It’s Sunday again, which means throwback time. A few weeks back, I told you the first half of my poker story — the rakeback grind, the volume trap, break-even poker with bonus income keeping me alive, and the move to Italy. Today I’m telling you how it ended. And the ending is the part nobody believes: I quit right after my most profitable year, walked away from the game at my absolute peak, and never sat down professionally again.
This is the story of the four years where I finally got good — and why getting good made it easier to leave. Though “leave” is the wrong word, really. I never stopped grinding for an edge. I just stopped doing it at a poker table.
From Grinder to Player
The first years of my career, I was a volume machine. Mass tables, farm the rakeback, survive the variance. It worked, but it had a ceiling, and I was pressing my face against it.
Somewhere in 2013, I made the first change: I left the rakeback grind behind and cut down my tables. Fewer games, higher quality decisions. Money-wise, honestly, it looked similar at first — maybe $8-10k a month, in the same range as the bonus-grinding days. But the life was completely different. Less draining on the brain. And actual winning days, instead of the endless break-even stretches and the downswings that come baked into a break-even game. I was finally playing poker instead of surviving it.
Then, in late 2014, the second wave of changes turned a better life into a bigger one. Six tables maximum, no exceptions. A seating script for game selection, so my software found the juicy tables before anyone else sat down. Multiple sites at once, because the good games were scattered and I wanted all of them. And hand data bought from some Russian guy on Skype — millions of hands to analyze opponents and feed my seating script, so it didn’t just find good tables, it found the weak players specifically.
I also started working with a mental coach around that time. That’s a story that deserves its own Sunday, so I’ll park it here.
Did the second wave work? I have the receipt.
That graph covers roughly one hundred days in the autumn of 2014: just over $100k in profit. For the poker nerds reading — the green line is net winnings, the blue line is money won at showdown, and the red line is non-showdown money, which includes all the blinds you post, so it almost always points down. What matters is the green one. From break-even grinder to $8-10k months to that. Watching the line climb like that was a completely new feeling.
The stakes climbed with it. In 2014 I was playing 3/6 up to 5/10. Through 2015, mostly 5/10. By 2016, 5/10 and 10/20.
The World Tour Years
Here’s the part that made it special: I did all of this while living everywhere.
Between 2014 and 2016, home was Medellín, then Chiang Mai, then Costa Rica, then Rotterdam, then New Zealand. A few months here, a few months there. Grind poker, live in poker houses with other players, travel, soak up new cultures, and eat some of the best food on the planet.
People say you only realize the best time of your life after the fact. Not me. I knew it while I was living it.
The Costa Rica chapter shows what the rhythm looked like. We rented that house I found on Airbnb for three months and had a chef cooking lunch and dinner every single day. My routine: up at 5 AM, run — five, ten, sometimes fifteen miles, I was training for a marathon. Breakfast. Play poker. Chill in the pool. Play more poker. Eat lunch, and done for the day. Afternoons were for exploring the area and surfing.
About that marathon: in 2015 I ran my first one, in Amsterdam. I hadn’t run in four years, but I was an avid runner before, so I bet some friends $5k that I could finish under 4 hours and 15 minutes. Then I trained for four months and crossed the line in 4 hours flat. Banked the money. Some bets you make because you already know the answer — poker teaches you that one early.
New Zealand brought the other kind of bet — the dumb kind. The bungy jump in the photo was the sensible activity that trip.
The one that almost killed me had no cord. I jumped off a bridge into a glacier-fed river — literally melted ice streaming down from the mountains. The cold shock hit and my muscles started cramping mid-swim, while I had to swim upstream to reach safety. I made it to shore on pure survival willpower, puked my guts out, and passed out for a good hour. Dumbest thing I’ve ever done. The guy who wouldn’t play seven tables because it diluted decision quality jumped into ice water without a second thought. Risk management is apparently a professional skill, not a personality.
The Quiet Second Bankroll
While all of this was happening, something else was growing in the background.
I made my first Bitcoin buy in March 2013, at $44, and kept stacking on the way up. The core stack I never touched. But I wasn’t asleep on crypto either — I sat somewhere between a HODLer and a guy hunting small cooks wherever they appeared. I mined Dogecoin in 2014. I lent coins to margin traders on Poloniex and collected the interest. Making trades here and there when an edge showed itself, plus one or two plays the old-timers might recognize. What I never did was day trade. Honestly, those days weren’t like today anyway — there was no daily cook to chase. Opportunities came a few times a year, not a few times before lunch.
So the second bankroll grew two ways: the untouched core doing its thing, and the small plays stacking on top. Every once in a while I’d check the price mid-session and realize my net worth had grown more that day from coins I wasn’t touching than from the tables I was sweating on. That does something to your head. The poker graph took everything I had — study, discipline, scripts, coaches — to point upward. The other line went up while I slept.
I didn’t act on that feeling for years. But it was planted, and it grew right alongside the stack.
2016: Everything Comes Together
Then came 2016, and everything I’d built over the previous two years clicked into place at once.
The mental coaching from 2014 and 2015. The quality-over-volume discipline. Getting deep into solvers through 2015, improving some part of my game every single day. The seating scripts, the bought data, the multi-site game selection — always in good games, always with an edge, never donating to tables I didn’t pick.
No single trick made 2016 my most profitable year. It was the compounding. Every skill I’d stacked since tearing down the volume grind paid out in the same twelve months, at the highest stakes I’d ever played.
And that’s exactly the moment I decided to leave.
The Decision
The plan was a gap year. Twelve months of pure travel — the reward for the grind, with a few years of travel already under my belt and a serious appetite for more.
I knew precisely what I was giving up. Walking away from the tables after your best year means leaving real money behind, and the poker brain in me could calculate that number to the dollar. I didn’t care. I was making good money, I loved to travel, and you’re only young once. Fuck it. Let’s do it.
The honest plan was to come back. Take the year, see the world, return to the tables refreshed. That’s what I told myself, and I believed it.
The Year That Never Ended
You know how this ends, because you’re reading it on the website that ended it.
The travel year delivered — 22 countries, every continent except Antarctica. Don’t worry, I fixed that in 2018 and ticked the last continent off the bucket list. And somewhere in the middle of it, with too much time on my hands, I found a familiar shape: free money sitting on the table for anyone willing to put in structured effort that most people couldn’t be bothered with. Crypto projects were handing out tokens to early users. So I started farming airdrops to boost the travel budget — and recognized the game instantly. It was rakeback all over again. A grind with positive expected value, ignored by the masses, perfect for someone who’d spent a decade doing exactly this kind of work.
The poker player in me couldn’t leave an edge like that alone. That little farming habit became AirdropAlert. The site grew while I traveled — and so did everything else, because 2017 was the year my quiet second bankroll stopped being quiet. The crypto portfolio exploded during that run, and by the time the year was up, my net worth had doubled.
Going back to poker made no mathematical sense anymore. More importantly, it made no emotional sense. The game had given me everything it had to give: a decade of freedom, the world tour, and a skillset that turned out to be perfectly shaped for the next game. I never really left — I just changed tables.
So I never returned. Well, not for real anyway. Sometimes for fun, like at the WSOP. But that’s another story.
Final Words
People quit poker for two reasons, usually: they go broke, or they burn out. I did neither. I quit because I found a better game to farm.
That’s the real arc of this story. I didn’t retire from grinding — grinding is just who I am. I spotted a fresh edge, in a young market, with almost no competition, and I did what a decade of poker trained me to do: I moved my chips to the best table in the room. Bankroll management became risk management. Game selection became market selection. Farming rakeback became farming airdrops. Same player, new felt.
The kid grinding rakeback in 2010 would never have believed how it ended. Peak year, best stretch of my life, and I walked. No regrets. The tables are still there. The window I jumped through instead? That one closed behind me, and I made it out just in time.
Funny detail to close on: I actually blogged about the decision back then. The post “Life after poker starts today” still exists on the Wayback Machine. I used to own that blog site — then forgot to renew the domain, oops, and a domain sniper took it in 2023. So the only copy of my own goodbye letter to poker lives in an internet archive. Somehow, that feels fitting for these Sunday throwbacks.
Want more stories from the early days? The full collection lives in the Morten crypto archives.
