About

My name is Anthony and I am a serial entrepreneur and amateur poker player. I have played for the past 7 years or so, and my main game is Texas Hold Em.

I started out playing a weekly poker game with some guys I worked with when I lived in Maryland.  Some of us were poker junkies.  We would watch the WSOP as we played and then literally leave our home game and go to our respective homes and continue playing online.  It was there that I got the nickname “Big Slick” because of my initials (AK).

I really miss playing poker online.  There were times when I would play literally all weekend, and have 3 games going all at once. Of course, my wife isn’t so proud of me when I tell her that, although it was honing my skills AND bringing in some money, so what’s to complain about?  One of my best online poker runs was taking $1 and building it up to over $700, by graduating from $0.10/$020 games up to the $2/$4 games. That was fun. I remember doing this while hanging out ay my then girlfriends (now wife) place playing while she was finishing her Masters degree.  My business was doing well back then which afforded me a fair amount of free time (I was actually spending lots of time traveling between MD where I owned a home and AZ where my girlfriend lived.)

In addition to home games and online play, our (East Coast) poker crew took the drive to Atlantic City about once per month where we played Hold Em at the Taj Mahal. I did ok, as long as I had time to grind it out and not get impatient.

I have also played in several small tournaments in Las Vegas and have had some successes at the daily Binion’s Tournaments as well as the daily SouthPoint Tournaments.  The biggest event I have played in was the US World Poker Championship in 2005 in Atlantic City (I did not place… it was just a bad day of cards.) The most disappointing tournament was when I flew to Ohio to play in a tournament with one of my close friends (John). It was only disappointing because it was my mothers birthday and I wanted to win for her. The fun part of the trip was asking a random woman out on the plane who turned out to be a pretty important foreign government official (and later became acting Ambassador for her country).

Before I met my wife, I was seriously considering moving to Las Vegas to play semi professionally. I was hoping that John would go with me so I’d have some company.   I was just looking for a change, but I found that change in Phoenix instead where I came to invest in real estate, but met my wife instead. The good news (pokwer wise) is that we have casinos here in AZ. When I first moved here, I would play about once a week and I told my wife I would play until I lost. One night, I had a bad run of cards and could not pull it out.  That happens, but I was true to my word and I stopped playing.

Truth be told, I don’t have lots of free time because I run a thriving Internet Marketing company, but I have to say every time I watch the World Series of Poker on TV I get stoked, so it’s now my time to step up and play. I am one of those guys who can just watch it for hours on end… which is the right thing to do if you are going to know your opponent.

Hope to see you at the table soon!

~ Big Slick