A question of approach

[thelipkin]

Here is a bit of about who I am and why I'm here and from that I have a question to ask.

I am 18 and have, like almost everybody my age, started watching poker last year when the WSOP was huge on ESPN. Hearing about Dave Williams winning 3.5 mill taking second place at the WSOP made me decide to make a run at playing with actual money as before Dave played poker he was a professional Magic: the Gathering player (something that is #1 the nerdiest passtime I can imagine #2 not very lucrative #3 something I, like Dave, play and have been supporting myself off of).

I went to play at a home game with about 10-12 guys who all play a lot of PP (and are all up) and have been playing for some time and I got killed. I have spent the past few months on this site lurking and have recently started posting and I have brought my 'bankroll' from the home games $20 into the black after 2 months of losing $10-15 each wednesday.

So, the first part of this post is a thank you to the board for teaching me how to play the game.

The other question is how to procede starting to play online. PP seems the fishiest to me but it also takes a significant investment ($50 is a nice chunk to jobless me, not out of the question, just a little painful) and it seems to have the highest variance. I bought into pokerroom a while ago when I didn't really know how to play because they had a $10 minimum which I could easily cover and I went down to $4 and forgot I had the account because my computer died. Anyway, this weekend I put in another $10 so I could play in a SnG and ended up playing 5-7 and ending the night at $16. Exactly even considering my whopping $2 bonus. I was up to $30 at one point but I sloppily let myself keep playing ending at about 10:00 AM.

How should I procede? How do I fend off the urge to just keep playing SnGs when I am up but it is getting freakishly late? It was partially the rush of being able to play literally 2 months of poker in one night, but I think that had I been mentally tougher I could have come out of the night halfway to staking myself at PP. How should I procede with my very tight budget?

[Legendash]

I am in a similar situation with bankroll, though i think i'm going to have to deposit at pokerstars just to play in the FTR league. With the small amount of money available you probably wouldn't mind playing smaller value SNG's, i play at VCpoker and they have 10c,25c,50c,$1,$3,$5 and up SNG's, i play 50c and $1 and have about $40 bankroll which i created from scratch so i don't know what the minimum deposit is but i would think it is less than $50.

I think one way to stop yourself playing when you are on a bad run late at night is just to keep a record of your results, once I see a big run of losses it makes it easier to tell myself that i can play better than this and i should go to bed and save my bankroll for another day.