Operation: Finding my legs again...

1st of october this year I quit my job. The plan is to move down to Thailand and work as a dive instructor and play poker on the side. I've been playing for a year, and had finally started getting even as of may. From then on it's been up and down, not losing badly, but steadily going down. I started to wonder if this poker thing really was for me after all.

November was a miserable month for me. I started out with 4000 dollars in my BR after some losses right at the end of october, but the RB came and made up for it. I decided to withdraw 1000 and continue playing at 200NL with 3.000$, I mean, 1000 $ more or less???

I started out fine, won 1000 $ in the first week, thinking 'this is good, I know this shit now'. Then something broke. For one week solid it seemed I couldn't catch cards to save my life, I felt kicked around by everyone and went on tilt time and time again, although I told myself I wasn't. Around the 20th I realized my BR was so far down I couldn't carry on at 200 NL and went down a level to 100 NL, although I probably should have gone even lower considering where my roll was. But things went better there and i made 600 $, putting me in at 1500 $. Still, I lost 1.500 total over a month and I want that to change. So, here are the goals:

Drop them leaks I want to really work and identify where the leaks in my game is, including doing what I've dreaded doing: Show the gentle readers at FTR how insanely stupid some of my mistakes have been.

Work that bankroll: 3000 $ at the end of the month.

Stop being stupid: I'm gonna stay at 100 NL, no matter how much it seems to me that
a) there seem to be the same players there as in 200 NL
b) everytime I take down a nice pot in 100 NL I think 'damn it would be good if I'd done this in 200 NL, I'd made twice as much money'
c) surely, I can't be beat? Anyhoo, it's only 20 $to call, giving me 4 to 1 that my 2nd pair is good, coz this guy is definitely bluffing. No way he has that ace even though he raised the pot from SB and bet throughout.

Make ground rules. I'll set myself goals for sessions and stick with them. For a while it used to be '200 dollars per session', now I'm going to work more along: 'Play 2 hours with a good break after the first hour. Stop playing after 2 hours with a 30 min grace period if, and only if, I'm still winning. Stop playing anytime I'm down 100 $ and take a good break.'

Share it: That's this one. Talk about the ups and downs and analyze them. Post hand histories regardless of embarassing mistakes and absorb the advice given.

Now, one major leak I've already spotted: my stats for 200 NL for november read: 25/12/2. 100 NL limped in at 22/12/3. For this first day of December it reads at 19/11/2 and a plus of 200 $. Tighter, captain, tighter.

So, as of 1st december 2009: BR $1600

Sorry to be harsh, but with $1600 you should not be playing 100NL.
Check here: http://www.pocketfives.com/poker-art...gement-2425952

Hm. According to that article, I guess you are right. I've always figured having around 20 buy-ins is good, and yeah, I admit 16 buyins is a bit lower. The thing is that I do have the money, only in my bank, not on the poker site. Does that qualify as a bankroll? It's basically money that I don't need now, but I rather have them there than on a pokersite.

woah. Even if ur just playing recreational poker and messing around, you shouldn't have such a liberal bankroll management system, your asking to go broke. From your story it looks like your going to be a little more on the serious side, so you should really consider being over rolled rather than playing so under rolled.

Originally Posted by fumblewumble

Hm. According to that article, I guess you are right. I've always figured having around 20 buy-ins is good, and yeah, I admit 16 buyins is a bit lower. The thing is that I do have the money, only in my bank, not on the poker site. Does that qualify as a bankroll? It's basically money that I don't need now, but I rather have them there than on a pokersite.

It really depends. If that is money set aside JUST for poker BR then yea I guess it can count. I would try to avoid this and just use whatever I have in my pokersite account as my bankroll. Just hop down to .25/.50 and play a few thousand hands and you should be rolled for 100NL in no time. Plus the games are softer at .25/.50.

All righy then. Guess I''m heading down a bit then, see what lies waiting there. Thanks for the advice. Guess we can change one of the goals over to 'play only 50NL'

I got the money, yeah, but truth is I don't want to 'spend' it on poker. Nice to have on a rainy day

Another thing: Is the need to have such a large bankroll dependent on multitabling? At the moment I only play max 2 tables at the same time, as I find it hard to keep up with more...

You should come into #flopturnriver. Also L_Clan, why are you not in irc!?


http://www.flopturnriver.com/phpBB2/...08-t67665.html

All right. Dropped down to 50NL, a strange experience. One of the reason I went quickly up to 100 NL about 8 months ago was that I had problems relating to the sums at 20 NL as money. Having a decent income I often found myself doing stupid calls based on the thought of 'sheesh, it's just 5 $ to call all in,I might get lucky'. As I started playing 100 NL I realized that any loss here would hurt my wallet more, so I tried to find out *how* to play instead of just getting lucky. Which lead me to FTR forums, amongst other learning tools. Anyhow, my first sessions in 50 NL started okayish, won plenty smaller pots where I used position to steal, but also got maybe a bit too cocky when some players easily let me roll over them, but others apparently saw through this and used it against me. After one questionable push (posted over in shorthanded) and one suckout where i flopped the set, but vill caught his kings set on the river I was down 120 bucks. Not the best of starts.

After that session I perused through the videos on this site and watched the ones dealing with SnG's and MTT's and suddenly got an urge to try that for a spell, dropping cash games for a few. Somehow BJaust and Ellipsesjeff managed to give me a new insight into these games and I decided to try them out. If it was just 'beginner's luck' or what I don't know, but yesterday I placed 18th of 500 in an 25 $MTT, netting 188 $ (one buyin only ), busted out of 2 others, won 3 $20 SnG's while busting out of 4, ending my bankroll for the day at 1710. Not too bad, but I spent a lot of time playing those tourneys, so it's not as profitable as cash games can be. But it was fun doing something other than cash since I've had problems there lately, gonna be tourneying today as well