I've decided to start a blog to hopefully set some goals for myself in writing and to inspire myself to work as hard as I can at something that I feel I may have a passion for. I guess to start out I should lay down my poker background up to now.
I started playing poker when I was probably too young to even grasp the concept of gambling. I've always liked poker since I was maybe 8 years old. Through the years I've played homegames on and off and even ventured online to play with playmoney from time to time. Poker was always just a hobby to me and something I've been mildly interested in until recently.
About five months ago I downloaded Ultimate Bet. Yes I know, Ultimate bet isn't a site I should be playing on. I know about the super user problems but it's where I started and I haven't had the motivation to leave yet. Anyway, within a couple of weeks of playing I managed to cash in a Freeroll. The thing about their freerolls is they're not very generous (which I assume most sites aren't.) The one I joined had the maximum amount of entrants... 5,000. After hours of playing somehow I ended up cashing in 4th place winning a grand total of $4. Even though it was only 4 bucks somehow it was a huge satisfaction to me to beat out a field that big and come away with free money. With my enormous, newlyfounded bankroll i began to play fifty cent, ten person sitNgo's. Somehow I donked my way up to about $10 which was also about the time I found FTR.
I began reading each and every article in the poker strategy form on sitNgo's. I quickly realized the debth poker had to offer. Poker is such a simple game in appearance but beneath the surface is a complexity I could never have imagined. I was hooked. I started reading everying I could find on SitNgo's. I bought the book Sit 'n Go Strategy by Colin Moshman and read that as well. After about a two months I was still obsessed with learning about poker but quickly learning that Sit 'n Go's were more about volume and repitition than solid ABC flop turn river poker. Its a Push Fold Strategy that may hinder real poker learning. Thats when I decided to switch to cash games.
By that time I managed to get my roll to about $100. I switched over to $2NL cash games and started in on my reading again. For the last two months I've read every post in the 6 max section of FTR as well as some other forums that I'm not as partial to as I am FTR. As of today I've grown my BR to $267 and am now playing $10NL. Here's my first 6k hands of 10NL:
http://i387.photobucket.com/albums/o...nful/graph.jpg
At about hand 3,000 I changed from a LAG opening range to a TAG opening range. I think the way my graph has progressed since then has been better.
I'm much more excited about playing cash than I was Sit 'N Go's. I feel like there's more money to be made, more to be learned, and it's possible to progress much further. To end this opening post I'd like to list some short term and long term goals I have for poker.
Short term:
-Play 15,000 hands of poker in the month of November. As of now I'm 3 tabling. At about 90 hands per hour per table I need to put in a total of 55 hours of poker time this month. That's 13 hours per week. Well within reach as I only work a part time job.
-Reach 25NL. I need to get to $500 in my roll to have 20 BI's for 25NL. Hopefully if I stick by my 15k hands of 10NL I'll be able to reach 25NL by the end of November.
-Read Doyle's supersystem. I bought it right when I first started with Sit 'N Go's but Haven't read it yet.
Long Term:
-My main goal is to reach 100NL. Of course one day it'd be great to get beyond that but for now I believe 100NL is well within my reach. I look at earnings graphs of 100NL 6max players and it's honestly inspirational. To be able to suppliment my income playing poker at a decent hourly rate would be amazing. What a wonderful world we live in that someone can play something as fun and challenging as poker and actually make money at it.
Anyway, that's it for now. I'd like to continue to post graphs of my progress and hopefully I'll be able to do that when I break down and buy Hold'em manager. I have 5 days left in the trial and after that I'm going to have to make a bit of a purchase.
Thanks for reading, any comments or suggestions are always appreciated. I look forward to hopefully becoming a member of the FTR communtity.
