Fresh from my winning £80 from my first ever home game, I decided the first thing I had to do was start setting up my own home game. I went online and started searching for chip sets. I found a really nice set on eBay for about £40 brand new. It arrived a few days later and I was really impressed with the quality especially compared to cheap plastic chips I'd played with the other day. I still have that chip set (with the exception of one chip that disappeared) and it remains the single best poker investment I ever made. I set about organising a monthly home game with some friends and work colleagues. The Friday night game became a regular thing and I regularly made money playing these games. £20 buy-in, 8 max game 1st, 2nd and 3rd paid, £80, £50, £30 if we had the full 8. Players came and went, different guys hosted, but I was always there. I didn't keep track of my winnings back then, but I must have been a few hundred Pounds better off because of them.
I still had £40 left from my winnings from the home game so I decided I was going to deposit half of it online and I also bought a book on poker called "Online Ace" by Scott Fischman. Scott was a young man a few years older than me who had turned a small online deposit into millions of dollars and won 2 WSOP bracelets. This was my dream. I bought the book and read it cover to cover. I would not advocate reading this book in 2020, but back then I can honestly say it improved my game. I tightened up my opening ranges, was more aggressive with my playable hands and learnt to bully the medium stacks on the bubble and how to play within your means so that you don't bust your bankroll in the first week.
I deposited on Full Tilt rather than Party Poker this time. Full Tilt seemed so much more professional and serious about poker and they offered much more variety in comparison. The other major draw was being able to find the Full Tilt Red Pro's playing online basically any time. Phil Ivey, Chris "Jesus" Ferguson, Gus Hansen, Patrik Antonius, Tom "durrrr" Dwan, Howard Lederer, Mike "Timex" McDonald, you name them Full Tilt had them. I would watch them for hours and be mesmerised by the sums of money flying across the virtual felt in the high stakes cash games.
Anyway, back to my budding poker career, it's now 2009 and I've just made my first deposit on Full Tilt and created my alias "ThaiRak". I have absolutely no idea where that name came from, but I liked it so it stayed. I can't remember lots of this as it was more that 10 years ago, but thankfully I have Sharkesope to help me out. I played about 20 games, mostly $1.25 10 handed Sit and Go's and some freerolls. I cashed for the first time at the 19th attempt, but then a few games later was the big one. I do remember this one. It was the monthly new depositor's freeroll. $1,000 and a very soft payout structure; I think about half the field got paid. 240 entrants and I finished 5th for a very cool $34.80 (thank you Sharkescope). My first big win. I'd nearly tripled my bankroll in one tournament, I was euphoric! I had just won a bunch of money without putting any of my own at risk. Maybe I really was good at poker, maybe in a few month's I could be one of those Red Pro's like my heroes.
That didn't happen. A month or so later, I met a girl and I started spending much more time with her and much less time playing poker. I still played from time to time on Full Tilt and had some reasonable reasonable results, including 6 more final tables. My biggest cash, which still remains my biggest online cash to date was $37.82, when I finished 7th out of 610 entrants in a $2.20 tournament. Checking out Sharkscope I can see the 1st paid a cool $299USD. But I had more important stuff going on in my life than poker. On 31st October 2009 I was involved in a car crash. The car I was travelling in lost control and span on a skiddy road hitting an oncoming lorry at about 40mph. The driver and a rear passenger in my car both died on impact. I was remarkably lucky. Sitting in the front passenger seat, I was furthest from the impact and suffered only 2 cracked ribs, a concussion and cuts and bruises. This was the worst part of my life by some margin, but, as with a lot of things, the best thing came out of it. In October 2010, my daughter was born. I do not want to include her name here, so i will just call her "B". Obviously I had a new focus in life now and poker had slipped further down the order of priorities. So much so that when I tried to play some poker online in May 2011 I couldn't understand why the Full Tilt client wasn't working. I tried re-launching several times, but no luck. I googled it and felt like I'd been kicked in the balls. Google was full of headlines like "Black Friday", "Full Tilt Scandal" and "Dark Days for Online Poker". Everything I read just made me feel worse. All my concerns about online poker were being realised and I knew I'd never get my money back. There was only $100.00 in my Full Tilt account, but that was all I'd ever held on the site and what I'd built up from my initial £20.00 deposit.
A while later at a Friday night game, one of the guys, Andy, said that Pokerstars had purchased Full Tilt and was paying out customers who still had money on Full Tilt when the site went down. Naturally I got on Pokerstars and followed the instructions and a few days later I had received the funds from Full Tilt into my Pokerstars account. I played occasionally on Pokerstars for a while, but my results we taking a battering. I lost my faith in the site thinking it was rigged and that online poker was no longer safe. I withdrew my money and stopped playing online completely for nearly 3 years.