Humble beginnings...

I’ve been playing this game for about a year. I didn’t know much about any forms of Poker when my friends invited me over to play some Hold’Em. To be honest, the only Poker I knew about was Video Poker. I know...

Anyways, I was pretty much hooked from the first session. We’d get together and play maybe once every two weeks, but I really wanted to play more. Enter Internet Poker. My first online experience was at PokerWorld, a really small Pokerroom that leaves much to be desired. I first dabbled with their play money tables for a while but got bored of that REAL quick. Idiots calling down with nothing just for the hell of it will do that to a man. So I stuck to my bi-weekly home games to satisfy my cravings.

I’d say the turning point of my poker education was my first live tournament. Wow, was I ever out of my league. The event was huge, 200+ people, 40$ buy-in with unlimited rebuys during the first hour and a 20$ add-on at the end of said hour. To put it bluntly, I did really poorly. I was scared shitless. Was dealt pocket aces on my first hand, and didn’t have a freaking clue what to do with it. I limped, along with half the table and had to let it go when the flop betting just got too crazy for me. I won a few pots here and there, but got promptly dumped early in the second hour when my two pair ran into a flopped straight. Bottom line: I had work to do.

I caught my frist glimpse of televised Poker one evening after work. I was confused as all hell seeing the players being dealt 4 pocket cards. (It was Omaha you see, told you Poker was TOTALLY new to me). But I started to understand the basics of the game, you raise to make idiots fold their junk, but also to increase the value of the pots that you win. You bet or raise, to find out where you stand in a hand, etc.

After hours of research online, I read tons of great stuff about Harrington on Hold’em Volume 1 so I ordered it. Wow, talk about a cultural revolution. Reading this book made me realize one thing, learning this game is easy, but being really good at it is a completely different animal. I read the damn thing three times from cover to cover in the span of a week. I was now hooked. I needed to play to apply the stuff that I had learned.

In early August, I returned to PokerWorld and played their daily freeroll. I was doing okay, didn’t win anything, but I was 100X more aware of what the hell was going on in front of me. I was no longer a doofus when I sat down at a table. I finally decided to bite the bullet and deposit 20$ on Pokerroom, a site used by one of my friends. The 1$ tournaments and the freerolls were fun, but that’s not really a way to build a bankroll, these things usually have over 1000, sometimes 2000, entrants and they’re mostly crap shoots. I blew through my first 20$ deposit in about two weeks.

To make money at this game, you have to put in hours, you have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and do some dirty work. You have to grind. So grinding I did. Lots of it. I redeposited 40$ on Pokerroom and started playing the 0.25$/0.50$ limit tables. I would later find out that I was ridiculously under-rolled to play at this limit, but I didn’t know squat at the time. I managed to run my 40$ up to about 100$, only to be introduced to some bitch called Variance who brought me all the way down to 15$. The upswing of variance procedeed to catch me by the balls for a little while and I pulled this shit back up to a little over 200$. I then took 2nd place in 1$ tournament for a cool 186$ payout (a huge amount at the time) and I was well on my way. By the end of the year I was up to 2 grand. Thing is, to get there, I chased lots of bonuses and put in lots of hours. I was burnt out on the game, and I had to quit for awhile.

I came back in mid-January to play some 2-4$ LH and I ran into my first serious downswing - 150BB over a span of 15 000 hands. To say that it sucked would be an understatement. My sets would get crushed by bigger sets or runner runner straights, flushes, etc. I ran nut full houses into quads twice and the biggest and baddest of them all, my flopped quad Kings got annihilated by a runner runner straight flush. These things are usually temporary and I finished the month of February on a high note. As a result, my bankroll is now sitting at an all-time high, an inch over 3K.

From here, I just want to keep padding the roll and moving up in limits. I will now be moving permanently to 3-6$ full ring. I also want to play some other games, mostly Stud and Omaha Hi/Lo. My first six months of playing online were amazing and I’m hoping the next 6 will be just as good, if not better.