This will be the first entry of many that will hopefully give you an insight into the world of a grinding poker pro. My name is Gary Hurst and i’m 28 and currently live in Grapevine, Texas having moved from Newcastle, England about 3 years ago. My start in poker came a lot like many of yours, a small game with friends on someone’s kitchen table surrounded by beers, take-aways and lots of laughter.
Somewhere along the line I started to become obsessed with the game and was like a sponge trying to soak up as much as I could. There were many days spent reading Super System and many nights spent watching the World Poker Tour on TV. After a few more of those epic kitchen table games, I decided to take the online plunge and I deposited $80 on Pacific Poker. I jumped into the $5 sit and goes and the roller coaster of a poker career began. With how soft the games were it didn’t take long for me to start winning, although more because the players were so bad not because I was so good 
It became a nightly thing for me, finish work at 5, tea by 6 and then straight on the laptop. After building my roll in the first few months up to $1k, I decided to try the cash games and without any thoughts about bankroll management, I jumped in the 1/2nl cash games and was short stacking them with $60. Again taking advantage of weak play I moved up through the limits quickly and 6 months after starting to play the game I was playing the highest nl games on Pacific at the time, 3/6. Although the player pool was smaller, I was still a winner and grinded at that level for about 2 years.
Around the beginning of 2006, I realised things were getting stale at my job and I decided that I would try to do poker full time. Having all of my immediate family in the States I decided it was time to return there. This was right around the time of the UIGEA and I was unable to play on Pacific in the US so I moved my roll to Full Tilt. I decided at that time to buy a purpose built poker pc and this is when I decided to buy what my younger brother describes as the ‘Starship Enterprise’, a Dell XPS420 with two 24′ monitors Link to picture of my pc
That was about 18 months ago and since then I have grinded the cash games on Full Tilt daily. Im one of those people that doesn’t really enjoy live poker. When you are used to playing 12 – 16 tables and 3,000+ hands per day the thought of sitting in a casino playing 25 hands an hour and 250 hands in a ten hour session really just has no appeal to me. That said I do make the trip out to the WSOP each year but after 3 weeks i’m desperate to get back online.
I know that Mal is going to be pushing the coaching side of itsawinner.co.uk and as I am the resident coach I think that its only fair that you guys see some of my results so that you know you are dealing with someone that is beating the games.
Here is a graph from PokerTracker3 since I installed it on March 1st, Click for my graph .
If anyone has any further questions regarding coaching or questions about me in general, feel free to get in touch with the site through the contact us section and I will get those answered asap.
Now that the boring stuff is out of the way and you get a general idea of how I got into poker, I can promise that the blog will be more interesting in the future. I will aim to update this blog a couple of times a week with poker related stuff. I will try my best not to use it as a forum for me to rant about the games but that might happen now and then … every once in a while i’m attacked by the tilt monster. I will also chronicle my poker trips around the US playing live games, there is yet another trip to Vegas on the horizon so I will post a full trip report of that in the near future.
For now though, im out, good luck at the tables ……
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post mate.
Good post Gary, and sick chart!
Good Luck at the tables.