Hi all,

My name is Chris and I go by the user name TheGull. Those of you who frequent the not so friendly confines of America's Card Room may know me from such timeless hits as: As the Bad Reg Spews, or The Tilting Lag Monster.

I've played poker very recreationally since the Moneymaker days, so I am not new to poker. I've always considered myself to be a decent player who at least tried to look at the game somewhat more analytically than others.

It's funny looking back on how I used to play. I remember fondly how I used to do my best to play as few hands as possible and be proud about how I didn't play "trash hands" like suited connectors, unsuited aces, and low pocket pairs. I did my best to get as close to 10% of flops seen as I could back when Pokerstars was available in the US.

I found that most of my live sessions were pretty fruitful, funnily enough. I don't have exact numbers because it was always recreational, but I would say that on the whole I won a good deal more than I lost at the tables.

The reverse was definitely the case online. My forays into Pokerstars and especially Party Poker were soul shatteringly bad. So bad that it became a real threat to my financial well being.

I guess you could say Black Friday was the best thing to ever happen to me in that sense. When all the card rooms were forced to shut down in the States my hunger for poker evaporated and I was no longer able to donk off all of my hard earned money.

In the past year or so I discovered that it's actually possible for Americans to play poker online! I know, I know. "Just what the degenerate needs!" You must all be thinking by now. To that I say: don't worry. I'm in a good place financially and I have matured a lot since those days gone by. Sure, I am still probably far too capricious with my money when it comes to buying things, but certainly not with online gambling. In fact I have only placed 300 dollars into my online account about a year ago and I have never had to rebuy since.

Which gets me to where I am today. I have decided that more than anything else right now I want to become a winning poker player. I don't have grand aspirations of making it to the nosebleeds or anything like that- I just want to establish myself as a consistently winning reg. And this is where I stand at the moment, so it's a little bit of a climb.



And here are my raw stats for good measure.





Here's my own interpretation of my stats and how I think I can improve them. As I mentioned before I have always been a TAG player. Recently though, at the suggestion of virtually all of poker academia, I made the pretty much overnight transition into the world of LAG, which has never really been my comfort zone. Despite this I went ahead and put in a lot of hands to try to acclimate myself to the more swingy (but profitable) nature of this style of play. Perhaps it is delusional of me to say this, but I genuinely think like I have the playstyle down for the most part, with three glaring exceptions and one more possibly minor one...

1. I call FAR too much on the river looking for the hero call
2. I have an awful tilt leak
3. I play too many tables at once
4(ish). I see too many flops.

I know that I have what it takes to be a profitable, semi-solid reg, but I keep tripping over my own dick in a way. And this brings me to why I make this post: I want to keep myself accountable. I hope that by posting my travails publicly I can achieve this.

So to sum up my goal is simple: Evolve from pipsqueak leaky LAG to beastly solid Reg. I hope to achieve this by plugging some major leaks in my game: I want to call down fewer river bets, I want limit the effect of tilt on my win rate, I want to cut down the number of tables I play, and I want to lower the number of times I enter/limp into a pot.

As my bankroll is now quite low, I will be returning to the 10 dollar tables until I achieve bankroll of 30 buyins at the next stake. After rakeback and other incentives this week, my bankroll will shortly be over 300. This means I am rolled for the .5/.10 games. This is where my journey will start. My final goal is to amass a bankroll which I can then use to play 1/3 live comfortably (I am thinking 10 buy ins, so $3,000. Perhaps then I'll have a new challenge to set for myself

Thanks for reading and I hope to emerge at the end as a beautiful Solid Reg Swan!

After losing another 5-1k big blinds immediately following this post, I went on a hiatus from poker and started playing WoW. Then... the bug came back in about October and I decided to start to study things more and get more analytical about my play. The results have been excellent so far.

[IMG][/IMG]

[IMG][/IMG]

I've been the victim of some runbad, but despite this I've nearly dug myself out of the massive red hold I'd fallen into. If I had had just a little rungood I'd already be out by now. I believe that I have enough of a sample size under my belt at the $2, $5, and $10 tables to be able to say that I am a winner at the micros- even if my overall graph doesn't quite show it yet.

Most of the literature which I have come across has said that playing a VPIP of about 15-20% is ideal for winning regs at the micros, but I have found a VPIP line of 25/18 works well for me. Perhaps I defend more blinds than most or perhaps I raise pre with a slightly wider range than most, I am not sure. Either way a looser style has worked for me.

In my original post I had planned to begin play at about the 10 dollar table level. I failed miserably and wound up with exactly 18 dollars in my account. From there I began my climb from the 2 dollar tables. I was pretty successful at the $2 and was a slight winner at $5, but with rakeback and volume I was able to boost my bankroll to allow me to return to the $10, which is where I a lurk now.

Here's my breakdown since I came back on about Oct 1



As it pertains to the specific goal I mentioned above:

I feel like I am still calling down too much on the river
I have completely eliminated tilt from my game! I refuse to let the worst suckouts influence my play
I have limited myself to only 6 tables at once.
I have no cut down on the number of flops I see (VPIP) because a higher VPIP seems to work for me at this point. Will re-evaluate should I need to.