First Blog!

So after seeing so many people(chiefly among them poker players) offer their two cents to the world, I have decided to chronicle my own musings on poker, life, and everything in between. Mostly my adventures of trying to come up through the poker ranks from seemingly nothing and actually make some good money at this hobby I spend so much time playing.

A little (ok probably a lot) about my poker life thus far: I started playing poker, as many people did, after the "Moneymaker" boom. Started playing with friends in college home games and immediately thought I knew everything about it. I mean how hard can it be really? Two cards down, five cards up, best hand wins! Little did I know that was only the tip of the iceberg. Eventually I found there were actually books on this game of No Limit Hold Em (NLHE) that offered up mathematical backing and also strategic play. Perhaps this simple game was not so simple after all. Good thing I was studying mechanical engineering so the mathematical parts came semi naturally. The bluffing and timing however left something to be desired.

Well after about a year of home games one of my good friends introduced me to online poker, specifically PartyPoker which at the time was still US friendly. Now I could feed this growing addiction whenever I wanted from anywhere. The discovery of single table Sit N' Go's (SNG's) was immediate. So I deposited my first $50 as most players do and never looked back, until the government decided to pass the midnight legislation known as the Unlawful Internet Gamine Enforcement Act (UIGEA). That's a whole separate topic, the likes of which I will not get into at this time. I had some moderate successes over the year and a half on PartyPoker, even racking up a $2500 score on a $20 Multi Table Tournament (MTT). Most of the money I was winning was still coming from home games though as my friends all decided to take a much more recreational route with the game where I actually chose to study it.

Well after withdrawing all my money from PartyPoker, I eventually moved onto FullTilt and immediately thought with one decent score under my belt I would crush any game. Boy was I wrong! The play had elevated to a much higher level and I soon went broke with the money I had deposited. This was where I finally learned a thing or two about bankroll management and not to "let it ride" on a buy-in that would cause me to go on tilt and then go broke again. I deposited a small amount back on Fulltilt and have been playing with that ever since, although I don't play there much anymore.

It was at this time I started to take notice of a lot of players that were making not only a living, but six figures plus each year. I decided to try to learn from them by watching the games they play and try to pick up any information I could. I heard rumors circulating about Annette_15 and how she started from absolutely nothing on Pokerstars to grind up to crushing the biggest games online. All without even being old enough to set foot into a casino. So I decided to start my own conquest of generating a bankroll from nothing on Pokerstars as well. Keep in mind my volume of play was not even a spec compared to some of the biggest players, but hey I had nothing but time. I found a site, Railbirds.com, that sponsored daily freerolls on PS and FT and started to grind them a bit on Pokerstars as well as the daily round 1 freerolls they offer there. This caused me to also expand my knowledge of all the games including Razz, Stud, Omaha, etc.

Well eventually I had accumulated enough to start playing the 10 cent 360 man turbo's on Stars and would have a cash here or there, but never really ran final table deep. It was at this time I started playing Limit Hold 'em (LHE) cash and Limit Omaha Hi/Lo cash at the .01/.02 level. I would usually flip flop my sessions and pretty soon I was on my way up to the $20 bankroll mark. Keep in mind all that from absolutely nothing. I started to throw in the .25 45 man SNG's and still grinding the .10 360's still with not much success, but enough to grind my bankroll up and down around the $25 mark. Again, most of my time was spent railing top pro's to pick up anything that would add value to my game. At some point I also started to throw in the daily .10 Turbo, .25, and .50 MTT on Stars when I could. Had a few deep runs in the .10, but with 5k plus fields it truly is a lottery at times. Another topic for another day is how donkey's just have no respect or sense of trying to actually play a good game, and thus are so easy to exploit.

Finally the day came when I scored in a .10 360! I made probably the best comeback of my poker life, being blind all in with about 36 people left to come back and win the whole thing! That padded my bankroll by $8 off $ .10 which wasn't bad, but more importantly put me on a much more motivated path. I decided to start to grind the .25 45 man's as my primary game and throw in the daily .25 and .50 when I could. Progress was tough for awhile as I grinded up and over the $40 mark, but once there I decided I would throw in a $1 SNG for every three .25 45's I played. All of this up to this point took me through most of 08 and 09 playing and working a full time job, sometimes 16 hour days. The lack of volume definitely made progress slow.

So leading up to today, towards the end of 09 I finally got over the $50 mark and started to throw in more $1 games with a lot more volume into 2010. I have been crushing the $1 SNG's so far this year and have more tournament leaderboard points (TLB) this month than probably half of last year, and more games played than any other month for me. Still have a few days left in January too. All part of my goals for this year to increase my play a ton and actually start to make some money here. To date I have eclipsed the $110 mark in almost 600 games played. Still a very small sample size with no significant downswings, but that equates to about .18 per game played. I'll start to feel better once I eclipse the 2k games played mark. Check Sharkscope.com for stats.

Anyway that's just a brief history of my poker life to date, in future posts I will try to cue in on some of my goals for this year, my thoughts on improving my game, and just random thoughts on life in general. Hopefully they won't be nearly as long winded as this post, but I can make no guarantees! :) Thanks for reading!