Poker Beginnings

I went to visit and talk with my friends at Linda Johnson’s Wednesday Poker Discussion Group (WPDG) yesterday. For those of you local poker enthusiasts who like to talk poker, I highly recommend you stopping by. It’s a wonderful group that gets together every Wednesday 3:00 pm at Ricardo’s restaurant here in Vegas. There’s no membership so just show up. Ricardo’s is located on the northwest corner of Jones and Flamingo.

Bill, who is one of the regulars and who reads my blog asked me to write about how I got my start in poker and how I came to play this great game we all love professionally. So, this blog is dedicated to him.

I started playing poker sometime around 1995. My game was $1-2 & $2-4 Limit Hold-em. I first was introduced to the game by my older brother’s friend John who lived out in California and who I also had become friendly. He had been playing professionally ever since he was 19 and after 20 years of playing had not had to take a regular job.  He gave me my first poker book. “Limit Hold-em for Advanced Players,”  by Skalansky and Malmuth. The first time I sat down at a table was at Hollywood Park Casino in Los Angeles. I played recreationally as I didn’t have much money and needed a job. He suggested that I become a dealer. And so at the ripe old age of 32, I switched careers. I went from actor (and every odd job like waiter, cab driver, etc.) to retail manager to now being a student again learning how to deal cards. It took me 6 months of study before securing my dealing job at Hollywood Park Casino.

I spent the next year really learning the game. The main difference between me and the other players is that I had a passion to learn and win the game. At that time in 1996 most of the people in the lower limits had no interest in becoming a student of the game. Today it is commonplace. Or course we didn’t have a tenth of the learning tools that there are today. The way I learned was a couple of books, but more importantly surrounding myself with great players and learning from my experience.

With an intense focus and desire to learn I moved up in limits rather quickly. Within a year I was playing $10-20 Limit Hold-em and was about a break-even player in that time. I had a couple of personal challenges and moral dilemmas to overcome before I could really start winning. I started playing smaller $20 and $50 buy-in tournaments about 6 months after I started playing live as well. I was having so much fun that the time went so quickly and looking back now, it all seems to run together. That’s the beauty of learning something new that you love to do. You get so focused and involved in what you’re doing that time passes very quickly.

I remember playing with Alan Cuningham in a $200 buy-in tournament in Lake Elsinore back in the day. Playing some of the smaller tournaments around LA with Michael “the Grinder” Mizrachi. Playing $40-80 with Daniel Negraneu. Some of the better-known players of today. This was all well before the poker boom. The common denominator was that we all had a passion to learn and win the game.

It would be many challenges in the 5 years leading up to and before I won my first big tournament. But I’ll have to write about those later…I’ll have to end off here for now. I just rolled into my hotel in Arizona and I want to get this posted before midnight so I can keep my commitment of posting my daily blog each day.

To be Continued….

Enjoy the Journey!

Kenna