My Story

Happy New Year!

I am a university student who has been playing poker for about a year. I started playing some 25c-50c limit holdem with a $10 deposit on pokerroom and no idea how to play the game. Like a classic rookie I played far too many hands, was very passive, and called down with 2nd best hands. In spite of all this I managed to break even for a few hundred hands (1 tabling) and I started to fall in love with the game.

After about a month, I purchased Small Stakes Hold 'em: Winning Big With Expert Play David Sklansky and read it very quickly. It completely transformed my game and I would recommend it as a first limit holdem book. I managed to grind my initial $10 up to about $50 playing 25c-50c limit.

Having played a few thousand more hands of limit holdem and about 3 months after having started playing, I decided to give no limit holdem a go. This was very intimidating for me as I had a very small bankroll (around $50) and no intention of re-depositing. I started browsing the twoplustwo forums and reading the stickies in the micro no limit section and soon moved my $50 to Poker Stars and signed up through an affiliate who was offering $50 for 50fpps and then an additional $50 for 100fpps, and so my no limit journey started.

I started off at the 1c-2c tables, with $50 in my account. I would buy in for $2 and do my best to play poker from what I had learned on the 2p2 forums. Due to a bit of luck and the softness of the games at that level, I soon turned by $50 into $80 and then managed to clear my first 50fpps bringing my bankroll to about $130. I then shortstacked 25NL for a short time, buying in for the minimum and folding all hands except for QQ+ AK just to get to 100fpps.

Once I reached 100fpps the extra $50 was credited to my account and I suddenly had around $180. For me this was a huge milestone, I had transformed $10 into a good starting poker bankroll and I thought that nothing could stop me.

I then started playing $5NL, and soon moved up to 10NL where I ran well for a while. However, I started to experience big swings. I had a couple of 25+ BI swings and my graph looked like a hacksaw blade.

It was now the summer, around June I think, and I was concentrating on exams, work and socialising so I was not playing a huge amount of poker. I was also very prone to tilt, and my poker would affect me emotionally. Seems silly now that loosing $15 would put me in a bad mood for the day, but I guess its all relative. All this meant that I was playing very little, by this time I had probably played around 10K hands of poker since the start of the year.

I didn't play much over the summer, read Harrington on Holdem, browsed 2p2, but generally stayed away from playing until September when I got back to uni. My bankroll was now about $450 and I was still playing 10NL. My game had improved hugely, but I was still experiencing massive swings and so I was eager to find leaks in my game and improve before I moved up in limits.

I dabbled in 20NL but found that whenever I moved up I would completely change my game for no apparent reason and start pulling off big bluffs and making stupid plays. This meant that every time I tried to move up, I would have to then spend a couple of weeks building my BR back up at 10NL.

Over the christmas I have not played any poker, but have read Theory of Poker (really great book) and am currently reading Professional No Limit Holdem, and of course, been browsing the 2p2 forums.

I am sorry if this story has been a bit brief and vague, but, as you will see in my next post, this blog is not supposed to be about my poker in the last year, but my poker during the next year, and I only included my poker history as a foundation for what is to come.