Full name: Zak Aaron Wray

Age: 29

Location: Teesside, England

Horoscope: Sagittarius

When started playing: May 2009

Screen names: ZakWray on Full Tilt, BOOMF on Pokerstars

Birthplace: England

Went broke on way up: Never

Secrets to success: Old-fashioned hard work and resilience

Main strengths: Attention to detail, psychological awareness

Main weakness: Playing more than 3 tables, accumulation tilt

The early days

 I actually knew very little about poker, let alone online poker or heads up. The most I'd played was the odd game round a friend’s house. I actually quit my job in a call centre in 2009 to gamble, but nothing to do with poker! It was to gamble on betfair.com! Which I had done on/off for a few years. It involved sports betting in-play on markets. Anyway with so much free time on my hands a friend introduced me to online poker. He was playing $1/$.50 HU cash. I couldn't really afford the $50 stacks then so I started messing around with heads up SNGs instead as they were more affordable! My first games were on PKR.com. I deposited $25 and started playing $1s! It was basically trial and error and I was picking up as I went along. I messed around for a couple of months and had built my roll up to around $300. I was ready to move up from the $5s to the $10s, but the action on PKR.com was so slow even at those stakes that I decided to move to Full Tilt and play the $10s from there. By now I was addicted for sure. I couldn't eat or sleep properly because all i wanted to do was play. I didn't really have a structured plan but I can just remember at the time the buzz I got from learning from at the time I know as different Villains' ranges. It was like putting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together each day.

From August 2009 I was done with Betfair and all I wanted to do was play HU sit and go's. I'd say it had quite a profound effect on my life (see here for a detailed story lol: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/26/psychology/social-not-so-side-poker...

I guess at that stage you could call me a $22 turbo poker pro lol! Which sounds ridiculous but that's the way it was. I was making around $4000-$6000 a month but I did have a ridiculous ROI of about 18% (yes games were softer then!)

That went on for a few months then I went travelling in 2010 to America/Canada. When I came back home in the June, Super Turbos on Full Tilt had already been around for a couple of months and I wasted no time in playing those. I was constantly keeping an eye out on what the current players were making and could see then it was clear Super Turbos was where the money was to be made. I basically started out at the $100s and maintained a very high ROI at those: around 6%.

2012 and present

The rest you could say was history; I took my game to the next level at around this time last year in May 2012. I had always struggled with the $200 level, because the swings there used to make me tilt too much. I took a stake with Jack "jackstack99/aisixer3jk" Ketendjian to play $200s and that went very well:

With hindsight I wish i had took out a stake a year earlier. I had failed to establish myself at the $200s lots of times but I just never thought a stake would help so much. I then went on to be staked by well known HS player Serkules. We ran terrible in the deal, but regardless it allowed me to play $500s and then $1000s regularly, which is something I'd never have dreamt about the year before, where I was glued to the $100s.

\Now I have a new deal with another Regular and I'm playing $200s-$500s everyday on both Full Tilt and PokerStars with the occasional $1000 thrown in.

They key to success

My future plan is to beat $500s for a higher winrate and to stop running so bad at them :) - and also to improve as a player. I think the key to success is to always have that hunger to play and to learn. If you are hungry to learn everyday and want to play, play, play. Then that's half the battle in my opinion. I've been going almost 4 years now and I still have the same passion, drive and hunger for the game than I did when I first started. It's a cliché but, if you want something bad enough, you can have it. You just got to want to put the work in, every day. My advice to anyone who is thinking about playing more seriously, or moving up in stakes: just work the hardest. Play the most. I'm an ordinary gambler who didn't have a clue about Poker so if I can do it, pretty much anyone can, I think. Not everyone can find that love for the game and not everyone has a high work ethic, so not everyone will succeed though.