The latest addition to the Upswing Poker roster of coaches began his poker journey playing heads-up for match sticks in a New Zealand tramping hut.
Then a teenager on a hiking trip, Tim Jenkins didn’t fare well in his first poker game. The match sparked a new interest in poker for the New Zealand native, however.
When Jenkins returned home from that trip, he started playing micro stakes poker online. After losing a pair of $20 deposits, Jenkins put $30 more in his account and began to take the game more seriously.
“After this point I never looked back,” Jenkins says.
Jenkins began to run the $30 into a legitimate bankroll, beginning with heads-up sit & gos online. He transitioned to 10NL Zoom cash games from there.
After initially struggling with the 10NL Zoom games, Jenkins joined Upswing Poker as a student and began to study the game more thoroughly.
“I joined Upswing in 2016,” Jenkins says. “Kept climbing through stakes until I found my place battling in 500 Fast Forward rake races on partypoker. Played about one million hands (a lot was untracked) in the last years of uni, generating a small win rate to go with huge rakeback from the leaderboard (often >100%).”
Jenkins graduated from university with a degree in physics and computer science. He chose a career path as a professional poker player, however, and crushes some of the toughest online games in the world in 2022.
Here’s a look at Jenkins’ online stats from the past 12 months:
“Growing up I was always very competitive and loved my sport but was never good enough to play at a very high level,” Jenkins says. “Poker became my arena for competition particularly after I left school and stopped playing sports.”
“The more I understood poker the more I admired its complexity and to this day love that aspect of the game.”
Jenkins brings his solver-based approach to Upswing, which aims to implement a simplified strategy to some of the game’s toughest spots.
“My studies tend to focus on describing complex spots as simply as I can with a focus on understanding (not memorization),” Jenkins says.
“I try to explain why different parts of strategies are important (in a solver) and look to build frameworks for different spots which describe how ranges should be constructed in certain situations.”
“This is a fairly unique approach to the game which allows me to describe spots simply,” Jenkins says. “Coaching for Upswing is a new and exciting challenge and I hope to explain the complexities of poker in a way that adds value to players of all levels.”
Jenkins produced six-figure winning in tracked online cash games over the previous year. The now 24-year-old crusher contends that results like his are still very much possible in the modern era of poker.
“Poker in 2022 is still amazing,” Jenkins says. “I never got to experience the true glory days of online poker but you see countless mistakes every day even playing in very competitive games.”
“Personally, I have had my best results to date this year and think that the rate at which the games are moving is often exaggerated.”
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