Originally Posted by
NickyPipes
Last night I had to make a late night drive down to Miami to meet some associates, along the way I was feeling reflective, reminiscing about my journey.
I was born in a gutter in Key West. My mom and dad were never together really, sometimes I would spend time with one, sometimes another. My mom stays in the Keys and my dad was here, there and everywhere. As I got older, I started tagging along on more “work trips” with my dad. He was a road man and I have great memories of the all characters he associated with. Real wise guys, tough guys, scumbags. The types you can only meet at a Marathon Key Dive bar on a Tuesday afternoon in October. They all have a story. Some will tell you they were in the CIA, some claim to be ship captains, others are just plain low life’s and their only tales are of degeneracy and the lessons that come with it. The education of Knockout Nick. My mom would mainly stay down in Key West pretending to be high society. My dad always had a lot of cash and would make sure she was taken care of, but she could spend money with the best of them while pretending our family had old money and “fit in”
When I was 15, my dad got charged with murder in a relatively well known case in Miami. He is still locked up to this day, some say he is innocent. I finished the rest of high school in Palm Beach County while living with my moms parents who are nice people who I admired they helped me a lot.
After high school, I went to a state school for college. Nothing really of note happened, I was actually always a decent student as I am a born genius but I never studied or did work. Got by wits. Mostly Bs that would have been As if I did the assignments. Who cares?
I guess one thing of note is during college I found online poker. I had played a lot of poker growing up, as my dad and his crew always gambled and played cards, so when the guys on my floor freshman year wanted to play cash games at night, I would clean their clock. Somebody asked if I ever played online and I hadn’t, but that night after the game on our floor needed I went back to my room, deposited on Full Tilt, picked the black ninja as my avatar and didn’t go to class for weeks!
First year of online poker was a wash, I didn’t have much to deposit and played micro stakes, winning a little losing a little, nothing major.
When I was 19 about to turn 20, I deposited $35 when I had less than $100 left in my bank account. Within one week, I ran my bankroll up to over $15k by winning a MTT 3 days in a row. I thought I was so rich I would retire, lol
I had some more success in MTTs and during my senior year, I was old enough to go to the local casinos and would spend every single night there playing cash. It was a soft locals joint, and I cleaned up. I really crushed it and I final tabled my first 5 live tournaments, a streak of luck that I couldn’t comprehend at the time. Suddenly, I had real money for the first time in my life.
I graduated college and didn’t even considered getting a real job. My dad never work a real job, my mom certainly never worked and nobody seemed to push me towards it. I spent my weekdays grinding cash games at the casino and would drive back to campus and sleep at this girls house and fuck her all weekend long while getting fucked up. It was the best of times and worst of times. Hoping to get 1 or 2 comped rooms at the casino a week then trash motels the other nights. The wins were glorious but the nights alone as a 21 year old after losing $1,000 and going back to a lonely scumbag motel on the side of the road at 5 at with the sun coming up was not that pleasant. Boy do I miss it though. The memories. Just writing this I can picture the feeling of those times, the smell in the air. The excitement, the joy, the depression, what I would give to feel that soul crushing depression again. Sick!
Will write more later about my 20s spent jumping around Africa, Middle East and Asia and how Pipes parlayed that into a business as a South Florida call center and email spam king.