It begins...

...badly

Hello and welcome all to what will hopefully be a blog about my success at the poker tables.

I've played this game on and off for years now and have had some modest success along with some modest 'un'-success. But this time I've decided to play it differently.

As opposed to the way I used to play, ie, buyin for $50 and sit my butt down with it - I'm going to build it, slow and steady (although if it chooses to go fast and steady I'll take that too!).

I have purchased a HUD to track my online play, and will keep an honest notebook for my offline play.

So how's it going so far? Well let's get to that!

LIVE
As I don't know of any 'freeroll' live events in my area I grudgingly accepted the fact that I would have to fork out some money to get started.

Now in my hometown there are two regular games with decent turnouts and players of questionable skill levels.

The Brock - Which is a £10 1R or 1A event every Friday and usually sees a turn out of around 35/40 players. This can result in prizepools of around 400-700 pounds on a good day.

They also run cash games but these are a bit sporadic and tend to run at the last minute. Blinds are 0.25/0.50 and minimum buyin is £20.

The Counting House - Standard pub poker. £5 buyin with a rebuy or an addon. Turn out is usually between the 12-18 mark and again play tends to be a little bit sporadic.

There are also a number of casinos about a 40 minute drive away, these some higher buyin tournaments but often the turnout is poorer and as a result are quite bad value for money in my opinion.

The cash games on the other hand are pretty decent, lots of players who like to gamble and as a result, patient play is often rewarded.

For the month of February live play looked like this:

Location -      Total Spend - Position - Cashout - B/Roll
The Brock -         £20          -  1/2/3    -   £160    -  £160
The C/House -     £25          -  3          -   £20      -  £155
Home Game -      £10          -  N/A     -    N/A     -  £145


Not a bad performace for the first month. The Brock was three way split which gave the bankroll a good solid start.

The counting house was actually two games. I lost £15 on the main event then played a side event for £10 which resulted in a split for £20 resulting in a five pound loss for the night.

The home game did not go as planned with an all in bluff against the best player at the table going south costing me my chance of cashing.

ONLINE
Now comes the tricky part.

I started the month by depositing £20 into Sky Poker. I had seen it on channel 861 and thought "That's the site for me!"

However things quickly went south when I encountered two very real issues. Firstly, the ENTIRE site consists of six handed tables. All of my poker experience is based on full ring poker and short handed games are defenitely not my forte, yet. I lost £6 in tournaments and broke even on cash tables.

The second, and much bigger problem, was the built in casino software...

Yes.

I lost £14 on blackjack/roulette or some other silly combination of fixed betting idiocy.

This is a recurring theme from my teen years when I would play exceptionally tight poker and do well at the tables only to spew my hard won chips in the direction of the casino.

Sky Poker is a no go. It's just too easy to bet with your poker winnings.

But what to do? I've just lost £20 of my B/Roll, I'm in no rush to dip into it anymore than I have to!

So I loaded up FullTilt and Pokerstars and had a look at what I could do for free. I then discovered the wealth of FullTilt FPP's I had from years before, 1200! With tickets to 0.50 tournaments being 120 points I turned 1000 points into $12.00 and started building from there.

Things were going great! I worked it up to $30 with a combination of cash and tournament play.

Then it turned south, pretty rapid.

$3.30 Turbo, Knockout events. I've always been a sucker for knockout events. Not because of the bounty, I could care less about the $0.50 price on my head. But its the fact that everyone else does and they go crazy to try and knock players out! Concentrating on actually cashing in the event has worked well for me in the past...not this time though!

In all honesty I played all three tournaments that I entered pretty stupidly.

The first one I built up a decent stack playing tight/aggressive poker, then I got too clever and tried to squeeze play against two opponents who I knew to be loose and low and behold I got called by A4o. Definitely a loose call by my opponent but also a stupid play by me. That hand didnt put me out of the tournament but it put me to below 10M so pretty much sealed my fate.

The second and third were played in rapid succesion and I went out on equally aggressive plays.

To the cash tables!

Now, I know I should be sticking to some sort of bankroll management system. I KNOW bad players will get rewarded on occasion and I know that swings are part of poker.

But despite knowing all of that I still sat down with 20% of my bankroll.

And lost it.

Then lost another buyin.

And another one.

And one more.


The first of these losses, was fair play. I was actually up $3 at the time called on the button with 78s in what was already a well limped pot. Flop dropped K, 8, 7. The play bet to me by someone I had figured as being tight and aggressive, I raised he re-raised and all the chips went in the middle with him flipping over AKs

Unfortunately an A hit on the turn and I lost my first buy in.

Now the next three were not so 'fair play'.

Retrak90 had a VPIP of 89% over 100 hands. And yet he took three buyins from me. Cracking QQ's twice and drawing out on AK vs A4. All three occasions I was in with the best and it went the wrong way.

I am currently sitting, probably seething somewhat with $4 in front of me from the $30 I had this morning. Determined to at least take a buyin back from this guy.

Online bankroll management can start tomorrow!