My journey to $1,000,000
Tags: Poker, Cryptocurrency, Financial Freedom

Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. None of you will be able to take this exact same path. All our stories are unique. This is mine. Not a native English speaker, so sorry for any grammar mistakes.

This is not a get-rich-quick story. There were periods where I worked my ass off for months. Periods were I was incredibly lazy for years.

Periods where I gained $100k’s in days and then lost it back in the span of a few hours. Times were I took a lot of risks and times when I played things very safe. Phases where I knew what to do and how to achieve it and phases where I lost every purpose I had in my life.

I’ll start off with a brief history of my background. I grew up to the lower end of your standard European middle class. My parents never struggled to provide us with housing, food and education, but we were not able to save too much besides that. When I was 16 I had about $5k to my name. Mostly savings from Christmas, Birthday gifts and Caroling.

I’ve always had a knack for business from a young age. From trading playing cards, marbles, etc. on the playground to putting my first $1,000

investment in an index fund at the age of 12. I’ve been fortunate enough to have a father who had some stocks, but was by no means an expert.

I did some student jobs during summer holidays from 16–20, which made me save another $5k. By the time I was 21 I had about $10k to my name, mostly from savings and a bit of work. I decided it was time I invest it all since I didn’t really need the money anyways. I put almost $8,000 into 5 different banking stocks. Those stocks were down 40% from their peak and financial stocks were the highest returning, safest options ever. This was in 2008 and…

I lost all of that money.

I was almost broke at 21 and barely had enough to go on a holiday with my girlfriend. I only had one year left until I would graduate university and I knew I needed to find some way to be self-employed. I always hated my student jobs and absolutely dreaded the idea of working for a boss my whole life.

Enter poker. My friends invited me to play some home games. Loved the game instantly (I always loved card games), but I was a total noob. However I am very competitive so that night I started looking for poker strategy online so next time I could crush my friends. Not because I wanted their money (although I wouldn’t say no to that) but I wanted to be the best. Then I stumbled upon some sites that teach you poker strategy. I was completely hooked. They had a special offer: if you completed their introduction course and passed their quiz, they would give you $50 to play with. For the next months I lived and breathed poker. I played hours and hours per day, watching educational videos, any type of poker content I could get my hands on.

Talking strategy with friends I made on the poker strategy forums. I climbed the limits. Started playing for $2 stacks and within months I was playing for $25 stacks. It wasn’t enough yet to justify doing it as a main source of income, but I was making $700-$1000 a month. As a 21 year old living with his parents, I felt like I was making big bucks.

However my hunger only became stronger. It wasn’t all about the money for me. It was about the game. Beating your opponents. Winning… Being the best… No amount of money could replace that feeling of successfully bluffing your opponents over and over again.

I kept being completely obsessed with the game. My university grades suffered under it and it probably was a main catalyst to me breaking up with my girlfriend. I would skip parties just so I could play more poker. One night I stayed up all night and played from 9pm to 7am, just when my dad woke up. I won my first big tournament. Entered a $22 tournament and won the first prize of $10,500. More than doubling my net worth at the time. My dad, who always thought it wasn’t anything serious, just left for work and couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. My best friends couldn’t believe it.

I asked myself: “Is this enough for me to become a professional player? Honestly… I don’t know. I only have a few months of university left. Let’s at least finish my Masters and see if my poker earnings can become more consistent.”

A few months later I graduated university (barely). Poker was going good and I was making $2k consistently, which was about the same amount I would receive as a salary if I would decide to start getting a ‘real’ job. Still I wanted a bigger safety net, but also didn’t want to get a job since I would have little time left for improving at poker. I decided to focus on poker for a few more months and see what happens.

This was probably one of the best decisions I ever made. I continued my grind. Both in terms of playing poker and working on my strategies. I kept increasing my winrate and I kept climbing the stakes. At this point I was playing for $200 stacks, 16 tables at a time. Everything was going smooth. I just needed that one month where I could say: “Ok, this is it. I am becoming a full-time professional.”

4 months after graduating that month happened. I had my best month ever. Total winnings of $15,000 in barely 25 days. Also with great consistency. I knew this is what I needed. I ended up not applying for a job (and I never did ever since).

Now, I was still living with my parents and it was time to change that. I wanted to go somewhere new, somewhere far away, somewhere exotic…

I messaged some poker friends and told them about my dream. It wasn’t too hard to find some people who wanted the exact same things. Three of us were set on the journey, we just didn’t yet know where.

One of them wanted to go to Asia. One of them wanted to go to a place with a low cost of living. I wanted to go somewhere where they speak English. So we picked Philippines.

We moved to Philippines. Rented a big mansion with a pool, employed a maid and a cook. This all for $500/month, we felt like kings. At this point I was consistently making $2-$10k/month and as most people who get a sweet taste of financial freedom for the first time in their life, my work ethic started to slack little by little. We went partying twice a week. Travelled a ton. Explored the world around us and only spent maybe 2–3 hours a day on actually grinding and improving our game.

View from Taal, Philippines

If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing. I had a great time and it’s important to not let something overtake you completely like it did to me for half a year prior to that. I needed this break, but I would never in my poker career get that initial hunger back. I had times where I worked very hard and times where I barely did anything for weeks. I had about $80,000 in net worth and I was getting too comfortable. I didn’t need this much money as I lead a relatively minimalist lifestyle. I also thought that poker would always be there for me so if I needed money, I could just go and play.

However this was far from the truth. In the next years governments started to crack down on online gambling. More people started reading poker strategy and every month it became harder and harder to make money with poker.

The year was 2013 and I finally had some money that I wanted to put into investments. Poker requires a large bankroll and only now I had extra savings that I could put somewhere. I was still hesitant to invest in stocks because of how hard I got burned in the Great Recession. Now there was this new form of currency everyone in the poker world started talking about.

It was called bitcoin... It went from $30 to $100 in just a month, what was this madness?! A new form of digital money or something? Fascinating! I thought it was too speculative, but I started going down the rabbit hole.

I was definitely hooked on the decentralized aspect of it. At that time I was thinking about gold, because of how it isn’t controlled by any government. But this? This sounded even better! One issue… the price increase was way too much, too quickly. I was going to wait till the bubble crashed and then I would scoop up some cheap internet money. Price went to $150, to $200. Oh my! Maybe I should just buy it already? No, I held firm. It will crash and yes finally after reaching $260, it dropped like a rock, almost instantly filling my bids at about $100–120. I put $10,000 in it, getting about 80–100 btc. Quite a big bet considering my net worth.

I didn’t care, I loved what it stood for. F*** the government! F*** the Federal Reserve and their bailout of the crooks that lost all my savings before!

Back to poker. I had been lazy for several months and the games got tougher. I decided to go on another intense multi-month work marathon. I played and studied all day long. I got better and better and instead of playing for $200 stacks, I was now playing for $1000, $2000 and sometimes even $5000 stacks. At this point the monetary amounts I would win or lose during one day became substantial. +$32,176 in a few days to lose -$28,239 the next were a common occurrence. Unlike some of my colleagues I was never too faced by it. This is also when I realized it wasn’t really about the money for me.

Money is a good motivator when you have absolutely nothing, but once you start having enough to meet your basic needs, it does not incentivize people much anymore. You’ll need to enjoy what you are working on.

This is what happened to me with poker. I had been playing for 7 years and I was bored of it. I had about $200,000 in savings (Made a fair bit more, but spend a lot on parties and travels).

A poker friend of mine recently got into an entire different field of work.

E-commerce. He was selling his privately labelled products to Amazon costumers and he was doing very well making much more money at this than he was making from poker. This caught my interest… Not just the monetary aspect but from a young age Iwanted to build my own company. Poker always kind of felt like a game to me and perhaps it was time for me to get more serious. This could be a way to do that.

I told my girlfriend this is what I wanted to do. She decided to also quit her job and join me in this venture. For months we went into hardcore work mode again. This drive and passion that I used to get from poker, but hadn’t been present for many years…. It was back. I went down another rabbit hole. Learning about finding suppliers. Taking samples of your products.

Redesigning them. Negotiating better product prices with suppliers, forwarders, banks. Looking at Amazon competitors, listings, reviews, feedback. How to improve on every aspect of this. How to design better products than they do. How to be able to have a lower selling price, but keep high enough margins. How to use pay-per-click ads to you advantage to net you extra sales, and so much more.

For half a year we lived and breathed Amazon. After a few months of hard work, we had our first organic sale. That feeling was indescribable. The sale was only worth $19.99 and we didn’t even have any profit at that price. But that sale meant more to me than winning a $10,000 poker hand.

We were fortunate enough that our first product took off right away. After just 2 months we had a $80,000/month in revenue (About $20k in profit). Little did we know that this would be one of our best months ever.

Now the same thing what happened to me with poker, happened again: we were getting complacent. We can just sit here all-day, becoming rich while we sleep? And the only thing I have to do is manage my inventory a bit?

At this time I should have realized that I actually did not enjoy what I was doing. We were just excited to start something new and run our own business, but we ended up starting a business that we weren’t particularly excited about. Now I didn’t realize this until much much later.

We got lazy and I was mostly to blame for that. We were making good money, more than what we needed to live a nice and fulfilling life. As I said earlier though: money isn’t a good motivator. Combine this with not actually enjoying building our company and I went through quite a dark period. I was on the verge of depression. Basically just playing video games all day (daarn you Dota!) for almost 2 years. My girlfriend was a travel blogger so we did still go on quite a bit of travels which was always nice to unwind, but on a professional level I had no ambition or any goals anymore. Even though I was financially much more successful than my peers, I wasn’t happy with life, my relationship and my work. Everything felt so dull and I knew something had to change.

For multiple reasons my girlfriend and I broke up. I didn’t want to live alone and messaged some old poker buddies to ask what they were up to. A few messages later I was on a plane to Ecuador. I was going to live together with 3 old poker buddies, one of which I knew from the Philippines. He was also really into crypto and was making his own market-making bots.

I wasn’t tech savvy enough (or interested) to start doing as well but I ended up spending a lot of time learning how to trade. Coming from a poker background, trading actually felt quite familiar. There are a lot of similarities between a successful trader and a successful poker player. This was in 2017 and crypto was booming. I was going irresponsibly long on a lot of coins. Joining several ICO’s. Some worked out really well, others went to shit or just rugged us from our money.

At this point I was probably already a millionaire if you take into account the value of the company (that we still had together). I didn’t really care. I found a new passion and was having a lot of fun exploring it.

Again it wasn’t the money per se that drove me, but this was about changing the world through technology. I wasn’t smart enough to build the tools myself, but I could put my money into the projects that I thought were revolutionary. Things were going really well. It took me 30 years to get to my first million. The second one took me, give or take, 3 months. The end of 2017 was approaching and I was longer than ever. A new paradigm is coming.

I ended up staying good friends with my ex and she asked me if I wanted to join for one of her upcoming trips. This trip was her biggest assignment to date and was planned 8 months in advance. Since we were still together when she was approached, it was a trip for 2.The destination was… Antarctica. Hell yes, I will join! This was December 2017, an infamous crypto month. We barely had any internet on the ship but I was a degen. I didn’t care. I needed to trade.

Each day we would have two expeditions. A morning and afternoon one. It usually involved wildlife and it was absolutely amazing. Probably the most special trip of my life. I love nature, hiking and this place was an oasis of serenity. But in between the expeditions, I was in our room, trading… It didn’t matter that it took me 10 minutes to place an order because of the slow internet. The markets were moving like crazy and there were insane returns to be had. I grinded my 80–100 btc stash up to 300. Reaching almost $6,000,000. Tripling my net worth in less than a month, all while I was freezing my balls off next to a million penguins. This is life-changing money. I was the greatest trader who ever lived (or so I thought), but I didn’t for a second think about taking profit.

Spending the night, camping on Antarctica

Then 2018 started and the markets started dropping. My euphoria, however, was not. I kept buying the dips, longing irresponsibly. Just a matter of time until we break a new ATH. Don’t forget, this is the new paradigm!

If you think that this idiot deserves to lose a lot of money. You are right and so he did. I lost everything back that I gained in the past months. Not only losing a lot of $$, but losing a lot of btc as well in the process.

The market dropped 85%, but I dropped even more. My crypto portfolio fell to maybe $200,000 and I fell well below 50 btc. So after spending almost 2 years full-time on trading, I managed to actually lose money instead of gaining any.

Luckily I had extra savings to fall back on and we still had our company, which we barely spend any time and effort on, but overall I was still quite healthy financially speaking.

I lost a lot of money but I gained some very important lessons as a result:

- Always practice risk management

- A $$ loss hurts much more than the equivalent $$ win

- Diversify, diversify, diversify

The last few years I have spent considerably less time on work. Hanging out with friends multiple nights a week. Focus on listening and playing music. Reading more books, meditating. Playing video games again, but more casually.

We sold our company for $200,000 in 2020 since we weren’t doing any work on it anymore. We could have gotten a lot more for it if we decided to sell it earlier, but it is what it is. I decided to put most of my savings and money I received from the company towards stocks. Mostly in the biotech, cannabis, uranium space.

Then Covid19 hit and we all had to spend more time alone again. Here I picked up crypto again more actively. I got into yield farming which honestly suits me much better. It is much less risky than trading and if you diversify in a lot of different platforms and pools, your overall risk is very low, while still making very nice yields. After yield farming I found NFT’s and that pretty much brings us back to today.

Ok this turned out to be a lot longer than I initially planned. If you made it this far, I am impressed. I left a few of my smaller ventures out since they didn’t really became a success:

- Started a yacht party business in Singapore. We rented a yacht and took care of housing and entertainment. This failed because we started with too many partners (7) and had a lot of disagreements.

- Started a Dota 2 team in Philippines. Managed a 5 person team with trainer. Took care of equipment, sponsors and tournament schedule. Failed because gaming is a very competitive business and we launched a few months before Covid, putting a halt to all tournaments.

- Started an angel investing venture in Philippines. Didn’t end up finding any potential interesting projects. Failed because I did not put in enough work to gain name recognition

- A few others that I can’t think of right now.

As promised this was my story on how I got to my first million. I could have easily gotten 50x the wealth I have now or I could have been broke. I could have done a LOT more work if I wanted to. Instead I was lazy for many years. However I am still grateful for the wealth I acquired and am happy I’ve seen a lot of the world in the process. At 30 I was a millionaire, visited over 50 countries and all 7 continents in the world.

I’ve had my ups and my downs. It’s not a perfect story, but it is mine.

Joenaes