I was still struggling however at the Hold’em Club on Sunday nights. These tournaments had up to 40 entrants and typically paid a couple grand to the winner. A lot of the players seemed to have a lot of experience, so it was difficult to compete. But about eight months after I first started playing tournaments, I posted my first big win. Then the next week I finished second. Finally, I felt like I was starting to understand the game. This story about the Hold’em Club shows just how little I knew about poker, but also how I was able to gain some great experience to develop my game. I thought these players at the Hold’em Club were just a bunch of rich Ticos (Costa Ricans) who enjoyed a nice game of poker on Sunday nights. It wasn’t until after I moved from Costa Rica when I found out that I was playing against some of the lop poker players in the world. Some of the players included Humberto Brenes, who has won more than $1.0 million in prize money at the World Series of Poker (WSOP) and was the 2002 World Poker Open champion, which paid a $500,000 top prize. His brother Alex Brenes is also a successful player in U.S. tourneys. Another top player was Dr. Max Stern who has won the WSOP 7-Card Stud championship and is the author of a poker book. Jose Rosenkrantz won a World Poker Tour title televised on the Travel channel and has placed in several events at the World Series of Poker. My Spanish wasn’t very good at the time, so I guess I missed them talking about all of their poker successes in the states. Talk about a sucker I probably never would have walked into that club if I had known whom I was up against. Although those tournaments were a struggle for me starting out, they gave me a tremendous amount of experience. The smaller tournaments during the week prepared me for the larger tournaments on Sunday, which gave me invaluable experience playing with some of the best players in the world. I finished the year posting a small win, so it was a great learning experience, a lot of fun, and a little profitable. In early 2000, Bristol-Myers Squibb transferred me to Argentina. Unfortunately, Argentina does not have any live poker, so I thought my poker game was again on hold until I heard about Internet poker. At first, I was skeptical, since I had always thought of poker as more of a game interacting with other people; however, I downloaded a site and was impressed by the graphics, chat feature, and overall feel of the game. I decided that I needed to get a piece of the action, so I took the plunge and made my first deposit of $600 at Planet Poker. Within a few weeks, I had won over $5000. I was officially hooked and soon poker would be changing my life in a big way. However, I was fortunate that I got a good run of cards the first few months I played. I realize now that I was playing at limits too high in relation to my bankroll (more about this in the “Bankroll Management” chapter). I easily could have lost the small bankroll I had if I had rum into some poor cards. But even though I was winning. I knew I had a great deal to learn. I started reading every book I could find and studied the game as much as I could. The quality of my play really improved a lot in those first six months. I soon found myself bored in my day job, and couldn’t wait to get home to, my newfound passion. Eventually, I decided to give up my six-figure income job, hang my two master’s degrees on the wall, and was on my way to New Zealand to become an Internet poker pro.

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