Interview with majcy

Charles Hawk: How long have you played poker? Tell me how you started?

majcy: I've been playing poker for maybe 5-6 years now, last 3 professionally. I figured through uni that I don't want to follow the career path my course was preparing me to and I didn't have any other ideas what to do with my life, so poker that used to be a hobby, grew into a job and eventually I quit uni. That's when I met the 1rake1, mav and adamc1988. I think that story got mentioned here and there. Thanks to that lucky event I ended up in perfect enviroment to keep improving and I made it way past just comfy life, pretty much living the dream. I was always inspired by other poker players blogs - how they can live in exotic places, travel the world, and now I'm lucky enough to also live that lifestyle.

majcy: My start with poker was through a high school friend that discovered it in it's golden age and got quickly quite successful. Took him long time but eventually he convinced me its not a gamble. Some no-deposit bonuses, few busto when playing micro stakes 6max cash, your classic 'how I started with poker story' :) sadly I never had that mentality to look for opportunity to print insane amount of money, I was on a level 'oh I enjoy this game and it can even make me some money'. Now reflecting on that I wish I had gone full throttle from the start. Took me ages to get in the mindset - 'what if I try my best to get really really good'

Charles Hawk: Describe your achievements.

majcy: I think the biggest thing for just me personally, overcoming my weaknesses, getting my shit together after loosing a lot at 1ks last year and comeback to competitive approach rather than drift away with spins or smth. That's mostly thanks to the environment I work in. SNE that I made last year feels like quite an achievement too. It was big challange to juggle with holidays, friends visiting, to plan so much ahead with the grind, and of course to girnd consistently no matter what.

Charles Hawk: Tell me about your main weaknesses when you were starting your poker career? Tell me which parts/weaknesses were the hardest to eliminate from your game and how you did it?

majcy: I think my biggest weakness at the start was mental game in general. Just getting frustrated too easily, making mistakes that I already had the knowledge to avoid, stuff like this. It's difficult to say what was the hardest to eliminate. I think work on mindset never ends, you will always try to cheat yourself again, you will always try to make easy move rather than the right move, it will be just in different kind of spots, with less EV on the line. The hardest part is to keep working, keep moving forward.

Charles Hawk: How did you meet the twins, why they decided to coach you?

majcy: I met them at the tables. I think I was in the middle of my first big heater in hypers and I started sitting the 1rake1 at 60s, over and over again, convinced he's shit. Eventually we got some conversation going. The interesting part is that they never bother to type in chat, especially to a fish. And John to this day finds it surprising that he somehow decided to write to me. Anyway I got really excited to learn he's playing up to 300s and eventually he mentioned that they were looking for people to stake and I agreed. I had to sign an actual contract and it was a 1 year deal, so everything seemed pretty extreme but I saw it as a good thing. Quickly after that they invited me to Leeds, even bought me a ticket and let me stay with them for 1 week to learn directly from watching them playing. That was pretty amazing and I came back with more notes that I took in last 2 years of uni. Afterwards it all went really smoothly and they eventually invited me to go to Bali together.

Charles Hawk: Are you missing your homeland Poland?

majcy: I don't really miss Poland as a place. I think I can't go back to cold weather anymore, maybe just for short winter holidays. I do miss my friends tho. These 2 years away happened to me like if it was 2 weeks. And I thought its 21st century: we have facebook, skype, you can play computer games together anyway. Turns out ping in Dota is terrible to other continents and I also realized Facebook chats are not enough to be significant part of your friends life. So it's a bit of a bitter feeling but on the other hand that's the nature of life, you loose some friends, you make some new.

Charles Hawk: Tell me about your most memorable travels. Any funny or unusual or interesting stories?

majcy: When it comes to travels two big trips come to my mind that were quite recent. I did a 3 week motorbike trip in malesiayan part of Borneo with one of my polish best friends. It was a hammock and a tent kind of trip without any particular goal other than just to explore. And we had so many stories it's difficult to pick something. Maybe one of my favorite moments – when we experienced some major issue with one of our bikes and because we were in the middle of not so well developed country it required a day or two to get parts from the main city in the region. Now i know that when u get technical difficulties on a trip like that it always means adventure and its a good thing. it happened in a small town located by the sea side, which was famous for diving and snorkelling. There was like a whole marine national park thing, spread across multiple tiny islands nearby. I got really excited about idea of camping on one of those islands. We headed to the marina and asked few people if its possible to get on a ferry or smth. It was getting late and apparently all these islands cant be visited for camping purposes or u cant stay overnight because is was a marine park so the only ones that u can stay on are the ones with small fisherman villages. We found a local guy that lives on one of them and convinced him that he should take us on his boat and let us camp on his island. He was very sceptical about that idea, trying to explain that the island is basically a rock with bushes everywhere but i was blinded by the idea of just going to a really small tropical island to stay there like in a movie.

majcy: We jumped on the boat and entered that water world where everyone was going somewhere in their small, almost homemade boats, it was like a car traffic on the water. It got dark by the time we got to his island and we were floating around using a flash light to examine shore line and learn that its impossible to put a foot on it. The beam of light seemed to arouse dozen of flying fish that jumped out of the water, whichever direction we pointed the flashlight. Absolutely out of this world experience. But our fisherman seemed pretty cold about it and kept asking to point a spot where we want to hop off, which made me a little bit worried about upcoming night. Cold as he was he eventually agreed with our idea to take us to the village, which was bunch of wooden houses directly above the water and later he offered us to camp on the pier in front of his house and took care of us for next 2 days. That was incredible experience to live in a place like that, very basic, very simple and so unique and beautiful.

Other trip was this January in Australia, I did around 4k km in a cool small van with two crazy Englishmen. was amazing to cover such distance and see the landscape changing so many times. Absolutely beautiful country. One of the best aspects of it was to see and surf some of the spots that are a world surf league stops.

Charles Hawk: What are your plans for the future?

majcy: Plans for future. I think i will be in the poker world for a quite a bit, too hard to say what is going to happen, the landscape has been moving so quick in hypers. I guess I will just stay highly motivated, live and work amongst like minded people and see where that takes me. I want to keep travelling, I'm thinking about doing another crazy bike trip. And usual stuff like to get better idea what's important in life, what to put on the line to make money (I think i started loosing hair chasing SNE last year), what to chase after you get the money.