How did you start playing poker?

I started working at a fire department and we were watching the Party Poker Millions tournament. I figured I could play that game, seeing as it looked easy. Man I was surprised at the difficulty of learning what appeared to be an easy game. A few books and a few too many hundreds later I'm starting to make some good cash.

i started out watching chris moneymaker bluff the crap out of sammy farha, and i thought to myself, that guy just won millions of dollars by being a good bull$hitt3r, and im good at bs-ing papers in english comp class at college, so i began playing poker, and studying poker, and not enough school work...i lost quite a bit in the beginning, but i was alot better at tourneys then, now im more of an all around player cash and tourneys...i still havent popped my AC cherry though, just house games and underground games...maybe this summer i'll go down nad bust out on some old timers on a holiday wknd, thats when i heard there are alot of fish there...

I also started watching poker the year Moneymaker won the world series. I realized it would never be something that I wanted to do as a career but it did look like a lot of fun. I started off by mainly playing with play money at Party Poker. I think the first site that I had money on was Paradise Poker (damn I miss that place). From there I pretty much became a freeroll chaser. After realizing the public freerolls were not worth the investment I found tournaments at Paradise Poker. They had weird names so I googled them and found the world of poker forums.

After finding poker forums I joined so many I can't even remember all the ones that I belong to. For the longest time I would join just to get the pw's. That is actually how I found this site. Then I realized that some of the forums were pretty lame and went looking for some that I felt like contributing to. Now there are only about three that I stay active in but it is where I find the majority of my poker playing from.