Sensei’s Poker Dojo

I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. Its a pleasant place to grow up, but I wouldn’t want to live there as an adult. In high school I was pretty much a nerd and excelled in math competetions and, of course, academics in general. I entered Duke University in fall ‘02, intending to pursue a mechanical engineering degree. It took me a few years to realize that engineering wasn’t really doing it for me, but by then I had gotten far enough into the degree that it would be ill-advised to quit. I would have had to take an extra year of school to get all the non-engineering prerequisite liberal arts classes taken care of, and at $40k a pop, that wasn’t too appealing. So, I added a math double-major to keep myself sane. In fall my junior year, I set up an account on partypoker and deposited $50. It didn’t last too long, nor did the next $50. At that point I decided that I was done losing to those idiots, so I read some poker books and took it upon myself to learn how to win. The next $100 I put in quickly became $200 and then more, and once I reached an acceptable level, I cashed out the $200 I initially invested. From then on, I was playing with profits.

For the first several months of my times as a winning poker player, I played mostly low-stakes limit and then some single-table tournaments. Both were fairly easy, but neither led to any particularly big scores. I played some small multi-table tournaments too, along with several of my friends in college who had caught the poker bug and were pretty much in the same boat as me at that point. We called ourselves the anti-crew, a shot at “the crew” of 2004 WSOP coverage fame. Ironically enough, most of the other members of the anti-crew had big multi-table tournament scores (in those days, a big score was a few thousand from a $50 buyin tournament) but I never really did. In the winter of my senior year, I began to play no-limit cash games seriously for the first time, and my results finally began to take off. I rose from .10/.25 to 3/6 within a period of about 6 months, consistently and solidly winning the whole way. It was also during those 6 months that I approached graduation, and had to decide what I wanted to do next with my life. I consider myself pretty fortunate to have stumbled into poker, because I sure didn’t want to work in a “real job”. Graduate school didn’t particularly appeal to me either at that point, seeing as how I had been in school non-stop for the last 16 years and figured it was time for a break. In addition, my grades had been pretty average the last few years, perhaps somewhat in part to my poker hobby, but also because I was just generally less interested in my classes.

So, when I graduated in May 2006 with degrees in Mechanical Engineering (BSE) and Mathematics (BA) and a modest GPA of about 3.0. I spent the summer after graduation living at home in Jacksonville and playing a lot of hands. I wanted to make sure that poker was the right job for me, and that I had a solid cushion before I made any big moves. Fortunately for me, the month and a half after graduation I crushed 3/6 for my biggest winnings ever (by a large margin). In September ‘06 I moved to San Francisco, on account of manifest destiny in conjunction with my extreme distaste for frigid winters. I’ve been living there ever since, and couldn’t pick a better place to live (in America, at least). In my free time (which is ample) I play ultimate frisbee and climb rocks. I ride a bike when I need to get around. I’ve got an adorable cat named Jenny.

As for my current poker games, I play no-limit holdem and pot-limit omaha cash games almost exclusively (5/10, 10/20, and 25/50, mostly), but dabble in other games like triple-draw lowball on occasion. Sometimes i’ll play tournaments, but mostly just big-buyin live ones like the World Series. I also coach players in mid-stakes NL and PLO cash games, primarily from 2/4 to 5/10. I’ve also been working with DeucesCracked as an executive producer since the inception of the company in its current form in late 2007.