i broke through last year because of two primary reasons, one was that I was living with MrGr33n13 in Montreal for the first six months of the year (3 of those in wintery Montreal where all we did was play poker).  He's a good resource to talk strat with and go over hyper concepts so naturally my game progressed.  Second, I took a lot of hours of private coaching with Jared Tendler and he really helped me to shore up some mental game leaks I had which were holding me back a lot.  Then from there it was just a combination of putting the volume in and not running under ev.  I am definitely not an amazing player vs. fish yet, and that's something I have to learn this year to take my game to the next level and truly become one of the better regs.

No, I was a losing or breakevenish player during my first few college years, but I wasn't playing consistently.  I'd run up a 2k roll, bust it, then take a few months off.  I really regret not studying more effectively back then.  It was a great time to make money with a low level of skill.  Mental leaks held me back a bunch back then, but I wasn't very good either.  I played 6 max sngs and tried to play 6 max cash without any success.  I basically just like the gambling aspect of it and would inevitably bust my roll playing higher and higher.  I didn't really have success until I started with HUSNGS.

I've been playing as my primary source of income since mid-2010 but I was happy to win a few thousand dollars per month in the beginning.  I didn't make so much in 2011-2012 but it was enough to be comfortable as a college student.

I don't think I need to justify it, to be honest.  It's a game that I love to play and I can make good money doing it so I don't see any more reasons than that.  There isn't anything else I can think of doing at this age where I get to travel extensively and pick my own hours, all while making a good wage.  I'd tell the priest to be cool and do his own thing.  Do less, buddy.

That said, I'm trying to form an exit plan for poker in the next few years.  I'm not naive enough to think I'm going to be doing this forever, nor would I really want to.

Yeah everyone who has been playing for more than a few years started as a deeper player.  I actually played reg speed husngs primarily.  There was even a time that I played deep stack (3000 chips) husngs on full tilt.  Those were super soft and you could have a 25% roi with an average stake of 300.  There wasn't great volume but I'd almost never have a losing day and guaranteed 10k months were awesome and unthinkable to me back then before deep stacks.  They still exist on Full Tilt but I don't know if they ever run anymore because I don't keep them in my lobby view.  

So much of poker is networking and who you get to talk strat with.  I've been lucky to be friends with a lot of the top husng players throughout the years and I wouldn't be where I am today without those relationships.  We talk about poker quite a lot, obviously.

I was having massive swings the end of 2013.  I think I went on around a 80-100k or so downswing when you take 50-100 cap cash into account.  I was warring a bunch of 1k hypers and playing hu cash at 50-100 so it wasn't really that big considering.  Thankfully I went on my biggest heater the moment my downswing hit my peak so I didn't really have time to dwell on it.  It was around a one or two week downswing.  I was chasing SNE and I was fairly comfortably rolled so besides a little tilt when it happened I really didn't get too affected by it.  The worst session was -50k vs RuaBot at 50-100.  This year I've been playing way smaller games so another swing like that isn't really possible unless I hit a worst case scenario.

Got the downswing back + a little bit extra in the following week.

Yeah, any time I've hit a low point in poker, (which will come regardless of who you are unless you're one the few chosen ones who always crush and run good) I've wished that I'd gotten a real job out of college.  Thankfully I've always been able to recover from those low points and I realize how awesome poker is and how happy I am to be doing this.  There are times when I've felt like I've ruined my life because of poker but it's always important to take a few days off and get some proper perspective.  

I'm not warring so much at 1ks right now.  I'm playing a lot of lower stakes guys who are trying to move up to 500s, but I've been doing really well so far vs them and those sessions are pretty fun.  A few of them are pretty good so it's fun to try to figure out how they think and put together a game plan to try to beat them.

The biggest thing would be to play very few tables at once and really focus on your decisions and start to understand why things work and why others don't.  The worst kind of learning is to watch a video and try to mimic a style.  Videos have merit and are great for beginners but they have their limitations.  When I was starting out I would watch a HUNSG.com video and incorporate everything I saw.  If I saw skates threebet jam q8ss and 20bbs, I'd start doing it every time.  Videos are a great way to beat low stakes games but you'll never really succeed until you can evaluate different lines on your own.  Going back to the first question about my breakthrough, that is why I've had more success since 2013.  I got to the point where I understand how to evaluate poker for myself and I wasn't relying on copying someones style to win.

Secondly, I'd say to take your mental game as seriously as your on-the-table game.  Understand what your tilt triggers are.  Get a feel for when you play your best sessions and try to be consistent and build your day around them.  I cost myself so much money by tilting and playing when I was overtired throughout the years.

Lastly, save your roll as much as you can.  Be a professional.  Don't play mtts if you suck at mtts.  Don't load up cash if you don't specialize in cash.  Your roll is your biggest weapon in poker and you need to protect it at all costs.  Any time you're first moving up the stakes you will inevitable hit plateaus and points where you think it's impossible to win.  It's much easier to get over these obstacles if you have all your profits saved from the lower levels.  Pressure to win is one of the biggest detriments to success in poker.  

It's so random so I have no idea.  Sometimes you can get a rush and other days you can be in lobbies all day and get 50 games.  Basically I just try to shoot for 2500+ games per month when I'm in grind mode.  Fish are better at higher stakes.  It's the same names for the most part, and I've been playing some of the same recreational players for years.  They'll have a better idea how to play than some guy who deposits 50 bucks and goes to 7 dollar games and hasn't played much poker before.  Also there are more semi-reggish players at the high stakes who you actually have to play well vs to beat.  That doesn't happen at lower stakes I'd assume.

I basically listen to a lot of house or trance while I'm playing.  I'll load up a 2 hour playlist and go from there.  I like a lot of the BBC essential mixes and Above and Beyond Group Therapy mixes, but there are a lot of good mixes.  Basically I just want to put something on where I don't have to change the songs manually, and two hours is a good stopping point to regulate my sessions.  

Basically I suck grinding when I'm overtired but I still do it a lot.  That's when I tilt and do stupid stuff and hate the grind.  I can't function when I'm overtired so I'm trying to play less sessions late into the night.

I've been lucky enough to do a ton of travelling since Black Friday.  In some ways it has been a blessing in disguise.  I've lived primarily in Montreal, Rio de Janeiro, and Malta since black Friday.  I've spent a few months each in Capetown, South Africa and Barcelona.  I've also hit up live tournaments in Paris and London a few times, as well as Vegas for the world series.  I also went with some friends to Budapest which I thought was a really awesome city.  I'd love to spend more time in Eastern Europe someday, and I thought Budapest had the best looking girls of anywhere I've ever been.  Money goes way further there as well than compared to Rio which is definitely a huge plus.

My favorite city to live of the three has been Rio.  It's been a fun challenge learning Portuguese, and although I still have a long way to go I'm making pretty good progress.  I definitely can see myself getting a longer term visa and spending a lot of time in Rio.  I don't think I'm heading back to Malta anytime soon, but it's a great place to focus on the grind and there are a ton of cool poker players I've met living there that I stay in contact with today.  It's a really nice relaxing country, but after spending 8-9 months there the past three years I don't need to return soon.  Montreal is another good place to live.  I'll be heading back there in June.

Tell me a memorable stories from your travels.

The first one would definitely be getting denied entry from Brazil the first time.  I was travelling from Malta to Brazil for the first time two years ago.  At that time Europeans didn't need a tourist visa while Americans did.  I'm not the most responsible person out there, so I didn't look into it any further when my European friends told me I didn't need a visa.  I flew from Malta to Rome at noon.  When I was boarding my flight, the airline employee flipped through my passport and there was a little confusion but they let me on the plane after a few minutes.  I had a ten hour layover in Rome so I spent the day seeing some of the sights and having a good Italian dinner.  When I boarded my plane to go to Rio, again there was a two minute delay but they let me on without too much trouble.  I don't sleep on planes so I spent the flight watching movies and listening to music.  We arrived in Rio around 6 in the morning and I was ready to meet up with Helio and get some sleep.  I waited about 30 or 40 minutes for my turn to go through passport control and I quickly realized there was a problem.  The guy working customs was flipping furiously through my passport.  To compound matters, I had lost my credit card in Malta the previous week and only had 500 Euros on me which wasn't enough to purchase a one way ticket to the states.  They took me to a holding room (folding chairs and stuff, not like prison) somewhere in the airport and I waited 8 hours from which point they put me on a flight back to Rome.  When we arrived in Rome, I was escorted off the plane by police and taken in a cop car to the customs office.  The other people getting off the plane must have thought I was a drug smuggler or something.  I waited for a few hours, still with no sleep since I had left a few days back in Malta, until I finally spoke with an Italian immigration officer.  I quickly explained the situation to him, told him I was going to buy a Ryanair ticket to London where I had friends and he was happy to send me on my way.  

The worst part of this situation was that I wasn't able to get in contact with any of my friends until about two days after I was supposed to arrive in Rio.  They were dreaming up all these worst case scenarios about kidnappings and ransoms and whatnot.  Thankfully I was just back in Rome without any major damage.  I had to go back to the states and get a visa and I was able to return a few weeks later.

Started slow.  i didn't have a lot of motivation in January and February but I'm picking it up a bit now.  110k for the year.

Nothing too big, I just want to take it one day at a time and win the WSOP Main Event.