Hello pokervip.com

I have been looking for a new poker community to join for some time since a uk poker forum I was a longstanding member of pretty much died in 2013.

I have been relatively active on 2+2 (toxic environment) Reddit (slightly less toxic) Cardschat (friendly) but never really felt settled or established.

I was alerted to this site by long term member, Russ, who told me it was a very friendly and busy site. He wasn't wrong about it being busy! I feel as though I haven't even scratched the surface yet and probably won't for some time.

A little bit about me.

I'm 41, I have been gambling for as long as I can remember. I played pontoon and rummi as a kid. When I left school, I spent way too much in my local bookies (eventually ended up working for him when I was 18) and was like most punters, losing money on a weekly basis without it ever being particularly damaging.

In 2003/04 (around that time) a colleague introduced me to online poker. I just created a bunch of new accounts on pacific poker (they gave free money to new accounts and didn't seem to care about the fact that you could open account after account, burn the $$ then open another) and started playing very small stakes SNG's.

I didn't know my arse from my elbow and I didn't care much about getting better either. I did however start to develop an addiction to the game that has stayed with me to this very day.

After a while, I moved to Betfair on the old Cryptologic network and played SNG's there. I was winning money in the SNG's and losing it back at the cash tables, I was losing approximately £200 per month (which was not a problem) but poker had cured my addiction to sports betting, which was the first step on my path to becoming a profitable gambler.

In around 2007, I found a UK poker forum called eatmystack and that is when poker changed for me.

I started to understand that it was possible to actually make money long term from gambling (always been my dream but never a realistic proposition) and I began to work on my game seriously for the first time.

I moved to Paddy Power and started grinding their double stack SNG's. They were insanely soft and you could frequently fold your way to the bubble and still be plenty deep enough to not be at a significant disadvantage.

I built a roll for the first time ever in those games and never really looked back in terms of needing to deposit fresh money to poker but there were a lot of ups and downs along the way.

In around 2008 I went on a roll in deep stack MTT's and slow structured rebuys playing across multiple sites, having at least six $1k+ scores in a six month period. The best of those was when I won the $10 deep stack on stars for a shade over $3000.

I transitioned to ring games around 2009 as I was having tilt issues in MTT's (I couldn't handle the variance well) and started playing on Betfair again when they had their own very soft stand alone software. I played mostly $50nl Full Ring and crushed it pretty hard. There weren't many regulars and it was literally like printing money. This went on for around 18 months until Betfair joined Ongame and I again found myself homeless.

I moved to 888 in 2011 to grind $50nl Full Ring games and remained on 888 playing a mix of Full Ring an 6 max games until Autumn 2014 when their Snap games started to become popular. This sadly led to a decline in traffic in their regular table games. I stuck with Snap until spring this year, when I started to feel burned out/demotivated and started flirting with Sky Poker, Unibet, Party Poker etc..

In August this year, I decided to make Sky Poker my new home and I can be found playing £20nl - £50nl on there under the SN The--Don (horrid name created years ago that I wish I could change).

Outside of poker grinding, I make videos for grinderschool, I offer budget coaching to inexperienced or long term losing recreational players and have recently started streaming on twitch. My stream can be found here

I am hoping to build a friendly community of like minded recreational poker players hoping to improve their game whilst retaining the fun element of the game.

The purpose of this thread going forward is to have a place to call home. I will be using the thread to alert people to when I am streaming which will mean there will be a steady stream of low content updates but I also intend to make high content updates at least once per week and hope to make some new friends on here.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask. I would love this thread to become interactive, much as I want my stream to. I believe the social aspect of online poker has been lost since Black Friday and I want to do my bit to start recreating a social side to the game I love (and know others do too).

I hope this hasn't been tl;dr for you but those that have made it this far, thank you. I look forward to getting to know you over the coming weeks/months.