First Ever Post

Last year I bought a PC magazine and inside was a free magazine called online gambler, I have never been a gambler as I always thought gambling was a mugs game. I'm not sure why but I decided to have a flick through, most of the magazine seemed to be dedicated to poker, up until this point I had never played poker before and had always thought it was like all other casino games insofar as you could win if you got lucky. After reading the magazine I realized that not only was poker a SKILL game but there were people all over the world earning a living playing poker.

The fact that people were earning a living playing poker sparked off an interest in me because at the time I was working for IBM, the contract I was on had gone up for renewal and been won by Fujitsu and I was facing a very uncertain future. I had just spent the last 2 years working towards an MCSE which I have now obtained. Whilst working toward my MCSE I had my whole life planned out I was going to spend another year working for IBM then start IT contracting and earn big money. However plans are always subject to change and this plan has changed. I think I have lied to myself for long enough and I am just not cut out for a career in sucking corporate cock, and lets face it folks 99.9% of the people that make it high up the corporate ladder do so not because of their ability to get the job done but their ability to talk a good talk. I don’t think that the time I spent working towards my Microsoft Certification was wasted as I firmly believe what you get by achieving your goals is not nearly as important as what you become, and what I became by achieving my goal was confident. Confident in my own ability to start a project and finish it.

A week or two after reading the gambling magazine my mother bought me a book called "Big Deal" by Anthony Holden, the book for those of you that have not read the book it is a year in the life of a professional poker player, and I can honestly say it's one of the best books I have ever read. I have no idea why my mother decided to buy me this particular book as I had at that point not mentioned my new found interest in poker to anyone. However this was the book that made me decide that my goal in life was no longer to work for some large corporation working someone else’s dream, I now have a dream of my own and that dream is to quit my day job and become a professional poker player.