Only One Out

Welcome to my first blog and attempt to get things out that no one probably wants to listen to.

My name is Garret, I am twenty one years old and am trying to become a professional poker player.  Technically I guess I already am since this is my only current form of income but I am trying to get to where I can make a reasonable amount to live from and hopefully much more.  Here is my story to how I have got to where I am now.

I started life like most kids in America.  My parents raised me well and they divorced when I was ten.  I went to a small private middle school and started to have a natural affinity for math in 6th grade.  I went to a public high school and started dating my first real girlfriend whom I would stay with off and on all through high school.  I was somewhat intelligent yet very lazy and slept through most of my high school courses as I had been up all night at my girlfriends house almost every night.  My mother remarried soon after the divorce and moved to Turkey with her husband in my freshman year of high school.  I had started not caring about school and thought my happiness with the love of my life was more important.  Around my junior year my mother moved back to the states but to CO(I lived in FL).  Around the same time my girlfriend had broken up with me for the 3rd or 4th time for someone else and I was getting sick of it.  I decided to move to CO that summer to live with my mother and dropout of high school.  Before the end of school I got back with my gf but made clear to her that I was still moving and she could prove she cared for me by waiting for me.  I moved to Colorado and got a job relatively fast as a delivery driver.  I worked my butt off driving a 2000 VW golf and soon after got a second job delivering pizzas at night.  I was bringing in close to $3k a month but didn't understand the concept of saving.  As the VW started to deteriorate I decided I could afford to buy a new car.  My realistically priced dream car was the VW GTI and now I could barely afford one so I bought it and a $600/month car payment.  During this time I decided I could juggle a third job delivering newspapers for 4-5 hours at 2am every night since I didn't sleep much anyway.  I quit that job 3 weeks later as I could barely function and the pay sucked. During this time my plan was to move out of my moms house and have my gf move up with me to live happily ever after as happiness was my life's main goal.  I found out via facebook that she had been cheating on me and was getting married to someone she had only dated for a month.  I started to realize that everything I was working for in life wasn't going to happen.  I had given up being successful for happiness which didn't exist for me anymore.  It was at this point that I had a mental breakdown.  I became very depressed and started going out late and gambling in pool halls till 5am and strolling into work late everyday.  I had basically given up in life and decided I wasn't going to be happy so why try anymore.  During this time I had already moved out into an apartment with a roommate and my monthly bills were at around $1.5k and I was making about $3k and spending the rest in between.  I had no concept of money at the time.  Soon after this I got fired from my main job for coming in 1hour late too many times.  My income was now about half but I continued to spend and enjoy myself as I didn't care anymore.  I fell behind on my car payments and my dad decided to come pick me up and drive back to Florida with me so I could make up my car payments and not lose my car.  The last night in Colorado, on the last day of work, on the last delivery of the night a drunk driver crashed into my car rendering it undrive-able.  The kid didn't have insurance and I had a $1k deductible which I couldn't afford so we left the car there and got a rental car and drove back to Florida.  Soon after,  VW repossessed the car and I became more depressed.  I had no goals, no future, and no idea what I was going to do with my life.  In CO I had played poker a few times with my friends and had moderate short term success against them.  I had played a bit online but was absolutely horrible compared to everyone else.  I knew that poker was a game of skill and that money could be made so I decided to learn more about it.  I read some bad books at the library (mainly phil gordan) and got an understanding of pot odds and the basics of holdem.  Eventually I did more studying and became a somewhat break-even player at MTsngs.  From there I got some micro stakes at chipmeup.com and worked/studied my way up till I was playing $12 45-180 man sngs.  During this time I discovered DC, got kicked out of my dad's house for not having a "real" job or goals, and moved in with my new girlfriend of 1.5 years who is no where near as slutty as my last one.  After making about $3k at sng's and being a horrible cash player I decided I wanted to focus on cash games and specifically HU cash. 

Now my goal is to be fully sustained on my own at poker and to make a living from it.  So far I am at $10nl HU and have made about $400 in 10k hands.  My goal is to be playing 2k hands per day but I don't seem to be making it as HU is much harder to grind than mtsngs.  Regardless I am starting off fresh and want to have $10k minimum by July 1st playing HU only.  Ideally I would like to be in my own apartment and renting by July 1st and have $30k but I feel I would have to run super good to do that and not get stuck at any levels.  I feel I can beat HUnl50 as I have played there before for like 10k hands when I had a bigger bankroll but I am starting at 10nl now and am almost to 25nl.

Well thats my story thus far and if you have made it through this super long post then I'm impressed.  Thanks for reading.