Full Name:  Leon Louis

Age 26

Location: London, England

Started playing: 2006, Professionally since 2010

Secrets to Poker success/strengths:       Resilience and Willingness to improve

Main weaknesses:  Spewing in Live MTTs/ Minicabs/ Indian restaurants/ Autopiloting/Being too generous



EARLY DAYS

I started playing poker in 2006, spunking off my money from my Telesales job on both the online and virtual felt.  In all honesty poker was an obsession for me, I was fed up with my job and became fascinated by the sort of figures a lot of my heroes at the time were making online. Whenever my boss went on business meetings I'd sometimes download party poker and play a little cheeky sit and go whilst I was on the phone.

 I would make small deposits online, almost invariably bust the roll, and then reload convinced that the next time was the time I'd strike gold (DEGEN!)

At the time I enjoyed the social aspect of life poker, and despite not really having a clue at the time I was amazed at the differences between how in depth and how open minded online players viewed poker hands in comparison to the average live player, and it sort of became my personal mission to learn as much as I possibly could.

 Poker didn't really come naturally to me, and the process of me becoming a winning player took a number of years. I didn't really know where to look at first, but after spending countless hours analysing the games of winning players,reading strat threads and discussing hands with friends my understanding slowly grew.

 



Between 06-09,I played pretty much everything and anything online, leaning towards 9 men sit and goes for a while, and had some moderate success.

My BRM at the time wasn't the greatest , and I busted four/five figure rolls a few times online from being a complete degenerate and playing in games I had no business in being in.

After watching some of the first ever husng.com videos from the likes of Croixdawg, I played heads up sit and goes during my lunch breaks at work and grinded up through the levels pretty quickly.

 I quit work, and at the time felt like I was riding the crest f the wave going from earning 900 pounds a month in a dead end job to around 6000 dollars a month playing 60-100 reg speeds on full tilt. It was all pretty effortless at the time if I'm honest and didn't work on my game as hard as I should have been.

Today

I made the switch to Hyper Turbo heads up in 2012, about a year later than I probably should have done. Throughout my poker journey me and my good friend Moca progressed at a similar rate, but I was too content in making decent money at reg speeds to move to what was clearly a more profitable game.  I've had a pretty good run at Hypers since then though, and hopefully it continues!

I think one of the main pieces of advice I could give to any aspiring poker player is to always be willing to accept new information - be a sponge. I think a very common thing amongst poker players is that a lot of them are afraid of being wrong/feeling incompetent. They assume their own poker ideology has to be the correct one and this in turn limits their growth.  There's a lot of information on poker accessible at the moment,and it's also important to make sure you're interpreting it correctly.

Also work hard! Poker is one of the hardest ways to make an easy living, and I believe long term the harder you work the better your results will be.



The four stages of competence is something that has been spoken about a lot in poker literature recently, and I think self determining what stage you're on is pretty important in terms of improvement as a player.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

This year I've had a pretty shitty work ethic and have been pretty unprofessional due to a lot of non poker related issues, but still am pretty optimistic I'll finish off having another highly profitable year.

 I also spend a little more time than I should playing like a maniac in small live MTT's just for the social/banter aspect whilst there's so much money to be made online.

My goals for the short term are to be more economical with my money, continue to improve as a player, live well, be happy and keep myself around good people.

Graphs:

I've only made the switch to PT4 last week, as for some reason HEM wasn't processing all of my games correctly.