First off, I'll say that these poker blogs that you see out there in cyber land are mostly for the person posting and those reading or following along are secondary. I don't mean that in a negative way, but there is a level of narcissism involved in something like this.
That said, perhaps there is a level of inspiration or some kind of motivation that can be passed along because of the experiences with my journey.
Poker has been a long road so far for me. It looks like my first deposit for "Real Money" play online was in September of 2005 for $100. Prior to that I played in a few home games and had various experiences with poker here and there while growing up, but there was never a time where I was realized that poker was more than a gambling game of luck.
I actually got interested in the strategy of poker because of the card game Hearts. I was fairly good at counting cards in hearts and being able to outplay them because I knew what cards they had available to play. Something clicked, and I realized that if I could do that in poker, it would be easier to beat opponents. Sure, hand reading is a basic foundation of poker, but I wasn't sure how to go about it. In hearts you begin the hand with 13 exposed cards and the information increases every time someone lays down a card, but it's not that easy in poker.
I read a few books and started to really get into researching the different strategies involved with poker. Like many people of the era that followed Moneymaker's win at the World Series of Poker, I thought that I should be playing for the "big" money by focusing on multi-table tournaments (MTT's) and 1 table sit-and-goes (SNG). One thing that I didn't realize at the time about MTT's was the amount of luck needed to get deep enough into a tournament to make a decent sized cash in comparison to your buy in. I had enough good results with minimum cashes to sustain my initial investment, and at the time, I was pretty happy that I could have this little hobby where I have the chance to make some extra money when all was said and done.
Like I said, I also played SNG's and had much better results with them, but I had absolutely no concept of bankroll management. I played $5 SNGs and looking over my history, I cashed out a couple times in that first six months. That means I was playing with less than 20 buy ins, which is probably marginal, but I was playing 1 SNG at a time and taking it very slow. The biggest issue with this is that I never progressed past the $5 SNG's, thus destroying my chance to make any "real" money.
My biggest cash at the time was at a point where I had about $70 left in my account. I was a freelance video editor in NYC, but there was a serious lull in the jobs that were out there, and after 3 months of no steady work, I was pretty broke. I remember it was a Saturday morning and rent was due the following Wednesday or Thursday. I decided that there wasn't much I could do until Monday, so why not play in this satellite tournament. I hadn't played in many prior to this because it didn't pay you cash, it paid you in an entry into a bigger event. Long story short, I won that satellite and got into the $50 Sunday tournament on Titan Poker where I took 4th place out of about 200 entrants.
4th place payed $750 dollars, and my rent was $725... I had the funds transferred to Neteller (the good 'ol days) and then to my bank account and payed my rent that month on time.
That was a great feeling at the time and a big financial relief, but I knew that there was a better way to make serious money in poker. Unfortunately, I was completely under-rolled and vastly mistaken about my skills as a poker player and I continued to muddle around with SNG's for a long time. There was also a year or so, where Neteller collapsed as a viable option for online poker in the U.S. and I was basically unable to play online for money. I will say that I was fortunate enough to remove my money from Neteller just before the huge debacle in December of '06 that locked up a lot of folks money for a long time. I had about $400 at Full Tilt and had taken it out for X-mas presents and such and thought I'd just reload $500 or so in a couple months time.
I'm gonna have to do a little research about my timeline, but off the top of my head, I don't think I got back into playing poker for money online until about September of '08, about a year and a half after withdrawing.
That is pretty much my beginning story of playing MTT's and SNG's so that I could be the next "Moneymaker."
These days I'm playing primarily Full Ring Cash Games, which I discovered about December of '08. I'll speak to that ongoing experience in my next post, but it's vastly more interesting than my n00b-ish beginnings.
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