POKER LIFESTYLE

The Story of How I Became a Poker Coach

My story starts early in 2008, when my friends at university introduced me to poker. It took me around 10 minutes to fall in love with the game, and I have never looked back since.

Tadas Peckaitis

At that time, I had no idea that there was such a big poker world outside of our home games. When I accidentally discovered online poker and played a few games, I was hooked at once. I started playing online more often and after a couple of months I was playing more than studying for class. I’ve never regretted it.

My involvement in poker started with random MTTs and few small stakes SNG games online. After seeing that I could easily make much more money playing poker online than at a student job, I started playing professionally. I started grinding sit n’ gos for a living. I was fascinated by competition and ability to beat others with my skills; this is something I enjoy until now.

Moreover, I loved the game on all levels. I could choose what I wanted to play, when to play, how to play and even how to improve. I loved that I could change my strategy vs. different players and adjust it to beat them; I even loved the studying and learning part!

I was incredibly lucky to have an opportunity to communicate with the best players in my country and learn from them. Back in 2008, the Lithuanian poker community was not even close to the size it is right now, so I had a chance to meet some of the top players. Moreover, I was even able to get some great coaching from some of those guys. Through my entire career in poker, I always had one coach or another alongside me, helping me build strategies, maintain my confidence, and give valuable tips in all areas of the game.

Coaching Offered Me Value Beyond Money

To be honest, money was not the main factor that pulled me in to poker at that time. However, making much more than my friends who had full-time jobs while simultaneously having the ability to play when I want, have the option to travel extensively and be self-employed was very appealing for a student. What else could I want, right?

Having that extra income, I started investing in some projects and dove deeply into studying and learning personal effectiveness. I spent a lot of time attending seminars, workshops, reading books and even had a coach for this. I do think this was one of the main factors that made me want to transition into poker coaching as well. I learned how to see the big picture, identify my goals and reach them. Moreover, I was a mentor in this field, sort of a life coach, and helped many students reach their full potential. I talk more about how to identify your life goals in my blog about personal effectiveness, which you’re invited to check out.

Just before starting my coaching career, I was lucky enough to play in numerous fantastic live venues and travel to many EPTs and the WSOP. I mostly played cash games but I was fortunate enough to also win a couple of tournaments from among very few that I played. I was doing very well in live games. However, something was missing. I was tired of playing 14-hour sessions, partying all the time, playing at night and sleeping during the day, and never having enough time to rest; so I decided to turn my focus back to online poker.

I was sincerely enjoying it, sustaining myself entirely from playing poker online. In short, that life looked very appealing to others. After seeing my success, a few of my friends asked me to help them improve their poker game so that they, too, could start playing for a living. Perhaps they were tired of trying to just get lucky and strike it rich at online casinos – you can check them out right here.

Anyhow, having had many coaches myself, I knew that coaching was not a joke and that it would require a tremendous amount of time, effort and dedication from me. Still, I wanted to help my friends, so I plunged into this adventure without realizing what would result from it.

After working with my students for a while, I saw a vast improvement in their games, and that gave me enormous satisfaction. I fell in love not only with the game but also with the coaching part and thought that it could be a good idea to merge these two passions together.

That’s really how it all started out. I started teaching a few players in Lithuania, and after posting my coaching thread on the 2+2 poker forums, it began to take off. Without doing anything else, I started getting new students. Perhaps this happened because I was really dedicated to coaching and genuinely cared about my students’ results. Perhaps some of my students liked the manner in which we communicate. Whatever the actual reason, word spread and I was getting more and more students. It’s likely that because all of them had such a great results, I couldn’t have been happier to be working as a poker coach.

Those feelings spurred me to my site and take my poker coaching even more seriously. That’s also how mypokercoaching.com was born. In the beginning, the site was just a simple info page with my BIO, coaching experience and a few tips. With a great deal of work and effort, however, the site grew steadily. Now, you can find many strategy tips, articles and videos up on the site, as well as poker strategy video courses. I created deep strategy guides addressing the most common mistakes poker players made, which I identified in many students while working with them over the years.

My courses allow new students to get personal coaching for a fraction of a price. They also serve my goal of helping as many people as I can. People who didn’t have the resources to get a poker coach can now easily benefit from watching my training videos.

Do not believe if someone says that games are not beatable or that you should not be playing. It is just because they are not ready to put the work to get the results that they want. Like with everything in life, to reach your goal you have to commit yourself to it. So, do not give up, study hard, play poker, and I hope to see you all soon!

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Tadas Peckaitis poker author
Written By.

Tadas Peckaitis

Tadas Peckaitis is a professional poker player, author of the free poker book “Play ‘A’ game and be the boss at your poker table”, and poker coach at mypokercoaching.com. He is also a big fan of personal effectiveness and always trying to do more. Tadas shares his knowledge about both of these topics with his […]

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