First of all, you should get an insight of my background and how I ended up here. Growing up, I seemed to always be the kid with so much potential. All the way through high school, I managed to live up to that potential. I had the perfect high school experience in which one can accomplish everything there is to accomplish. My future was set up in front of me. I had worked so hard and everything seemed like I would be on my way to success as I had always envisioned.

I took off to college and something immediately happened to me. I wish I can say it was something dramatic, something life changing. The truth is that I really don’t know. I just stopped working hard and simply stopped caring. Little by little I stopped going to class and focused more on getting by than on academic excellence as I always had. I found it harder and harder to keep motivated. Eventually, I started losing my scholarships and towards the end I had to pay for school out of my own pocket. Throughout this time, I kept gaining weight to the point which I lost all self-esteem.

My third year in college, I discovered poker. It was the beginning of the boom of poker as it was being televised all over ESPN. Everyone around campus was playing it, and I soon got caught up in it. Soon, I discovered I had a natural knack for it. I picked up some books on the subject and made my way to the online world. In the beginning, I struggled like all beginners, but I stuck with it and soon I started making some nice change in the games. With the help of my friend Dan, my current roommate, my game continued to improve tremendously.

I started to read stories about young guys making thousands of dollars a year playing online. The boom in poker was going strong and more and more people would join online sites to play. I saw this as a great opportunity for me to make great amounts of money. I felt I had the talent and dedication to make this work for me. Opportunities like this show up once in a lifetime, and I felt I had to seize it. College was not working out like I had envisioned so the inevitable happened: I left school to pursue the game of poker full time.

I wasn’t totally thrilled about leaving school since I did not truly know what poker would bring. During this time, I felt my life had very little direction, and I guess I went into some type of depression. I isolated myself from the world and there were times where I would go up to three months without stepping foot outside of my house. I kept gaining weight and my self-esteem continued to suffer. One of the few positives during this time was that my poker game took off as I became totally involved in it. All my efforts and dedication was geared towards it. I was making plenty of money to live on and in my household of just my mother and me, for the first time in my life, we were economically stable.

I saw internet names that I would play online with make their way into television playing the game. This is where I realized I could do the same and the dream to pursue riches and glory through the game of poker began. Dan and I started talking about the possibility of moving to Las Vegas together to pursue such dream as we shared the same aspirations. Eventually, we settled on June of 2008 to make the move.

Right before making the move to Las Vegas, I moved out of my mom’s house to live with my friend and his wife. I consider this a very critical point in my life for various reasons. First of, it would make it a whole lot easier to say good bye to my mom once I would move to Las Vegas. For reasons that will be discussed later, this is one of the hardest things I had to do in my life. Secondly, I had a chance to regain some of the social skills that had long deteriorated or even lost. We would go out and interact with other people through various activities. Through them, I also renewed some old friendships and got to meet some new people. I got to experience some old emotions and some new ones altogether that made me feel something I had long forgotten, feel alive. To all the people that took part in my life during this time, I would like to say thank you.

Well, in a world dominated mostly by mathematics and the law of averages, for me, success seems inevitable. However, I have previously failed in a similar situation when I went through college and success seemed inevitable. The difference now is that I feel totally dedicated and feel determined to reach that goal. I have worked so hard and sacrificed so much to not succeed. Don’t wish me luck, hopefully I won’t need it. I live by the words that a special person once told me, “I don’t even need to wish you luck because I know that you will succeed in whatever it is that you decide to do.” I truly believe that this person is right, and I will try my hardest to prove it.