Matt "ADZ124" Marafioti is a writing machine and he's decided to open up and share some personal thoughts and stories from his past.
Matt talks about his early runs in online poker and the reasons he decided to become a professional poker player.
just wanted to add that, after busting my tournament at Borgata I had to go back to drop off my friend’s iPhone before deciding to hop on a plane to London with Tom and Reynolds (I was not planning on going until about two hours before their flight).
Irv Gotti was low stacked and sitting in my old seat in the donkament, and the guy who two-outered me with 77 verse my AA now had all the chips.
Irv plays pretty small at Bellagio (usually 10 20) but one time before dinner I was bored and sat in the game and bluffed off like 3k into him. I then asked David the floor guy there to go get me a hundred k so I could muscle the game but had to go to dinner.
I reminded him of this and he remembered me, I couldn't help but warn him about the guy sitting two seats over. I was a little tilted so I called him Joe Cada #2. I like Joe Cada, nothing against him at all. He’s a cool guy, it’s just that I’d like to play him all day for all that cash he won anytime and stuff.
He is a good tourney regular I guess, but the main event final table just sickened me to watch. Darvin Moon ran like Jesus on water while Ivey gets three-outered for his tournament with AK vs AQ.
I am kind of an old school new generation player, my idols are the Johnny Chans, the Daniel Negreneaus and the Mike Matusows. I used to watch Mike the mouth on TV and think he was hilarious. Now I have his number on my phone and his AIM.
We've played cash a bunch together and some tournaments. It’s funny how things change. Even Hallingol, one of the best regulars on Stars in 2005-2006 stayed at my house last week in Toronto with his girlfriend. The guy is up $500,000 on me heads up but that doesn't stop me from buying him dinner.
It’s funny because he multi-accounted me too. I used to watch him play when I played 25/50 cent all the time. It’s funny how fast things can happen.
My story with poker was no one in my life believed in it, not my parents, not my friends. I used to get made fun of in high school for playing online. I squeaked my way past my last year of high school with honours but began to get heavily into poker.
My parents firewalled all the computers in the house so you couldn’t even type the word poker in. My dad was so upset when he saw 15 declined attempts to buy in for 50$ on Poker Stars. And even if I did win, which I rarely did, I would never cash out.
By the time I was 19 I was off to school with the love of my life and some great old friends of mine. Within a few weeks of being there and going out to the underage bars (as an 18 year old) one night I got into what Daniel would call "Hot-head mode".
After a bunch of shots, and because my girl was flirting with other guys, I started to pick a fight with a guy outside the bar. The next thing I knew I was pushed into the wall and six people surrounded me, including two bouncers (who were friends with the guy ). By the time they were finished I had been beaten so badly I shat myself (gross), my nose was on the side of my face and my girlfriend at the time screamed "oh my god matt your nose!".
The cops in this crooked little town took me to the hospital, but before they did they wrote me a drinking ticket, as I stood there only 18 years old, totally covered in blood with what looked like red jeans on.
I went to the hospital and they snapped my nose back into place as I screamed the F word at the top of my lungs and the two police came into the room and threatened to arrest me for swearing because there were little kids there.
They are lucky that my dad, a big businessman in Toronto, did not press charges. I had so much resentment for the rest of the year because of this. If I wanted I could have all of their legs broken in 24 hours right now, but I moved past it and was the bigger person in this situation.
After the hospital we went back to my dorm room, where usually she would complain about the brightness of my monitors and the fact I would stay up all night playing and not go to class. But tonight was an exception, my face was destroyed, my head was bruised and I couldn’t sleep.
I called my best friend and asked him to send me the 18$ he had on poker stars as I had no money to my name at the time. I started at 10 and 25 cent limits and within 1 week on my 12 inch monitor and 56k internet I had ran it up to $48,000 with only one tournament cash for $6,500. I was so proud as this was my first real run.
I felt like this justified the beating in some ways and something positive came out of it. The next week I went to 25/50 and lost it all. Back to busto, and boy did it hurt that time. I promised myself the next time I went on a run I would do something differently.
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