I’m Richard, 27 years old and living in the Netherlands. I’m working part-time (24 hours a week) as IT-architect for a big financial company for over 10 years now. I also poker part-time and that’s mainly what this blog is about.

I have a common standard background in playing games which started with playing normal cardgames with the family, followed by Magic The Gathering which I played pretty serious for over 4 years. During my time playing Magic I also picked up cardgames like Poker (5 Card Draw) and “Zeilen”, probably something typical dutch. Next to my gaming background, I also always liked a bit of gambling, so when I turned 21 the first thing I did was booking a trip to Las Vegas.

In 2004 when I visited Las Vegas for the first time I played a bit of 7card stud, but a year later there was almost only Texas Hold’em left in Vegas. In 2004/2005 I still played mainly Blackjack and Craps but in 2006 I joined the $4/$8 and $8/16 limit cashgames in the Bellagio. When the pokerboom started in the Netherlands in 2006 I started playing more and more and could use the fact that I was already familiar with the game to my advantage.

I played little tournaments all over the place and as soon as my “local” Holland Casino offered a poker cashgame (Sep 2006) I became a regular in it. They offered €5/€10 Limit Hold’em which I played as much as I could for almost 8 months. I played a bit of Internet Poker as well, but at that moment I still preferred playing Live. After I quit a long World of Warcraft “addiction” and was tired of playing from 20:00 till 03:00 in my local Casino (combined with a normal dayjob), I started playing online on PokerStars in 2007. I liked the fact that I could stop and start whenever I wanted and play more tables at the same time. 

After getting started online, playing Full-Ring $0,25/$0,50 and moving up and down along the way, I learned to play more and more tables at the same time. I booked two trips to Las Vegas in 2008 where I played $15/$30 Limit Cashgames in the Bellagio and also played a lot more hands online that year. Looking for a change in my day to day life, I choose to start playing poker part-time in January 2009.

In 2009 I played the WSOP Main Event, where I busted day 1.  Next to the WSOP ME I hardly played any tournament poker in 2009, since I’ve now focused purely on playing Limit Hold’em.  2009 was a success, as I managed to reach my goal of 600.000 VPP, while making profit at the tables as well. I started the year playing $2/$4 and $3/$6 and I’m now playing all games up to $15/$30.

In 2010 I will probably try to reach for Supernova Elite, but for sure will play alot again. You can read more about this at the 2010 Poker Goals Page and my weekly blogs. You can also follow me on Twitter to get more frequent updates: http://twitter.com/Tzen1