Poker is all about dreaming. There are a lot of people who dream about playing for a living and for me this was always my dream too. I started by playing in my spare time " I'd been studying computer engineering " with fake money on online poker sites. Then I deposited pounds 50 and did quite well out if it. Five years on and that pounds 50 is worth more than pounds 1 million.

Most of my income comes from the internet. When you play online you have to play in a different way " much more aggressively. And the swings can be very large. For me it is very common to lose a five or six figure sum in one three-to-four-hour session. It's a lot of money. And being a professional means you have to accept that even if you're the best player in the world " and I'm not " you're always in the hands of fate. It's a game where the luck factor is very important if you play for short periods. But in the long run you'll be successful if you are a good player.

It is very, very important to know yourself, to know when to stop. When I suffer a big loss I need to go somewhere to recover my energies. I lost a lot of money online last November. I'd had a bad session and I was down by about pounds 70,000 in three hours. I was sweating and thinking, 'What will I do with my life?' I decided that I needed a break and booked a holiday. When I came back I recovered my losses in a week. But it doesn't just hurt financially when you lose big: you also feel that you'll have to go back to the old life and the old job. But then you realise that all it takes to recover is a couple of days rest.

It's also very easy to have a six-figure win in one week. The first feeling I get after a big win is that I can become richer, that I can beat everybody and I should be on television. You feel you can conquer the world, so you start to lose touch with reality " now that poker is so popular we sometimes forget we are just poker players and not TV stars. When you start acting like a star, throwing money around, it's how most of the players lose it all.