Hello!

I am creating this blog/journal/whatever-it-is thread here for motivation, inspiration and learning purposes. I am very big procrastinator. Writing things down helps to keep me accountable, especially if those goals and commitments are shared publicly. Also I find tracking my progress and how far I've come can be good fuel later down the road when things are not as smooth. And finally, wring is a great way how to organize my thoughts and solidify commitments. It's just how my introvert brain works I guess. So I am mainly talking with myself here. But if somebody's reading this I hope you can get something out of this as well. Maybe, if anything, learn from my mistakes at least.

Anyhow, lemme just post a little intro here...

So, I discovered poker somewhere between 2010 - 2012 I think. I mean I knew the game existed before that, but I had never played it and I did not even knew the rules. Anyhow, I was bored so I went to one of those flash game websites and started playing this app called Bullfrog Poker. I did very well there. I played very tight and managed to build up quite a lot of chips. Eventually moved to other free to play apps like Zynga Poker Facebook's app, etc. Did decently there too. Back then I did not even knew that poker is a game of skill. I just played intuitively. If you would ask me what ware the reasoning behind my actions in a hand I could not tell you. But I knew it worked. I probably knew somewhere in a back of my mind that there is more to it than just luck, but I never really bothered to explore it.

So I played on and off for few years on apps like that for fake money chips. Then somewhere around mid 2014 I stumbled on a video on Youtube. Video was from one of the Youtubers that I watched and in it he mentioned that poker is a game of skill, not just luck, and that he used to play it full time for living. I then looked into it more. I realized that there were this whole professional scene where people were playing tournaments with real trophies and stuff. Kind of blew my mind. I then started to study strategy and soon after switched to real money games. Joined this forum around that time too. Even posted a few hand reviews and stuff. Was quite serious about it because I got inspired. I loved the card game and the idea of playing it for living full time seemed amazing. I started from the bottom- 2nl micro stakes. Was studying and practice-grinding for few months. But eventually life kind of got in a way. I started to play less and less until I quit fully.

I never got any tattoos but I wanted to. Somebody told me that I should pick a tattoo and wait for a year before I actually do it. If I still want it after a year then I should get it. I did exactly that and it never ended up lasting. This "make a living playing poker" thing did pass the test though. I realized that these thoughts will not just fade away. I had this dream in back of my mind for all those years since 2014. I wonder now what if I could have stuck to this for those 5 years. Maybe I would be doing this full time now? So here I am, giving this thing a shot. I have a dream but no clue where to start. So I am starting from the bottom: 2nl micros. The goal is to slowly build my skills, beat those limits, build bankroll and move up the stakes. I think moving up to 5nl by the end of the year seems reasonable? That's the first goal.

Gonna post here wherever I feel like. It might be daily, weekly or really any time I have some things to write relevant to poker. At the very least I'm gonna try to post here at least once a month with recap of my results.

This is my graph back from the day years ago before I quit:



About 30k hands over few months. I did not play every day back then and when I did it was 2 to 4 hours usually. Now I am thinking to put in more volume in. Maybe somewhere around 50k hands a month or so. At least eventually, after I get used to playing on multiple tables and get somewhat comfortable with basic strategy again. The idea is to treat this thing as a whole time job/school project now. Still not sure about resources though. I like learning from books. Not sure whether subscribing to a training site or getting a coach is necessary yet for these limits? I know I have to get ABC fundamentals down for now, which I do not exactly have now. And I feel it should not be difficult to do it from a book? Years back I bought "Crushing the Microstakes" book and was studying pretty much exclusively that. I guess for now I will go back to it. Even tho I am not exactly sure how outdated it is in late 2018 going into 2019, since it was written back in 2011?

Update: Been playing very little for now. But I've been studying what I think is decent amount so far. Studying more than I play. Should play more though. I want to create a consistent schedule, that would probably be good idea.

By the way, I just remembered that this graph above does not represent my whole time of playing. I was wondering why I had so little hands. Did forget lol. But I remember now I did play about the same amount on other tracking software free trial and never ended up saving the hands. And before that I played without a HUD for a quite a while too. So my lifetime total is more closer to 100k hands. Not that it matters now cos all the skill I had (which according to graph doesn't seem to be that much cos I was losing player) I feel has faded away during those years anyways. So starting from the scratch again.