Hi all, maybe a quick introduction first.

I was a decent player during the poker boom. I made a good profit on micro and low stakes, both MTT and cash. I paid a lot of live in local casino's and HG's. It paid my college, rent, expenses,... for about 3-4 years.
In 2011/2012 I quit. I knew I wasn't good enough to go pro and could make more money with my degree. I wanted to build a normal life in the country where i'm from.

A couple of weeks ago I played poker again with some friends, no buy-in, but is was sort of a competition. The only thing my friends were talking about at that point was that online poker was rigged and impossible, the games can not be beat and so on and so on. Nothing new as I heard all this before but suddenly I had an idea to try and prove that poker can still be beat, especially on the micro - levels. So I wanted to see if it's possible for me to build a bankroll in a year with playing poker part-time.

I opened an account on stars and a party - skin (I closed all my accounts years ago). and put some money that was still in my neteller account on the sites.
I played around to see what the competition was like, made some profit and got to this challenge:

The challenge : turn a 250$ bankroll to 1000$ bankroll by the end of the year

Rules:
not allowed to add more money if you go broken
not allowed to rise up in stakes without a sufficient bankroll (100 buyin's for SNG's)
only play SNG's with an occasional MTT if there is a chance at overlay or to start the session if it's going to be a long session.
Balance playing with learning

Games:
1 Table turbo SNG's on party
2 table turbo SNG's on Stars

Goals:
I have 3 main goals with subgoals that are ranked top down from hard to easy

Be a profitable poker player

1. Earn 1.000$ this year
2. Get >10% ROI
3. Get >5% ROI
4. Make profit

Get volume in

1. Play 5.000 SNG's
2. Play 4.000 SNG's
3. Play 3.000 SNG's
4. Play 2.000 SNG's
5. Play 1.000 SNG's

Learn strategy

1. Read 2 new books
2. Read 2 books you've already read once
3. Read 10 articles
4. Watch 20 video's

I was thinking of updating on this forum so you can either see my go broke as a fish or follow along my journey through the micro's more than a decade after the poker boom.

Aren't low stake SNGs dead on stars with the rake increase?

I thougt multi table SNG's were excluded?

GLGL

First update, after only a short time. I'm still not sure how many times I'll update and in what form so any feedback is always welcome.

As somebody already mentioned in this thread, pokerstars f*****d over microstakes players with a rake increase so I'm not sure if I'm going to keep playing there. However due to legislation my options are limited. Pokerstars, Bwin, Ladbrokes (same party-skin) or unibet.
I'm sticking to Bwin for now and also playing some 1$ SNG's in the beginning of the session for volume but I'm thinking of adding 5-man SNG's on unibet as I hear the games are soft there. However I would be unable to track my progress anywhere so I would first need to make something to keep track of my games played and profit to make sure I can see my ROI.

Anyways, The beginning was good, I put in some graphs and snips I made from tracking websites since Bwin does not allow hand history download.

Overall I'm happy with the start but it's only the ridiculous small amount of 120 games. Going broke by being a bad player is still a huge possibility

Profit Graph in €


Overview in total for SNG's and divded per stake



Just for fun I added the sharkscope overview, It's also the only way I can make some sort of analysis of my play which is kind of a bummer:



So the rules might change a bit on the coming days and I'm not going to give a big goal update as I haven't played a big amount yet (still a dad of 2 kids so I won't be playing 1000's of hands in a month anyway) but I did watch my first 2 vids this week.

I watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7mdS507cdA and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnFr5_EEABM&t=1400s

I'm going to search for some articles tomorrow and am looking into what book to read first. Right now I'm thinking Colin Moshman's Sit "n Go Strategy.

I'm going to play on thursday and friday evening, normally friday will be a longer session. I have a party on saturday and if I'm not too hungover I will have another session on sunday.

let's keep the graph pointing up

Total bankroll : 256$

Time for an end of the week update.

I transfered my pokerstars cash to unibet. It has low rake on SNG's, decent trafic and fishy players due to it being a gambling site.
They don't allow HUD's or tracking websites so I made an easy excell to track my own ROI.

I've had 2 sessions, friday night and just now on sunday. I wanted to play longer today but the player pool was shrinking.
Next week I'm working late shifts which gaves me free time before lunch and 2 hours every night for a quick session.
I'll need to take a day off on tuesday for private reasons so I might have a big session then and in the weekend.

I'm going to stick to these SNG's for now and will find some articles on vids on ICM as this will become increasingly important, especially in the 5-man SNG's.
I'm going to buy the book of Colin Moshman and further see what training I can find for free.
For now the biggest takeaways from playing and the vids I've watched is:

• smaller bet sizes
• you don't always need to raise pf HU

for the results, the Unibet graph and stats:





Partypoker graph and stats







Bankroll : 269.44

Allright, time for an end of the month update.

In conclusion, it's been a good month overall. I made some good progression both moneywise and goal-wise.
Allthough I have identified what will likely be my biggest obstacle : volume! being a working dad it's difficult to set aside a couple of hours to play and for SNG's a small session is at least 3 hours.

This brought me back to cashgames. If my main objective is to build a bankroll I don't think there will be a way to exclude cashgames if you're not able to have long sessions.
So in the month of may I might align my goals with this reality.
I played some 10NL today and I was amazed by the bad players. It felt like the poker boom all over again. There is no doubt in my mind that I ran good looking at my profit but no doubt this is beatable with a decent BB/100

9-man SNG's



6.6% ROI

I know it's futile but I'm in the 1% leaderboard of SNG's on this site with these stakes and that's just fun to mention.

5-man SNG's



8% ROI

Both graps drop in profit at the same time. This is due to 2 decent losing sessions.
At first it looked like I was unlucky, losing flips and getting sucked out when all in.
However, I always aim to study and analyse more when I think I'm on a downswing and I quickly found that I was playing bad because I had too many tables open (8).
I played my cards on automatic pilot with no regards for the table and the other players which meant I got blinded down until I had to shove and leave it all to chance.

I play less tables now and put a lot of time into study.

Cashgames

I played 2 sessions, 3.5 hours of 3 tables and netted 62.42$
Since no tracker is allowed, I take 90 hands per hour per table into account which means I got a winrate of 45/100 but with a laughable sample that really can't be used to measure anything.

Bankroll 353.47$

April profit = +/-103.47$


Goals

Be a profitable poker player ==> Too early to tell but a good start

get volume in ==> might change 495 SNG's played

Learn Strategy

1. 2 new books read
2. 7 articles read
3. 10 videos watched

Time for an half of the month update.

It's a busy month for me on personal matters, so I could only play short sessions of an hour or 2.

Because of this I choose to focus on cash-games.
I've played only 10NL so far and went on an absolute heater in my first few sessions.
I've never ran this good, every pocket pair was a set, every draw was cheap and hit on the turn, every big hand was paid off by another big hand.
At some point I was scared because I was playing at 55BB/100 which I know isn't feasible and will bite you in the ass in the future.
Then I had a couple of sessions where I was carddead and every draw against me hit so the universe balanced itself.
And in today's session I misclicked a check on the river with QQ on KKKxx board against K8o so that was awesome.

But overall in cash micro it seems that there are more fish than in SNG's and they are easier to target. So I will definitely be playing some more cash.

I would love to add some fun hands in here but since the site where I play doesn't download HH I can't. If anybody has a site where I can manually input these hands, it would be appreciated to share.

I found a few leaks in my game, like playing too loose in the beginning of a session and calling too light on flops. There are more leaks but without hand histories, they are hard to spot.

Cash games sessions



Overall in sessions


Current Bankroll

471.18$

I will update my to obtain goals by the end of the month. most likely they will be simplified to include cashgames and focus less on the type of games. the focus should be on learning, volume and profit.