ThePokerhaus.com

Biography:

I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan where my parents were both getting their Ph.Ds from the University of Michigan. Before I turned one year old my parents both got jobs as professors at the University of Houston and we moved to Houston, Texas. In the summer between first and second grade my mom was offered a job at the University of Illinois and we moved to Urbana-Champaign, Illinois (my dad worked at Purdue for a year before also getting hired at the U of I). I have lived in Urbana-Champaign since, going to high school at University Laboratory High School (Class of 2004) and then going on to the University of Illinois, where I am currently a junior in Accountancy. I currently live at the Pokerhaus.

Poker Story:

Like so many other poker stories, mine started with Chris Moneymaker and the 2004 World Series of Poker on ESPN. I had never player poker but for some reason always found myself watching the reruns, over and over. Then one day late in Summer 2005, inspired by a Phil Ivey episode, I decided that I was going to learn and become great at poker. Don’t ask me why or how, but I seriously walked from my room to the kitchen and told my Dad that I was going to start studying poker and become a great poker player, having never once played texas hold em seriously. I had never heard of position and I didn’t even know what the small and big blinds were, but I was determined to learn.

For the next couple months, my poker learning came in the form of $5 games with my similarly inexperienced high school friends and low-limit dorm games. After a few weeks of beating the dorm game I was playing, I decided to deposit $50 on PartyPoker. As many of you know, Party’s lowest game was .25/.50NL which has a $50 buyin, so I didn’t have much room for error, and despite my best efforts and more than doubling my initial deposit, I quickly found myself bust.

Then one day in fall 2005, I was introduced to Ben Lefew and mentioned to him that I was interested in learning to play poker. Ben told me that he had been playing professionally for a few years and gave me some recommendations for books, and so I started my poker education with Play Poker Like the Pros (Phil Hellmuth) and Super System (Doyle Brunson et al). After digesting those, I decided to put $50 more on Party and start at the $5+1 single table sit-n-goes. I eventually lost this deposit too, but I was quickly learning about the game due to a combination of reading books, discussing poker with Ben, and seeing lots of hands online.

In December 2005 I deposited $50 a third time, and never looked back from there. I started an Excel spreadsheet to track my results and downloaded Poker Tracker/Poker Ace Hud, and slowly built my bankroll playing the $6 and then $11 sit-n-goes on PartyPoker. My bankroll crossed $1,000 on January 9, 2006, at which point I moved up to $22 sngs. It is important to note how conservative I was with my bankroll early on - I only moved up in levels when I had proven to myself that I could beat the previous level over the long term (200 sngs or more). My reasoning was if I start at the bottom, the only way I could ever move up a level is if I earn my way there by beating the previous level consistently. Having the bankroll to move up is a natural byproduct of being able to beat the game consistently.
Early in 2006 I became extremely depressed due to some issues in my personal life and cut down on playing poker for a month or so from mid-January to mid-February. However, I soon found myself itching for poker again, and engrossed myself in poker - reading books, blogs, and multiple online forums; watching poker both on TV and live; talking poker with Ben or Faraz; and above all playing lots of hands. I moved up to the $33 level in February 2006 and also started playing the lower buyin multi-table tournaments ($11-$33). By the end of February my bankroll had grown to $5,000 and I had two cashes of over $1,000, both in $33 MTTS on Party.

In March, 2006 I had my first big cash, 4th in the Party Friday Special for $10,454. Faraz and I were bankrolling the tournament so he got half my profits, leaving me with about $5200 in profit. Around this time, I stopped playing sit-n-goes and bounced around a while… heads up sit-n-goes on Pokerstars, heads up pot limit omaha hi/lo 8-or-better (PLO8) on Pokerroom, full table PLO8 on Full Tilt, and also played some mtts on the different sites. This period of restlessness was mostly due to my depression - the constant failures that come with playing tournaments became too much so I tried to branch out and quit playing tournaments.

A visit to my Aunt in New York over the summer really improved my state-of-being and when I returned home in July, I started playing $109 sit-n-goes and the bigger multi table tournaments across the net. I started reading a lot at www.pocketfives.com around this time and was really motivated by all the great minds on that site. August 2006 was a good month for me - I had my best month ever with several significant cashes, profiting $6.5k on the month. However, everything hadn’t really come together yet - at the end of August, I had 8 2nd place finishes in MTTs without one win.

September was the month that I truly broke out as a multi table player. On September 10th, I placed 2nd in Ultimate Bet’s 200k Guaranteed for $27k, by far my biggest cash ever. About a week later, I decided to sign up for www.cardrunners.com and get into cash games. I signed up on September 20th and watched three or four Green Plastic videos that night. The next day (September 21st) I won my first ever MTT on Pokerroom for $5.3k. The day after that, I won my second ever MTT on PartyPoker, this time for $9.3k. Watching those cash game videos added an aggressive element that I hadn’t had previously and pretty much tied everything together for me. Ever since, I have been playing and beating the biggest freezeouts across the internet.

I have started branching out into cash games, although my plans for the immediate future are to continue playing almost exclusively MTTs. You can find a link to my blog on the menu in the top right corner of the screen if you are interested in more recent updates on my poker career.

Andy Seth
10/19/2006