Through poker, I became a millionaire at 20 years old, and here's how I did it.
First of all, I started playing poker when I was about 17. I wanted to play with friends during high school, but pretty much no one wanted to play with me. I played with a friend, tearing up little pieces of paper for $10 buy-ins. I went about $80 up and tried to collect from him, but he didn’t pay me, and no one wanted to play me, so I was out of luck.
For some reason, I didn’t know about online poker or thought I was too underage because I was 17. So, I joined a group of people—not really friends—and played $0.50/$1 and then $1/$2 around my neighborhood. I found out about them having a game and then discovered a nearby game that was $1/$2. I got my ass kicked; I lost all the time. They were quite a bit better than me overall. I wasn’t very good; I was definitely running pretty bad—losing about 80% of the time or so—at least 70%—and didn’t have any big wins.
There were strong suggestions that I was cheated, but it wasn’t clear at the moment. A couple of people said I was cheated, but in this specific period, it wasn’t that clear. However, later on in my career with these same people, it became very clear that I was cheated. One of them who was mostly innocent but didn’t cheat me was Scott "URnotINdanger2" Palmer. That’s when I first met him; he was among this group of friends, and I got my ass kicked—I lost about $3,000 in a few months.
My parents locked my savings account, which had about $5,000 total in it, and said I could keep playing or whatever, but I had to get money on my own. My road to success was pretty bumpy; most of these guys who were allegedly my friends were total jerks to me. Scott was a bit of a troll—he would do things such as three-bet me and play against me blind when he thought he could read me. He’d fold his hands and then zip himself off in a hoodie as well. He would also just play hands blind against me and flip over queens or some big hand; it would turn out that he actually had something really good when he was playing hands blind against me without looking at his cards.
He thought this was a fun way to deal with things, but he was actually my friend and hung out with me quite a bit—certainly hung out with me when I started winning at poker and became much more successful than these guys. But before all that, let’s talk about some of the things they did—such as a mix of experiences that were both positive and negative.
One of which was they once pretended to steal my car by pretending to be random people on the street. A couple of friends hijacked my car—I was driving an Lexus ES300 at the time—and they just kind of drove it around. I could tell something was a bit amiss because people were not that afraid. We parked on the side of the road, and these guys just got out of the car and got a gun! Then Scott said, “Oh no! They’ve got a gun, George!” That’s what they called me.
We drove around the neighborhood while Scott kept saying, “Run George! Run!” I could tell something was too relaxed because there was a bit of giggling and laughing that shouldn’t be happening if someone’s stealing their car! Of course, their other mutual friends brought back the car, and sure enough—it was all just a prank—but I actually thought that was funny.
There were things that were less funny that eventually happened—one of the players would change the cards in the deck. It wasn’t Scott who changed the outcome, but to their sort of credit, they wanted to run it twice. The first time was when they cheated and had the good run-out to suck out against me; the second time—I won it because they felt a little bad about cheating too much—which is sort of a good thing.
Well—that’s a good thing—relatively speaking! The same player who was beating me fairly—when I was losing $3,000—would win about $600 or so. I was getting very visibly upset; it was clear that I was upset and frustrated. Then he would start giving me lessons and teaching me things like “Oh—you know if you bet on 9-5-4 after your re-raise? What the hell can you have?” And I'd think “Oh—you’re right!”
So he showed me—“Okay well—I was just bluffing you in this spot.” Even after losing $650, he’d give me some advice as a bit of consolation. This is one of the things we played for—and he just gave me some advice anyway—but it shows that people who are a bit of a dick, still usually have some kind of positive side to them.
I always remember this: another story is we were betting—and I'm not super athletic; I'm certainly not good at basketball specifically. We bet on basketball—and this guy who was quite taller than me and certainly more athletic decided that it would be a fun idea to completely trash me and bet his $100 to my $50 that he could get 20 points before I could score one point.
I got the ball every single time in our basketball game! And I've played a bit of basketball—I actually wasn't horrible—but compared to anyone who is any good?
And I said, “Okay, that seems kind of crazy—I’ll take that.” So I played, and very quickly I figured out I couldn’t score a layup on this guy. He’d just get the ball from me, or I’d miss and not be able to take a shot really. About 10 shots in, I realized, “Damn, I can’t score this way.” Maybe even a bit less, and I realized—but one thing I could do was because he was giving me the ball every time and wasn’t really guarding me when I was very far away—there was a chance to attempt a three-point shot, which I was actually pretty good at. Sure enough, around 13 points in, as I kept taking three-point shots, I scored a point!
Yeah, I did not get paid from that—I’m pretty sure—but I won, and I remembered it over a decade later.
The Bullying Goes Up a Notch
Another story is one of the messed-up things these guys did to me was they invited me to go with them to Ocean City, which was sort of a party city for summer break. Then one day, they drove up and picked up my money, saying, “Oh, we need to collect the money from you.” And they drove off to Ocean City! I didn’t know they were driving off to Ocean City. I’ll tell the story a little differently—then they drove off, and I messaged them, saying, “Okay, when are we going to Ocean City?” Later, I found out they went to Ocean City without me and took my money—$400! It’s not very nice. This was a bit later, after I had won $3,000 or so.
The moral of the story is a little different. There was once a guy who also bullied me; he would visibly wrestle me. I did, in fact, retaliate and suggested violence, and he immediately backed off. Then what happened was he decided to impersonate a police officer over the phone, and I actually fell for it! This police officer said, “Oh, you’ve got to give poor Sean $150,” and I thought this was real. So I actually gave him $150. And so basically, I got scammed in a strange way.
Apparently, these days he’s doing quite a bit better in helping with charity—I don’t really know much about the details—but nice if that’s the case. I don’t care anymore, but it’s a good story. That same guy managed somehow to put s*** on my car. It didn’t really affect me that much—kind of messed up in retrospect—but he put s*** on my driver’s seat entrance to the car. I was able to get in through the side entrance, fortunately. I don’t know how he did that—kind of an accomplishment, a little bit of a joke on him—just because he has to carry around crap everywhere and somehow get it on the car.
I was able to just get in through the other car; I didn’t even think much of it. So he calls me up, saying, “Oh, I heard you had s*** on your car.” I’m like, “Oh, can I have my money back?” Being not the brightest at this, I asked that question, and it’s kind of messed up—but I didn’t really care.
One fun fact was he did, in fact, believe me during a period with a bunch of other people in a kind of violent way—he’s a bit of a wrestler, right? He was wrestling me down or whatever—but kind of in front of everyone, like you know what a better wrestler challenges in and says, “Oh, you want to wrestle? Okay.” So what happens is they actually do wrestle a bit in front of me. I almost didn’t give a damn, but he got his ass kicked right in front of me! That was kind of fun—kind of funny to watch him get his ass kicked by someone better.
Yeah, it gave me a little taste of some adversities. By the way, the entire time I was studying online poker, I was studying on the internet and reading books about how to play poker. I read Phil Hellmuth’s book Play Like the Pros and Phil and Doyle Brunson’s book Super System. What I thought were good resources to learn—they’re somewhat useful. I read articles on the internet; I was trying to figure stuff out.
And then I got a job at McDonald’s because my accounts were locked—remember, I just lost a bunch of money. I worked for about a month and made about $1,000 before realizing, “Holy s***, it sucks to work a full-time job or even a part-time job and go to school” because I was going to college during this time. I had to travel between the job and college—man, did that suck!
Discovering Online Poker
So what happened was I then found out about online poker—and lost a little bit of money.
I lost a couple of deposits; I deposited $50 and was happy to play as small as possible to build up my roll. I was tired of losing this losing $3,000—I thought that was a lot of money. I worked it up to about $350, and then my account got locked because I deposited on one of the other guy’s accounts—his name was Jason. They flagged my account or flagged his account because the same credit card was deposited for my account. So they were wondering what was going on, and I was not 18, which was the legal age. I was kind of screwed for a little bit.
I ended up biking down to the DMV around my birthday, November 14th, getting my license back and getting my $350 back, which I finally won. And then I started grinding it up from there.
That’s pretty much the beginning of all that. From there, I was playing $5, $10, $20, and then $30 Sit and Go's. Three months in I lost $3,000, and the next six months I slowly grinded it all the way back. You may think, and as I was thinking, “Ah, s*** man—I’ve barely done anything in poker.” I read the story of Dani 'Ansky' Stern, who just kind of blasted off and won a bunch of money, and it was great. He won a tournament for a few thousand or whatever, and I was like, “What am I doing? This game sucks.” I was a bit sad, and then guess what? Destiny happened. I won a tournament for $5,000! My mind was blown! It was a $24 buy-in tournament, and I won it outright for $5,000. There must have been about a thousand people in this thing, and I even won it with my signature hand at the time—King-Four off-suit. I had bluffed someone and just kind of whipped it in their face. I bluffed amazingly, and somehow won the tournament with that very hand.
So after that, I had now had $3,000 plus $5,000—big money for an 18-year-old college student at the time. And I decided, “Well, nothing’s really changed—I just got lucky and won a tournament.” Being a good poker player, I was so I withdrew the $5,000. Finally, I was able to have money, and from this point forward, I always ate out to eat. I didn’t just have white rice or whatever the crap I had for my food. I invested in a membership to CardRunners.com to enhance my skills and learn more. This actually was one of the defining moments when things really began to take off.
Shortly after this, I had quite a big role. I was playing $50 buy-ins; I was moving up in stakes. I discovered heads-up poker, where I fortunately played someone heads-up at $250/$500 and won about $350. I think that was the amount—yeah, I was like, “Man, there’s some real money in this!” $350! These guys are bad; I’m going to play some heads-up poker. I was watching videos on CardRunners—watching guys playing these high stakes like L.J. Jones playing some $2/$4, Cole South playing $50/$100, $100/$200, $1,100/$2,200. I was thinking, “Holy crap, these guys must be really good! Oh man, I’ve got to learn all their secrets.”
So I grinded, and then I moved up to $50/$100 really quickly. And then I moved up and went to $1/$2 very quickly. Now I had some serious money—must have had around $8,000 plus online or so. I started making $50 plus an hour; things were getting a little serious. Things were getting a little heated—maybe even $100 an hour. I could track it in PokerTracker or I believe I was using PokerTracker at the time. I saw my hourly rate, and I was thinking, “Man, this is some real money! Holy crap!”
And so I then moved up to $2/$4. My parents gave me an internship where I basically just sat around and did nothing all day. It sucked—maybe I could have played online poker, but I didn’t. I just read CardRunners.com. I made A$17 an hour; it took me a few weeks or so to make $2,000. And then I was able to play $2/$4 and make $2,000 in one day. It seemed like this was going to be the better option for me—still in school, just summer break. This was the year 2009; I remember playing $2/$4—serious money, more than $100 plus per hour. That’s like real money for the real world.
Actually, I was able to make $4,000 in one day. Shortly after, I got an offer to play heads-up with one of these guys who was out of town. I was invited over to their house. I actually don’t know who precisely cheated me, but what happened was I played and I lost $4,000 to this guy on a single table heads-up. There were people watching and commenting like, “Oh, George, look—he's got something good,” and then Joey would, of course, check-fold, and then he’d blast the crap off if I had nothing. He played a bit of a crazy style, and I learned later, as I said, lost $4,000 this way.
I did make it back in a single day from $2/$4 playing fair and square later. I found out that someone admitted that I was cheated out of $4,000 for some reason. They admitted it—smart, I found out, and I was like, “Oh, okay—that’s interesting." That’s kind of cute in retrospect. I remember playing $2/$4 didn’t stop me from moving up in stakes. I wasn’t able to get any of that money back, but that’s okay.
So I was able to play $3/$6 and move it up to $5/$10. At this point, I had around $15,000 to $20,000 or so. I know I fell back somehow to $20,000 at some point. I got up to $30,000 from $5/$10 and moved up to $10/$20 by the time I was 19 years old. I had $100,000 at $10/$20.
At this point, Scott and I were friends. We hung out a bit with this guy named Ed, who was one of the best players in the game. I played a little with him at $1/$2. Ed was quite cocky and arrogant towards me and called me a few choice words outright. Yeah, I wonder if anyone still wants to play with him. He was very good at pool and quite smart, I would say. This must have been towards the end of 2008; I must have been 19 years old at the time.
Moving Up the Stakes to Millions (and Isildur)
Fast forward to going into the future of 2009, I kept moving up in stakes. I had disconnected from most of those other guys. I was in college, and I was kind of a loner at the time. I was focused only on one thing, which was playing poker. By the way, one of the things that will help a lot towards making a lot of money is being focused only on one thing. I then moved up to $25/$50 and got smashed by Luke Schwartz a little bit. Then I came back and eventually beat him playing $25/$50. This is where the money gets really serious—$1,000 plus bankrolls.
I don’t remember a whole lot of what happened in the meantime, but I had a bit of a meteoric rise. I started playing a lot of the coaches that I had once learned from, such as L.J. Jones. I did win a little bit, not a huge amount. I played him, but I didn’t play Cole South at this period. I started playing other guys at $25/$50 and that sort of thing. I played Tom Dwan at some point, and Tom Marchese, who is one of the better players. This was towards the end of 2009. I crushed Spirit Rock specifically, but Tom Marchese didn’t go so well. I played Aaron Jones—yeah, that’s a guy that I played and won quite a bit of money from. Lucky Chewy beat both of them, I believe. CR, I played—I watched his videos from DeucesCracked—and he, I believe, beat me. White Line, I’m not sure how he did; I believe I beat him.
I played also some other instructors from A.J.’s crew—some FTOPS winners and that kind of thing—guys who win tournaments. This is when people who aren’t so great were playing back in the day. Then I played a Viktor Blom (Isildur1) at $25/$50. I didn’t know who he was; he’s some Swedish guy. I actually beat him at $100/$200 and then, while I was moving up to $500, I moved up to $1,000. This is where I finally became a millionaire at the age of 20 years old. I did play Isildur1, and I thought I had an edge—maybe I did in fact. This was one of the worst sessions I ever had, and I lost $500,000—about half of my roll—in a single day to Isildur1. It was pretty gnarly.
So I got to a million, lost $500k and then guess what? The next day I played Z Justin and lost $110,000. Now my mind’s spinning, and I’m like, “What the hell am I going to do?” But this is the story: I made a million dollars and managed to get my head straight after that. After I got to a big pinnacle point, I got f***ed up immediately, of course. It’s a bit of a high—a super high—and a super low. But I managed to get my stuff together and think, “Okay, well, I still have $300,000 plus at the age of 20 years old.” So things are pretty good—pretty sweet. I managed to win some tournaments and win some back, and I tightened up my game selection. It’s quite important when you’re getting screwed up and on a bit of a downswing.
So I swung back, and then 2010 was the next year, which went pretty well by most standards. My hourly rate for winning was about $10,000 an hour. I felt like I had loads of days where I grinded forever on Sundays and just lost playing loads of tournaments. And then somehow, I managed to be the biggest winner that year for about $5 million at the end of the year.
This is the year where I really played all the people that I learned from and then beat most of them and won loads of money. I played Cole South, Brian Hastings, Taylor Caby—all these guys from CardRunners—and I succeeded. This is where my meteoric rise and the rise to fame came from. When I played against Tom Dwan, I beat him for a large amount of money, and then he challenged me to the Durrrr Challenge, which kind of messed with my mind. And then I lost even more money playing Patrick Antonius and Phil Ivey.
The Moral of Jungleman's Story
I managed to come out on top, and the moral of the story is that even though starts can be rough, even though it looks like things are not going anywhere, it doesn’t mean that they’re not. As a matter of fact, all the crap that happens ends up benefiting the story in the long run in my opinion.
It ends up being part of the story—if there’s not something messed up and challenging, then there’s nothing worthy to accomplish from it.
In spite of all the bad things people did to me, not only did most of them have some good sides—I think pretty much everyone seemed to have a good side that I ran into. Even though they did lots of bad things, it didn’t end up working out very well for them overall, relatively speaking.
As it turns out, the best strategies are actually the nicest or rather the most good strategies to work out in the long run because they aim for the long run. But you’re supposed to retaliate if people do something bad—you’re supposed to defend yourself, not supposed to get messed up. That’s actually the GTO-like strategy as it turns out. I certainly never thought I’d end up having this much success—becoming basically a poker legend, especially when things were going pretty terribly.
It all began with a desire to be free and to play games, and here I am. So now this is part of my inspiration for supporting the poker dream, and that’s what I hope—that all of you guys still have that you can escape the possibility of having a soul-crushing 9-to-5 job and that you can also achieve extreme poker success through your meteoric rise. I’m supporting this through The Jungle Verse with my writing and helping to create conditions so that you two can follow the poker dream and follow your dreams.
