Meant to write one today, but I got tilted last night and took today off playing... and now it's beer time Definitely tomorrow

Please do.. I am awaiting your post. Til then enjoy your beer. I run and flee in the wind like a little japanese girl...

looking forward to it also. teh other one listed here is a good read also for those of you keeping up with this one.

28th December 2008- deposited £20 which was $28 onto party poker. I had learnt playing live with friends, reading books and discussing strat. with friends. One friend who had played online before me told me about a 20BB strategy, we both deposited at the same time, $28 and $60, with me being the $28. I 20BBed NL10 with 10 BIs and proceeded to move up through NL25 (at a 20BI roll) and then began 6 tabling NL50 until i had built my bankroll up to roughly $600, in the space of two weeks.

I then began playing $11 stts, went on a huge heater and got my roll up to $900. Went back to a 20BB strategy and by the end of january i had won $1200. Then i tried 100BB'ing NL50 with 24 BIs, something i felt at the time was conservative bankroll management, and swung off $900 in under 4 hours. Party poker announced their Grindroll scheme, basically freerolls for regular players.

I took these grindrolls as my opportunity and went back to 6 tabling 20BB NL50, winning at roughly 4bb/100. My roll quickly went back up to $700 and i found myself entered into the $5k, $10k, $15k, $20k and $50k Grindrolls. I cashed in the $5k, $10k and $20k each time for the minimum cash. Then, reaching the end of the grindrolls, when it had begun to dawn on me i wasn't going to win $10k today, i pretty much quadrupled up my stack in the $50k in about 4 hands. I found myself chip leader and went on to win $13.75k.

I'm now a reg at NL100 HU, playing very conservative BR management, because, after all, i didn't win this money at cash games, and i only want to play what i can beat. Currently winning 9ptbb/100 over 55k hands HU NL100

I started poker about 1.5 years ago at IJJI poker. This is a site for mostly kids where they can win game chips and exchange them for prizes. Growing up I was always a comptetive person. Whether it's Billiards, Basketball, Video games, you name it.

I was a HUGE billiards fan before I discovered poker. I would play with my friends every weekend at pool hall for like $1 a game.

After IJJI poker shut down, I was pretty much hooked on poker and I went online to look for where I might be able to play Poker at. I found Poerstars.

I was never a believe in depositing so I just played playchips to hone my skills. I was total noob, don't know any fundamentals, All I really got for me was bankroll management due to a huge nit that I am in real life.

Then one night, it all started...

Back then, Pokerstars had these $200 freerolls that runs twice a day. That night I decided to participate. Being the noob that I am, I just waited for premiums and shove. needless to say, about 6 hrs later I won the whole thing! With about 8000 entrants, I had about 12 million chipstack. I can still remember it clearly, it was 3AM in the morning and I won $30!! (yes i know $30) I wasnt able to sleep because that was the first time where I won first place in anything let alone money. From that moment on , I was hooked...


To be continued...

I don't really mean any disrespect, but I appreciate this thread for the people who have actually made it to high stakes or at least mid stakes, not people such as myself who are newbies and grinding micro or small stakes.

Looking forward to the OP's next post!!

Nice run

Did you even read the OP

Hopefully the hangover won't last too long...

lol my bad. I tried to write yesterday between sessions but I was burnt out on poker, and I wrote 3 boring lines so I'll do a good one today instead

January 2007 - $50NL-$100NL

With a doubled bankroll, and a reasonably solid NL strategy, I left NL25 behind and made 50 my main game. I was still learning at a super fast pace, and I had absolutely no interest in the limit games. Playing on soft Tiger Gaming, where I had beaten up the small-stakes limit games, I knew in time I'd be able to rise to their biggest NL games (NL200 and 300) in fairly short order, as long as I put in my hours at the table and kept digesting all the strategy I could dig up.

I remember reading a thread, which I probably will never be able to find, that gave kind of a rough template for the necessary skills acquired along moving up in stakes. For example... and I'm sure this will be wrong from the actual post but... NL25: Know the basics mechanics of the game, understand value betting with big hands. NL50: Start to understand semi-bluffing, blind-stealing becomes an essential part of the game, etc,.. this post helped me SO much just in hinting where I should expand my knowledge, where the next step is in order to keep improving.

Around this level, I started to really see how deep the NLHE cash games are, in terms of strategy and skill potential. Like I mentioned earlier, LHE is two-dimensional to NLHE's three dimensions. Not only can you just bet, check or fold, you can size bets. This is SO huge in terms of strategy, and I still want to put this off until MSNL where I really got into creative betting patterns. Being a significant winner right away at uNL, I definitely could have jumped into 100 or even 200NL and been a marginal winner, but I wanted to build my game slowly and thoroughly from the beginning, and I think this is very important. Skills in poker build off other skills. You can't jump right in and just fire off random bluffs and check-raise for no reason if you haven't developed hand-reading skills, you'll get killed! At 50NL and 100NL I started to see the big picture, and I understood there were worlds in front of me, which was all the more motivating to keep learning.

I was reading my mentor's poker blog a lot around this time, looking for new concepts and inspiration, and he mentioned a couple times that 95% of what is written in 2+2 is total BS. I'd like to defend my fellow posters, but he was right. The average poker player loses in the long-term, right? I understand the average thinking poker player is not necessarily a loser, but it seems to me the skill level of 2+2ers is distributed on a bell curve. There are a handful of huge winners like cts, durrr, and whoever else, and on the other end, there are probably some posters here who play way over their skill level and regularly get crushed at the tables for huge sums. In the middle, of course, is a huge mass of mediocre players... some marginal winners and losers, some big winners at uNL who hold themselves back and don't move up, and a ton of break-even players at all stakes. What type of player do you think is going to have the loudest collective voice on the forums? The mediocre outnumber the experts by hundreds to one. Also, the big winners individually spend less time posting on forums and probably more time playing and working on their game at the tables. Since they are known only by screenname and cannot be held accountable in real life for their words, people who post on forums really seem to be a LOT more arrogant and ignorant than people you meet in real life. They will always tell you what's right, what's wrong, and they'll rarely admit when they make a mistake. These are the people that create 2+2 'general knowledge'. Instead of accepting that their game is not so sharp, they blame losing streaks on variance without having a clue about what variance means, how it works, or how downswings can be avoided by simply improving your winrate ie. getting better at poker. Don't buy in to what everyone else assumes is right. How come every time you see a PokerEV graph, the poster is complaining about running $xxx BELOW equity? Use your own mind when something doesn't quite add up. You have to keep an open mind during play, and while reading about strategy. Try new things, keep what works. I'll finish this ramble with a quote I read somewhere: The mark of an intelligent mind is to be able to entertain a thought without necessarily embracing it.

SSNL up next

were you talking about this post and the ones that go along with it?

Yesss this one! Sweet man thanks. I haven't had a look at this since I was playing NL100.

This is what I'm talking about. If you read everything you can get your hands on, you'll find nuggets of gold like this once in a while. Every point form he made here contains a world of strategy considerations. Posts like these kept me constantly improving and looking for new ways to up my winrate.

i was so about to ask if you could give us hints on what you remembered about it so we could look that post up lol. glad you found it ill be reading that one also!

Wow thnks for the stickies. Really good stuff.

Great.
Work is sooo boring. Glad to have something meaningful to read to speed up the hours...

I got into Poker around 2005 i think - Two women for work where big into Poker and talked about it alot. I asked them a few questions and was interested in playing.

I enjoyed playing Chess and stuff like that, other card games. I've always played those crappy poker machine games at fairs and stuff.

What tickled my interest in Poker is that i belive its more skill based then luck when your a winning player.

Reason i believe its more skill is because you know when to bet, when to fold, when people are bluffing etc

Its not like, you get the cards, who has the best wins there and then, you can manipulate the game etc

So they got me to go on Pacific Poker. I put on $25, got $25 bonus and i managed to win $75~$85, on £ i put on £15 and took out £70

I withdrew and stopped playing thinking i would get hooked. I most of played for 2 weeks? How i won, i dont know. It was MTT/SnG and im sure it was down to pure luck

Roll on to 2008 i fancied playing again, played on PKR.com and stuck to SnG and MTT, i managed a few places in MTT and my $25 went into $250, i took out $200 and lost $50. Used the $200 for lessons, then stopped playing.

Think that was September.

Middle of March 2009 - I had an urge to play, i missed playing. So, i put $50 on to FTP, took out $40 from Luckyace and put that on, and from that im up to $115 on FTP playing Cash games (What my lessons was on)

I reg browse 2+2, i have a few books i like to browse over etc. Im not looking to go Pro, but i am looking to be a good cash game player, playing with BR and my main aim is to play Poker for a hobbie and make 1 cashout a month.

It might be $50 or it could be $500. It depends on how i apply myself and learn the game!

Great post Raze, keep it coming!

Raze how much do think having a mentor helped? currently i discuss poker with a 1 or 2 close friends and all three of us are basically on par. while we have some very interesting discussions and they have helped me improve my game .. sometimes i think having those conversations with players who are better and think on a higher level would help me progress a lot more..




EDIT:


hehehe look at him go..

Punch duck punch duck

To clarify: when I say mentor, I mean this blog. I've had maybe an hours worth of PMs with him, and this blog was by far the best thing I ever read for my game, so he's the closest I have to a mentor.

I wish I had someone higher up to frequently talk to. I PM this blogger every few months to see what's up, but I never had real strategy discussions with anyone above me, ever... except when I was a NLHE noob, and my buddies were beating NL100. I don't know why I didn't try harder to make friends with poker geniuses. It definitely pays well.

Actually, now I talk to my peers a lot more than ever. I make friends at the tables and get their Email addys. I regularly pester a guy who destroys high-stakes MTTs like I've never seen before, and when/if I decide to jump into MTTs, I'm going to pick his brain. He's gonna be sorry he ever gave me the time of day.

wtb a mentor or anyone to talk to about poker lol

Aristotle FTW

raze is my new hero, srsly
much love dude, loved the history

sweet did I get the quote right?

I knew that sounded familiar