Nick is a cash game player, content creator and part of 888poker’s Stream Team. Each week he shares his thoughts and experiences as a player dedicated to the daily grind. This week, he returns to the place where he first discovered his love for poker...
After a couple of weeks at home following 888LIVE in Manchester and UKPL in Leeds, it’s back on the road for another UKPL, this time in Reading. It’s the first time the town has been included in the 888 calendar since I joined the team, and it happens to hold a special place in my heart. In fact, without my time spent in Reading over a decade ago, there’s very little chance I’d be playing this game for a living right now.
In the summer of 2009 I’d just finished my A-levels and had been accepted into my first choice university, Reading, to study Philosophy. My experience with poker was limited to 3-handed games with my friends from school, and there was very little chance that I’d ever amount to anything more than that in the game. I didn’t have any ambition to pursue poker, and my focus was fully on getting my degree and enjoying my time at university.
That changed fairly quickly though as I sought out one of Reading University’s many ‘societies’, social clubs where like-minded individuals could practise and enjoy their hobbies. This is where my love for the game began to flourish, and I made friends that I still have to this day.
Discovering online poker and cash games
Alongside the poker society, I began to play online poker for the first time. I started off with $20 in my account and played two hyper-turbo tournaments, coming second and first, and I never looked back.
I thought I was the best player in the world at that time, and I found a small niche of 45-man sit and go tourneys that I just seemed to crush. I’m sure a lot of it was a hefty chunk of luck, but it certainly helped that everyone in 2009 was absolutely horrendous. I quickly put together a little bankroll, and poker gave me a great side income to supplement my studies. Poker gave me my financial freedom very early on in my life, and that was definitely a huge attraction to pursuing it vigorously.
It was also in Reading where my passion for cash games truly developed. Battling it out in the many home games hosted by the poker society was the highlight of every week, and I started to live and breathe the game. If I wasn’t in a lecture or writing an essay, I was playing poker in any game that was going. Most of my relationships at university were built through common interests in the game and, looking back, those experiences and friendships were much more valuable than any degree.
Full circle
So it’s quite poetic that life is now coming full circle and I’m back in Reading this week to play 888’s UKPL. Success in these tournaments has been distinctly limited as you’ll be aware if you’ve read any of my previous articles, and it’s been a largely frustrating experience. But even for someone as pessimistic as myself, and even though I promised I was done being positive after a brutal stretch of results, it’s hard not to feel good heading back to play in a town that bears so much significance for me.
And even if the predictable happens and I’m brutally dispatched from the tournament once more, I’ll be making time to walk around the town and my old university campus to remember the very good times I had there over a decade ago. And who knows, maybe there are more good times to come this week. Stranger things have happened.
Above all else, I’m really looking forward to coming back to a place I called home. And I know it doesn’t work like this, but if I was to win anywhere, I’d want it to be here.
Follow Nick on X, Instagram, Twitch and his YouTube channel.
