Poker News Daily: How did you get started in poker?

Fitzgerald: When I was 16 years-old, I saw some kids playing at my high school. I didn’t know if a flush beat a straight when I first sat down. I was a broke kid. My family didn’t have as much money as other people in the area did. The first day, I made $10 and was instantly addicted. I read every poker book that I could and played in every home game in Seattle.

A friend of mine got an account online. His father let him use his credit card and I started playing. I could only play when he wasn’t playing, which was after 9:00pm on school nights. Sometimes, I’d be playing until 2:00am or 3:00am and then go to school at 7:00am. It probably screwed me up in high school, but it worked out.

After that, I was living in Seattle and working as a security guard. I’d sleep through my job and then come home and play poker for eight or ten hours per day. The first month that I did that, I made $7,000 as a poker player and $1,200 as a security guard, so I put the money into savings and tried it out. That was in 2006. Now, I’m traveling the world playing poker. It’s been a fun ride thus far.

PND: Where is your favorite place to play a live tournament?

Fitzgerald: I really hate the Turning Stone area. There’s nothing to do out there, but the tournament structures are very good and the staff is very nice to us. As far as how enjoyable the city is, I’d say the Philippines or Korea. Italy was really interesting and Ireland was also fun.

PND: You’re widely regarded as one of the top poker authors in the world. What inspires you to write articles on poker?

Fitzgerald: I find that a lot of poker players aren’t great at articulating their thoughts. I am a younger guy and we focus a lot on how to play the game of poker. We struggle at managing our emotions and our money because there really isn’t a lot of literature on it. The literature I have managed to find is pretty horrendous.

A lot of poker players struggle with self-discipline and that’s something I’ve really tried to enforce in my writing. That’s something I’ve wanted to write about. I think there’s an avenue there as far as writing goes and I’ve done that.

PND: What about being a cash game player helps a person when they play tournaments?

Fitzgerald: One of the things that I struggled with as a cash game player before I became a tournament player was that I really didn’t know how to play flops. I didn’t know how to control the size of the pot well. When you’re playing 100 or 200 big blinds deep, you have to play the river and you have to play the turn. You can be a decent at cash games playing on auto-pilot, but you get good at exacting value and noticing bluffs that you didn’t notice before because the chip stacks are so shallow.

When you play in live tournaments, you find a lot of recreational players who might not necessarily grind tournaments online. You also have players with a lot of knowledge on how to play deep stacks. You can kill live tournaments if you show up, focus, take your time, and prepare well for them.

PND: One of your pet peeves is a player who berates an inferior opponent at a table. How bad of a move do you think that is?

We have to think about the poker economy as a whole. In any type of online game, there is always an elitist class that likes to rag on new players. Then, down the line, they find that not as many new players are coming in. In poker, that’s your livelihood. It could be how much money you’re making in five years. It seems foolish and backwards to me to ridicule the competition constantly. If you ridicule them about strategy, they may not have even known that a certain strategy exists, so you’ve created a better player.

PND: What advice do you have for players just getting into the game?

Fitzgerald: You have to think of poker as a profession. The phrase I’ve heard is that poker is “a hard way to make an easy living.” I think that’s true. A lot of people think I have an amazing life by getting to travel the world and play in poker tournaments. I’m very happy for that, but it’s very hard to see my family and have a steady girlfriend. If your ultimate aim in life is to be a traveling tournament professional, then you’re going to have to accept the hazards of the job.

I was never the guy who poker came naturally for. I never understood things really quickly. I was the donkey in every game I entered. The one thing I had that other players didn’t was persistence. I was constantly seeing hands, asking questions, talking about hands with friends, and trying to get better.

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