Hi all

Having enjoyed reading a lot of the threads in here I've decided to start my own. It will be dramatically different to most as I'm a recreational player and have absolutly no desire to go 'pro' and certainly don't have the ability for it. I'm a 50 year old Brit who has spent the last 3 months burning through a $75 bankroll online exploring all the different formats of the game. Usually at stakes way higher than my ability. I've really enjoyed myself whilst doing it so instead of just reloading and carrying on like before I want to add some sort of structure.

I don't get much time to play and almost all of my games are played on a mobile so whilst there isn't a great deal of scope for me to put in much volume or build up a poker database for study I still love the game and want to learn how to play it. So my first lofy goal is simply to stop losing money. Despite my games being played away from the computer I'm a bit of a stats freak so I've kept records manually. Please don't tell me that my sample sizes are too small to be meaningful because I know that. I just figure that if I keep records then they will eventually become useful if I don't die of old age first!

To be honest with myself and everyone here there is only a single format of the game where I'm not a losing player. That's right, at an MTT I'm a losing player. In a cash game I'm a losing player. At all the random forms of poker that sites these days offer (zoom, blast, spin & go, you name it) I'm a losing player. Even at normal STT I'm a losing player. The only place that has helped slow my decent from $75 to $10 has been the knockout STT. In a trivial sample of 250 of those I have an ITM of 43% and a ROI of 6%.

It's my current belief that these are a little wilder than a traditional STT as people will call light when trying to grab a bounty. I think this is why I do slightly better at them than I do in a normal STT where my favourite finishing position is 4th. I'm sure I play too tight for too long which means as the bubble approaches I'm short stacked. In a normal STT with no bounty to go for people will not call my desperate all-in with nothing like they will in the knockout STT.

Anyway, my plan is to reload and take on the normal 50cent STT's and not go broke. Not very exciting I know. It will take me weeks to play what you guys play in a session and my entire bankroll will probably be less than you would open with when holding AA but it's more about the poker for me than the money. Posts will be infrequent simply because posting daily is pointless if I've only played 1 STT since the last post. I may post the occasional hand history but that will be more for fun than advice. Feel free to follow along for the ride as I try to be slightly less fishy than Nemo.

I'll leave you with a hand that made me laugh the other day. Yeah I know I played it terribly but it still made me laugh.

Well I know I said I'd not update this after 1 any but hey, I lied.

Roll reloaded to 50 giving me 100 buy-in. Yeah that's ultra conservative but the idea is that I never reload again.

So far. Played one won one. Must be pure luck but I'll take a winning start.

Hi

I played, for me, a ton of sng's over the weekend, 18 in total. I appreciate that for most of you that's about 1 session but for me it's a lot. I think the excitement of starting this thread made me play way more than I should have. Twice I woke up to find I'd been knocked out! Top tip, playing whilst asleep is -ev.

So current stats (not really relevant but hey)

Played 18
Running total -$1.89
Finish position:
1 6%
2 17%
3 11%
4 28%
5 11%
6 6%
7 11%
8 11%
9 0%

As you can see I'm far too likely to go out in 4th which I believe is because I play way too tight for too long and my stack has no fold equity left when I do play.

So the plan for learning this month will be:

[ ] Figure out some opening ranges that change with the tournament situation. (stack size, blind size, players left, table position)
[ ] Learn about fold/shove decisions when short stacked.
[ ] Play with less fear around the bubble.

Well I added a few more games. Seems to be more of the same which isn't unsurprising as this whole journey is very new.

Played 24 (+6)
Running total -$1.72 (+0.16)

I spent a while going back through all the hands of one of the tournaments. It was like I was looking at someone else play. With forever to think about my choices and not being caught up in the actual game even I think I play horribly.

Now this is good because there are things I can research in terms of better understanding things like equity in certain situations but it has highlighted that I also need to do a lot of work on keeping emotion, especially fear, out of my game.

Now I'm playing 50c tournaments and I have a reasonable job so it's not like I'm playing for stakes that matter to me in the slightest. What's happening is that I don't have the time to play as much as I would like. So my fear of busting out is not lost money it's the fact that if I bust out I can't start another tournament in the time I have left and I want to carry on playing.

I really need to research how to block out things like this that are making me play badly.

Well things have changed since the initial post and I was going to let this thread die but maybe not.

Seems that the first thing you need when learning to play poker is the ability to be honest with yourself. Having thought a lot about my situation I figured I have two real options.

I could continue with the SnG's knowing that I really can't play very many due to time constraints. Small volume would make learning very slow and as a complete novice it was hard to figure out where I was going wrong.

The alternative was to switch to cash games. It frees me from the time pressure and means if I only get time to play 30 hands that's just 30 more in the database not a tournament that I've not been able to complete. As cash game structure doesn't change it's easier to use that hand database to spot the glaring leaks and improve. It's also much easier for me to grab hand histories as my main playing device is a mobile not a pc. When I get pc time I use it to study not play.

So now I'm playing 1c/2c cash rather than SnG's but the main goal is the same. Let's not be a losing player any more.

It's very, very early days yet so no meaningful statistics to report other than I'm actually net positive over the first 1000 hands!