventures in the land of staking under Lord Timex, living in China, creative writing, a trip around the world, a taste of success, and the story of a man they call Adam Fucking Junglen.