On Wednesday, Full Tilt revealed that it had signed its first-ever Player Ambassador. Marc "PlayinWitDreams" Kennedy, a UK-based online grinder who has played professionally for several years winning hundreds of thousands of dollars, will help Full Tilt bring in new players by writing articles and blogs on poker and game strategy. In addition, one will be able to follow him on Twitch, a streaming site that has become very popular in the poker world in the past couple of months.
"We are pleased to announce we have signed Full Tilt player Marc Kennedy as our Player Ambassador. Marc's addition to the team is an important one," Full Tilt's managing director Dominic Mansour said in a press release. "While the focus is moving towards reshaping online poker to suit more recreational players, we realise the importance of having ‘a Man on the Ground' . Marc will help us improve our online poker experience through his love for the game, passion for product and his understanding of customer issues. We look forward to working with Marc to help make Full Tilt Poker a better place for everyone to play and players will be able to keep in touch with Marc through his blog and regular Twitch broadcasts."
Kennedy posted the following blog after his sponsorship had become official.
My Story - by Marc Kennedy
If you don't play the highest stakes Rush poker games and don't spend a lot of time on the 2+2 forums you may well be wondering who the hell is this guy that Full Tilt just signed and what makes him so special?
Well to be honest there isn't much that makes me special, I don't have any WSOP bracelets or major live tournament scores and I've never even made a final table of a big Sunday tournament. I started out in poker around 2007 playing free to play pub league poker in Perth, Australia. I was born in England but moved to Perth after falling in love with the country on a gap year and decided to stay in Oz for University. I had a very quick progression in poker going from the pub league tournaments to cash games at the local casino and then

to dabbling in online MTTs at various sites all in the space of about 6 months. I was in the final year of University and about 8-9 months into my poker adventure when I had a weekend that would change the course of my life forever. I deposited $850 on Full Tilt and using exceptional bankroll management decided this was my time to take a shot at online cash games. I sat in 2 x 400nl full ring cash games, buying in for the full 100bb on each table. Within an hour or two I was up a few buy-ins and my confidence level soared. I quit those two games and bought into 4 x 400nl FR games, my streak continued and by the end of the evening I was playing at least 6 tables on my tiny laptop screen and was up at least a few thousand dollars.
After a good night's sleep I came back the next day with my winnings and repeated the process, buying into as many 400nl FR games as I could fit on my screen and I just played and played and played. The next few days I did nothing but play poker and at the end of it I was up something like $12-$15k. I had a bankroll!
Looking back now I can see how hot I ran during that time but in the moment I felt unbeatable, like I understood the game better than anyone at the time and I knew that I had found my calling. I was supposed to become a stock broker or something similarly mundane but not anymore, for the first time in my life I had a true passion for something other than beautiful women and nights out with my mates! I read every book I could find, every hand history that got posted on the online forums - I spent more time in the following months thinking about poker than I had ever spent on one topic in my life.
I ground my way up to playing as high as 2000nl and 5000nl full-ring and then Black Friday hit and the Americans left and full-ring poker took a huge hit in liquidity, much worse than any other format of NL. It wasn't too bad at first but I could see it was a dying game online and I knew I had to move to 6-max. I felt like such a noob in those games, the aggression level was like nothing I had ever seen before and I struggled to get a grasp on the format. It took me probably about a year before I felt comfortable in the 6-max games. The next few years in my career were fairly unremarkable I was making a very good living grinding my way through at mid-stakes. It wasn't until Full Tilt announced they were going to run the Blackcard competition that things changed for me.
When you start out in poker you pretty much have two dreams - win the WSOP Main Event and get a Pro sponsorship with one of the big sites. Most people realise fairly quickly how unlikely it is you'll ever win the Main no matter how good you are and being a male, English, mid-stakes cash game player with no major tournament scores I had given up hope of getting a deal with a site as well. So when Full Tilt announced the Blackcard Pro Competition I knew this could very well be my one and only shot at getting signed and I wasn't about to let it slip through my fingers. I felt the passion that I had when I first found poker build inside me again - I was a man on a mission and nobody was going to get in my way - this was my time.
I dedicated the next 2 years of my life to the Blackcard Competition, my then girlfriend and now wife quit her job to cater to my every need so that I had nothing to do except play poker. At times I was working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week to stay on top of the Rush-High leader board. I went on to win that category five consecutive times and when Full Tilt decided to end that promotion recently I was able to retire as the undefeated champion of the Rush-High Category. It's an achievement that I am incredibly proud of because I know I pushed myself to a level, that in all honesty, I didn't know I was capable of until the situation arose. It's hard to say I enjoyed that time of my life, I was pretty miserable a lot of the time due to the insane workload I was putting myself through. I knew, however, that it could lead on to something bigger and when Full Tilt offered me this deal to be the first ‘Player Ambassador' they have ever signed, I really felt like the sacrifices I and my wife had made were worth it.
My role at Full Tilt is not as a Pro in the traditional sense - my job is to act as a Player Ambassador and to consult on possible changes that will have an effect on players at the site. I'm here, to be YOUR voice. If you have an issue that you want me to raise on your behalf or a great idea for something you would like to see at Full Tilt, you are welcome to and I encourage you, to contact me via Twitter @PlayinWitDreams, on 2+2 where I post under the nickname Sparky999 or chat directly with me on my Twitch channel @MarcKennedy, where I will be streaming from time to time. I can't promise you that even the greatest ideas will always be implemented, as every decision has to be weighed against the cost of implementation and the developer time available. I can promise you, though, that the best ideas and the biggest issues will be voiced directly to the people that have the power to say yes and those who know me already will tell you that I am not afraid to speak my mind when I believe something matters.

On top of streaming on my own Twitch channel Full Tilt will also be hosting my channel on their Twitch site @FullTiltLive every Saturday afternoon UK time, I will mostly be streaming micro stakes Rush poker with the occasional bigger buy-in FTOPS events thrown in for good measure. The regular Saturday Micro-Rush stream time slot is designed mostly to give you guys an easy opportunity to be able to chat directly with me and not only ask questions about the stream but also give me your likes and dislikes about the site, what you would like to see at Full Tilt in the future and just generally give you access to somebody who has been ‘living the dream' for a long time so you can get some honest answers to the poker questions you always wanted to ask but didn't know where to go (or didn't want to sound stupid in front of your friends asking, because let's face it, we have all been there at some point in our poker story!). In addition to Full Tilt hosting my Twitch channel every Saturday, I will also be writing a couple of blog posts a month which you can find here . I have a few ideas about some articles I am going to write but again, if there is something you would like to see me write about, contact me and I will do my best to cover it at some point in my twice monthly ramblings.
I want to play my part in helping to return Full Tilt to being the force in the industry that it once was and to do that I need your help, support and ideas. I want to fulfil this role as best I can but to do that I need to know what you guys think, so no more being an armchair quarter-back! If you've got a good idea let me voice it on your behalf and together let's build the site that we, as poker players who love the game, want to play on at Full Tilt.
Thank-you for taking the time to read about my poker story and I look forward to being able to engage with as many of you as possible over the next 12 months.
source: http://www.fulltilt.com/blog/meet-marc-kennedy/
