Poker and me

I was always a pool player, ever since I saw "Jeff Melton" play some 9ball at Billiards in Springdale, AR when I was 15. I knew right then that I would be a pool player. I had only played a little up until this point going with friends on some weekends but after seeing Jeff play I started going during the week to practice. It wasn't long before I was better than all my friends and the $1 ring games became profitable on the weekends. During this same time I caught my step-dad cheating on my mom and my sister had already been through several things including a child at 17, she is 4 years older than me, so I think I was rebelling a bit and I found myself at the pool hall all the time. My mother was having hard times, my sister lived with her husband and I had not seen my poor excuse for a real father since I was 9 years old, still haven't. I call a bomb threat at school and get expelled and then got my GED, wow what a great way to spend the most important controversial years of your life, weeee.
 I had some jobs but most only lasted until I had a few hundred dollars then I would be playing pool. I was 16 when my mom was getting married again, selling the house she could not afford, and leaving to Nashville in the RV she got for the equity in the house. They said I could go with them but I chose to live with a friend and get a job. This lasted a few months then I went to Tulsa with a friend and stayed about eight months grinding at pool and staying in hotels and with friends, it was chaos, I didn't even have a vehicle. I learned a lot of hard lessons during this time but ended up broke and hungry and I had to do a very painful thing, I called my sister to come get me.
I lived with my sister a while but it was rough, she was married, with two kids, and it just wasn't an ideal situation. I was working and playing pool again and reunited with the friend I lived with and moved back in with him. He lived way out in the boondocks on this huge area of beautiful land all divided up by his family and most of them lived there. He loaned me a vehicle and kept me alive until I worked and earned enough at my job to reimburse him. I worked at a grocery store and did just that while always still playing pool a little. Then I managed to get to work at his families auto shop with him and started making even more money. We lived together, worked together, then we would go play pool and try and make money at that together, it was a blast. We hustled and practiced and hustled and practiced and took many trips to Tulsa on the weekends for the pool tournaments.
This was around the time I was also introduced to poker. We would play the occasional home games with guys we knew from playing pool. A lot of high Chicago, and number games, and kris cross, just all kinds of funky dealer choice games. I was able to win more than I lost at these games and felt like I was okay at poker, hahahahaha, so green. So we are working and playing pool but I knew I wanted more, and thats when a door to door magazine sales manager stops in the shop to get car work done and recruits me.
I am thinking I'll sale magazines door to door in all these cities then go hustle pool after. On the first stop after packing up and leaving with them and we go to Tulsa, OK. It's the first day and we are working an apartment complex when I run into some other guys working door to door. They sale automotive coupons and are based out of Dallas which is our next stop. I instantly hit it off with two of them and they fill me in on some knowledge about door to door magazines and they recruit me to join them. I tell them I will think about it and call when I get to Dallas after I have made a decision. So we get to Dallas and I decide to go, and four others come with me. Mutiny on the deck!
Now I am working as a door to door salesman based out of Dallas living in a one bedroom apartment with my manager and two others working 6-7 days a week, traveling a lot and staying 5 to a room in motel 6s with low sales on the floor. It's here I meet the mother of my two boys that lives in Atlanta, GA where she was recruited into that business. We worked together for a while which made the "two to a bed" thing not as bad because I was never low sales and she would sleep with me. We end up getting pregnant, about the same time she gets really homesick, and we were both tired of the door to door sales thing even though I was pretty good at it. We had just got our own apartment when she decided to quit, but I was still working. She manages to get a ride to Atlanta from her father that drove a truck, and I end up quitting soon after and going to Springdale to see my friends and family. It's here that something brutal happens, we spend some time apart and she falls in love with Atlanta again and won't leave her family. The only way I get to see my son is if I move to Atlanta too, but I'm broke with no family to really fall back on, and with pool and gambling as my background I needed my friends and connections to stay alive, I was horrified. I really wanted to head down their but had no money and kept hustling to try and gather money but as I did that, time kept going by and we grew further apart and then broke up long distance. I was selfish and in a way confused, I really always thought I was going to be this great pool player and when I made it things would be so much easier, but time just kept passing by.
 As my son was turning a year old his mother and I had been talking more and more and I finally decided I would head down there and see if we could make it work. It was a cool reunion and getting to see my son was amazing, although his mom was so different and I couldn't really figure out why. I was there a couple weeks or so before heading back to Dallas to meet up with one of our old co-workers who had his own door to door company selling automotive coupons,  and I was going to get to work. When I got there though, we didn't do much working, it was hot outside and we could not get motivated. So after a week or two of hanging out and being lazier than I should have, I took off to Tulsa to start playing pool and try to get myself where I wanted to be.
It was at this time I started staying with a girl I met after I caught her watching me play pool a few times. She said that she could not get pregnant, but then a month or two later in the same week, I found out I had two more kids on the way. One from the girl I was living with, and another from my sons mother in Atlanta, and we had been safe all but one time, oh no. Needless to say I felt like the girl I was living with had lied to me and after some other weird brutal issues I also thought she might be crazy, so I moved on.
It was around this time while having my own apartment in Tulsa and a live in GF that I started to run a poker game out of my apartment. Holy cow, I might start to talk poker now. So I run a game one day a week and it's going well. I am not really learning anything about poker just hosting a game and usually winning and still knowing I am pursuing pool. Thinking back on it now I am amazed at how green I was and that I never even thought to try and get better. After a while my game got popular and one of  my friend wanted to join in. I helped him get a table and was going to share the game and work together, we would both have a day of the week for our game and tell each crowd about the other game and share players. But soon after I got falsely accused of cheating by an idiot and my game died and his flourished, I was so pissed I just gave up and focused on pool.
I was pretty much done with poker after that except the little bit I would play in Vegas while there for pool, but was always over my head. Then I hear about online poker in 2003 or 2004. I join Partypoker and play, but never really gave myself a chance and very stupidly and cockily thought I was better than I was. I never even knew to think about trying to learn the game and improve at it like I did pool. I am truly ashamed at how cocky and foolish I was. I would play $55 sit n go's all day and when I would win, I would usually lose it all back. I was a fish.
A few months later I get a call from a friend saying he secured a position at a casino and that poker was coming Tulsa. So I went and got hired and was trained to deal, then floor, then train dealers. Now around this crowd and with some trips to Siloam to play poker in a sister casino for the first time I was introduced to someone that had tried to improve at poker but it was still over my head. I was to cocky and thought I was good, meh. It was around this time the Moneymaker boom happened and I started playing more online and losing and not knowing why. Then I got in the wreck, but actually played online while in the hospital and part of my own way for dealing with it and knowing I wouldn't really play pool again after putting my life on hold for pool was to tell myself that maybe poker is for me, everyone is sitting down. When I got out of the hospital I played a lot of poker, everyday after work I would play until time to sleep and do it again. I was a winning live player, maybe not a huge winner, but I had enough common sense to stay winner but would get killed online. Those things didn't change until 2010 when I decided to take the steps necessary to improve and here we are.