Stone Poker
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Prior to poker, I was in chess.
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Chess is one of the few family traditions we had and so I started playing at a young age. My grandfather was very active in my chess education and would anxiously await my coach's feedback on my progress and tournament results each week. I liked chess, but was generally more interested in the social aspect of it and lacked motivation to study. I was much more interested in playing basketball; additionally I was a ball-girl for the NBA Champion Houston Rockets and shooting around with household names of the NBA was a lot more fun than studying chess!
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I spent a lot of time in summer sports camps throughout my youth and during my freshman year at UT Dallas, I decided to organize a summer chess camp for kids. Chess had been a positive part of my life and I understood the skills I'd learned had helped me in other areas of life, so I decided to try and create a chess camp that was fun...one that kids would love going to just as much as the basketball camps I had attended only a few years earlier. Chess camps were not a typical summer activity for kids; there were some advanced camps for competitive tournament players but no programs for beginners who wanted to just learn the game and have fun. That one-week camp during my freshman year turned into six weeks of chess camps the following summer, followed by twelve weeks and six cities the summer after that. USA Chess was very successful very quickly and by the time I sold the majority of my shares in the company in 2004, it had become the premier chess camp organization for children in the country holding summer chess camps in more than 100 U.S. cities.
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While in Wilmington, DE for a chess camp during summer 2004, some of the instructors taught me how to play poker. We went to the hotel lobby area after dinner one night, found a deck of cards and collected as many $1 bills as possible. No one got much sleep much that night, I was quite enthralled with this new game.
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I continued my poker education by playing in local games and home games in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. I decided to focus on tournaments because I thought my chess background would be helpful. I traveled a bit throughout 2004 and 2005 playing various tournaments throughout Louisiana, Mississippi, Indiana and Oklahoma. I wasn't too profitable these first few years and after the 2006 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, I stopped playing poker for a while.
~~~
Some of 2008 and most of 2009 was spent traveling for live poker to Atlantic City, Barcelona, Foxwoods, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Monaco and Morocco. I also began playing online poker regularly and noticed substantial improvement. By January 2010 I was playing online tournaments full time, but on April 15, 2011 all of that came to a halt. Known as 'Black Friday' in online poker, players from the US were no longer permitted to play on unregulated poker sites. I moved to Las Vegas to play live poker full time, but eventually moved to Rosarito, Mexico in 2012 to once again play online poker. I moved back to the US in 2014 to my home state of New Jersey when online poker became regulated there. I became a Sponsored Pro for partypokerUS in 2018.
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Stone Poker Live
Prior to poker, I was in chess.
~~~
Chess is one of the few family traditions we had and so I started playing at a young age. My grandfather was very active in my chess education and would anxiously await my coach's feedback on my progress and tournament results each week. I liked chess, but was generally more interested in the social aspect of it and lacked motivation to study. I was much more interested in playing basketball; additionally I was a ball-girl for the NBA Champion Houston Rockets and shooting around with household names of the NBA was a lot more fun than studying chess!
~~~
I spent a lot of time in summer sports camps throughout my youth and during my freshman year at UT Dallas, I decided to organize a summer chess camp for kids. Chess had been a positive part of my life and I understood the skills I'd learned had helped me in other areas of life, so I decided to try and create a chess camp that was fun...one that kids would love going to just as much as the basketball camps I had attended only a few years earlier. Chess camps were not a typical summer activity for kids; there were some advanced camps for competitive tournament players but no programs for beginners who wanted to just learn the game and have fun. That one-week camp during my freshman year turned into six weeks of chess camps the following summer, followed by twelve weeks and six cities the summer after that. USA Chess was very successful very quickly and by the time I sold the majority of my shares in the company in 2004, it had become the premier chess camp organization for children in the country holding summer chess camps in more than 100 U.S. cities.
Stone Poker Room
~~~
While in Wilmington, DE for a chess camp during summer 2004, some of the instructors taught me how to play poker. We went to the hotel lobby area after dinner one night, found a deck of cards and collected as many $1 bills as possible. No one got much sleep much that night, I was quite enthralled with this new game.
Turning Stone Poker Room
~~~
I continued my poker education by playing in local games and home games in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. I decided to focus on tournaments because I thought my chess background would be helpful. I traveled a bit throughout 2004 and 2005 playing various tournaments throughout Louisiana, Mississippi, Indiana and Oklahoma. I wasn't too profitable these first few years and after the 2006 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, I stopped playing poker for a while.
~~~
Some of 2008 and most of 2009 was spent traveling for live poker to Atlantic City, Barcelona, Foxwoods, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Monaco and Morocco. I also began playing online poker regularly and noticed substantial improvement. By January 2010 I was playing online tournaments full time, but on April 15, 2011 all of that came to a halt. Known as 'Black Friday' in online poker, players from the US were no longer permitted to play on unregulated poker sites. I moved to Las Vegas to play live poker full time, but eventually moved to Rosarito, Mexico in 2012 to once again play online poker. I moved back to the US in 2014 to my home state of New Jersey when online poker became regulated there. I became a Sponsored Pro for partypokerUS in 2018.
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