“What’s the biggest pot you’ve won?”. That’s usually the first question people ask me, when learning that I used to play poker for a living. And while it’s a great conversation starter, it’s actually not at all relevant or even interesting if you take poker seriously.
Some of you may know that I played poker professionally from 2009 and up until 2014. What very few of you know, is that I went broke 2 times getting to that point, and how close I was to quitting before I eventually had my, “aha moment” and it all clicked.
This is the only article I’ve ever written about my poker career and the highlighted ups and downs of it. I’ll be brutally honest, and while it may be a long read, I promise that it’s going to be interesting.
The introduction to poker
Back in 2002, I was a bit lost in my life. I would play video games all night (Diablo II and StarCraft), with a close friend of mine. As we both didn’t have our own PCs back then, we would meet up at an acquaintance’s apartment who had two PCs, and then just sit around till the PCs were free for us to use. Then when morning came around, I would walk back home to my mother’s place, where I had been forced to move back for a while. Just thinking about it today makes me cringe.
Then one day, that acquaintance of ours invited a bunch of friends for a poker night. As I had no money whatsoever, I was forced to just slay monsters in Diablo II and watch the poker game from the sidelines. When the game eventually ended, I recall one of them winning almost 1,000 kr. ($160). I was kind of mindblown over how easy it looked, and since I’ve always had a knack for strategy games, I thought, “how hard could it be?”.
A week or so later, he invited the guys back for another poker night, and I borrowed 200 kr. to join in. After playing for less than 30 min, I had lost that money and borrowed some more. After a few hours, I had lost 800 kr., which was an absurd amount of money for me, since I had no job or anything. I remember the walk back to my mom’s apartment, and how angry I was with myself for losing money in a game I clearly didn’t even fully understand.
The next day, I ordered a poker book and read a bunch of articles on poker strategy forums. I promised myself that I would not enter another poker game, before I understood the fundamentals, and realistically was able to compete. So a month later, and after having spent a bunch of hours reading about poker fundamentals, I joined one of the poker nights again. And this time I ended up winning 500 kr. ($80). I remember walking back to my mom’s apartment, just wanting more of this winning sensation. I couldn’t wait for the next game.
Transition to online poker
For the next 6-8 months I would continue winning regularly, eventually starting to look for bigger games with other friends, etc. The issue with all of this was, that games were running with such a little frequency that it was almost impossible to sustain any type of normal life. So one night at a game, when a friend of mine mentioned that he was making 30,000 kr. per month by playing poker online, I was excited out of my mind to give it a try.
The very next day, I loaded up 2,000 kr. onto Ladbrokes Poker site, and ran it up to 5,000 kr. by the end of the night. Over the next few weeks, I won a bit and then lost a bit more. I kept reloading money onto the site, every time I lost, because, in my mind, I was just unlucky. After about 2 months, and a lot of reloads, I was met with a popup saying the reload failed. Apparently, I had no more money left on my card, and I was officially broke. Luckily I was still living with my mother, so that eased off some of the pressure, but the feeling of being a complete failure was horrible.
For the next few months, I would study poker in much more depth and really dive into advanced strategy and how to mentally think about the game. So when the time came to it, and I again deposited money to a new poker site, 888, with the nickname, “GrowAPairPlz”, I felt ready. To begin with, I started playing one-on-one tables where you could sit with $200 (HU NL200 is how it’s referred to among poker players). I worked my way up to NL400 and was averaging about 20,000 kr. per month, for a while.
So when my friends started planning a trip to Las Vegas, the mecca of poker, I immediately hopped on the idea, and booked my ticket alongside.
Going broke for the second time
Let’s set the timeline for a second. There are about 5 days till our flight is leaving for Las Vegas, and I’m playing vs. a recreational player that sits down with $360 or so. This is the typical setting and one that most professional players win about 80-90% of the time, unless the player leaves the table too quickly. After about 3 hours, he’s sitting with almost my entire bankroll of $9,000, and I’m tilted out of my mind. He ends up taking the last few hundreds I have on my account, before leaving the table. At this point, I take a look at my poker balance again, and it verifies the resounding $0.
This is the first time in my life I felt anxiety. Even now, writing about it, my mind takes me right back to my room in the newly rented apartment, that I had moved into with a friend of mine. This is the worst emotional stress I’ve had from poker in my life. Nothing comes close. It’s hard to really explain it in words, but imagine having a trip booked for Vegas, but not having any money to spend on the trip, while also hardly having enough to pay rent. Not only that but also knowing that you don’t know where your next paycheck will come from.
I learned the hard way, that poker is a game of not only emotional fitness, but also bankroll management. It’s completely natural for anyone that loses in something, that they want to win their money back, and in their eagerness to do so, take bigger risks than they would otherwise do. So while my game usually was good, it would take a dive, when a visibly worse player was catching a lucky streak for hours on end. Over these hours, I started playing worse and worse, and by the end of our match, I was literally playing worse than him, due to throwing all of my knowledge to the side and just gambling. This is the single biggest reason why so many become addicted to gambling.
Almost quitting poker
It was really hard emotionally to go through this, and I had to do some soul searching to figure out if I really wanted this type of stress in my life. The days you’re winning in poker, it’s amazing and it’ll make you feel like you’re invincible. But the days you are losing, you begin to question everything, and if you were ever good enough, or you’ve just been lucky up till this point.
Eventually, though, I reached out to a friend of mine who was playing on the same poker network and asked him if he would loan me some money for the Vegas trip that he was also going on, and fund my poker game online when we returned, if I gave him back 50% of my winnings until I had won a significant amount. Without much hesitation, he agreed and my body felt 1,000 kg lighter, immediately.
A few days later, we traveled to Vegas and while it was a fun trip, it was never the Vegas trip I had dreamed of, since I literally went broke a few days earlier. The only thing I could think about was getting back, so I could get started on playing online poker again. Las Vegas is one of those places that — to me — just isn’t as fun without a proper budget.
A picture from our Vegas trip that year.
Catching a hot winning-streak
After we arrived back from our Vegas trip, my friend transferred the funds to my account, so I could get started playing. In poker, it’s called staking, when someone else gives you money to play for, and in return, they take a percentage of the winnings, up until an agreed amount/point. I don’t remember the exact amount that we agreed to, but I remember that I started playing HU NL400 (one vs one with $400 on the table), and just hit an immense heater. In about 2-3 months, I went from NL400 and all the way up to NL2000, and had won about $150,000. I paid my friend his money back and started playing for my own, and didn’t look back. I started getting really competitive at this point and would play anyone, at almost any stakes, even if I felt they potentially could be a bit better than me. I wanted to learn, because I wanted to be considered one of the best.
Eventually, I climbed my way up to play NL 5000, which means you sit with $5000, and the matches usually end with someone losing $20-70K. I was definitely on the losing end more often than previously, as I found the climb from NL2K to NL5K to be the hardest of them all. It’s basically a level that the best players in the world will also play at, which means that you’ll have to butt heads with some really, really intelligent individuals, most of the time. I was stuck here for at least half a year, and couldn’t really figure out how to beat the really good players at NL 5K, but still crushed the NL 2K games.
Investing in myself
Eventually, I sought coaching from one of the best HU players in the world at the time. His hourly was pricey, but looking back, it’s the single best investment I’ve ever made in my poker career. I remember the first coaching hour we had together. His level of game theory and understanding of the game was beyond me, and the best way I can describe it, is if you compare a good soccer player in the Danish Superliga, and then a sensational player in Real Madrid or another world-class club. I must have replayed the first coaching session back at least 30 times, before I started to grasp his skill level.
I probably had a total of 15-20 sessions, and if you’ve ever heard about one of those moments, where things just suddenly “clicked”, this was definitely one of them. From then on, I would hardly ever lose any games vs. anyone, over a decent amount of hands. To this day, I’ve only lost to 4 players over a decent amount of hands. Funny enough, two of those are danish players. The other two are respectively English and German. To the curious poker friends of mine, the English player was, “help_999”. As for the danish ones, you can ask me privately, and I’ll tell you.
Mr. GrowAPairPlz in his full glory.
After a while, no one would play me on the poker site, 888, so I had to add new poker sites in order to be able to play. Around this point was when the poker news started to gain interest in my activity. Shortly after, I found myself playing vs. the infamous, Isildur1, which ended with a nice boost to my bank account. I can’t help to laugh a bit now, looking back at my ignorance, when reading the responses to some of the questions. Both articles above are in danish by the way, but you can probably use Google translate to read them.
Slowly losing interest in poker
After a while, not a lot of players are willing to play you, and around this time I spent less and less time analyzing my own game, and the players’ game, that I was playing against. Instead, I started going out to clubs and parties a lot more and blowing money carelessly. At the height of this, I was going out 2-3 times per week, and the people I had around me were no longer my good friends, but instead, a lot of newer acquaintances, whom some only had their own interests at heart.
Look at that smirk. Back when I was too cool for school.
I started playing less and less online, and instead tried to re-ignite my interest by going to more live tournament events globally. Something I had previously had no interest in, mainly because of the nature of knock-out style tournaments and the polarizing results. Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun traveling and this is definitely one of the things I look back on with a smile on my face, even if it was not profitable for me to travel and play. To give you a bit of insight, a tournament’s entry fee was usually $7-10K, and then on top of that, you would have to spend money on flights, accommodation, food, etc.
Yours truly making very important decisions. Or something.
I did win a few minor tournaments though, one of which was a heads-up tournament, where I beat the first ranked player on the all-time money list, Bryn Kenney, and another guy in the top 15, Daniel Colman. Both were really nice, and back then they had not won anything major. It’s crazy to think about the fact that Colman then went on to win the biggest tournament ever, at the time, for $15 million a few years later.
Calling it quits and turning to business
Around 2011, I had completely stopped analyzing and training, instead it had solely become a means to sustain my lifestyle, which for me is not a position I like to be in. I’ve always loved a challenge, and whenever that fades, I lose interest and eventually move on. This was no different, and so when a few friends asked me to invest in their company, I accepted and entered the second phase of my adult life.
Over the next few years, I pursued this company and a few others. All of them taught me a lot about business, structure and persistence. They didn’t fill my pockets with any gold though, so after about 2 years of having no income, I finally had to figure out a way forward in order to continue working on my own projects. Even though I had made a few investments, I didn’t have much liquid capital left in the bank. During this time, I was miserable and felt like a loser. For someone who’s always been able to make things work, this was the second time in my life that I felt real anxiety over adult life, and what I would be doing professionally for the rest of my life.
My dad getting me back on track
After a few weeks of feeling sorry for myself, I met up with my dad. We usually go out to dinner and share what’s going on in each other’s life. This time was no different, and after patiently listening to me whine for an hour, he finally stopped me and said, “You know what you have to do, right?”. I looked at him confused, and he shared further, “You’re one of the best poker players in Denmark, and while you may not love it anymore, it’s a means to an end, while you grow your business”. At first, I hated the idea, but over the evening, it slowly made more and more sense. So when I got back, I put together a plan of action and agreed with myself that I would play poker during the night on the sidelines, while working on my business during the day.
If you’re not aware, playing live poker is very slow and tedious to someone that’s played online poker for a living. Nevertheless, I showed up to the games night after night, only to get a few hours of sleep before working most of the day. This would happen 2-3 times per week, and slowly started to eat away at me. While the money was good, I was not really functioning during the day, or even during the games at night. I was still winning in these games, mainly because my understanding of poker is high, and a lot of recreational players are just there to have fun.
I must have played for about a year in total, before I had made enough to live somewhat comfortably, but frugally again, and then decided to throw in the towel. I also promised myself not to play live poker regularly anymore, as it turned me into a shell of myself.
Let’s summarize
So first of all, I want to make it clear that I absolutely love the experiences I’ve had through poker, and that I’m proud of my accomplishments. I feel very privileged that I’ve been able to do something for a living, that I was very passionate about. At the same time, it also completely messed up my relationship with money. When you’re making $100,000 per month, in your 20s without breaking a sweat, you start to believe that it’ll continue like that forever. It never does.
Must have just won a hand, with that grin on my face.
Another thing that I grossly underestimated, is the social aspects of being a poker pro. It’s a very lonely lifestyle, and because you often times live during the nights, the only people you really talk to are other poker players. For me, I found myself missing regular relationships more than ever, and would oftentimes go for weeks without having much social interaction with anyone outside of other poker players, not even my family.
In a documentary back in 2012 — I think it’s on TV2 Play, called “Extrem — Gambling for millioner” — about gambling and particularly poker, I was interviewed alongside a few other poker players, and one of the things I tried to stress, was the lack of social interaction, and how it’s in our nature to always think the grass is greener on the other side. Yeah, sure, it was cool to be able to do anything you wanted, at any point. But at the same time, the lack of structure in your life — for me — was hard. Overall, I’ve learned a lot about psychology, strategy, and myself through poker, and while it was a big part of my life, I am very, very happy to have moved on to other things. Does that mean that I’ll never play poker again? No, not at all. But I’ll never play professionally again, as I no longer have the passion for it, as I have the passion for building businesses.
Oh, and by the way, it’s $47,800. By biggest pot won, ever.
Naturally, I’ve left out a lot of stories, but tried to tell my story as accurately as possible. I could probably fill up an entire book, if all of the smaller nuances of my poker career were written in full.
If you have any questions or just feel like saying hi, hit me up. I’m always open to an interesting conversation.