Excellent post OP, good job

Great post! Thanks for sharing your story and your experience!

Raze, if we didn't both have schlongs I'd ask you to marry me.

Excellent post, appreciate it. =)

honest to god..some of the most concise poker wisdom that can be written in less than a 300 pages.

They always told me when I was a kid you would be surprised what you would learn when you read and reserch. My suggestion is everyone read this even the ones who think the know it all. By far this is the best post and the best pieces of information that I have ever come across you break things down nicely. I have heard about rakeback and stuff just never looked in to it the the phrase " You big Dummy" come to mind?

Anyway thanks for the great information you have put on here.

I do have a couple of questions.

Do you use PT3 if so do you like it?

I have a Ft account but havent played on it in a year can I get rakeback somehow if so how?

As far as a prop player do you have to sign up for that first before you do the rake back to get all the you can out of that site?

Think thats it Thanks again they should Sticky this post so everyone can read it and reread it.

Congrads the milestone

I haven't bought PT3 yet because they don't support my current site (Pacific Poker). I will snap it up the day they add support. I think PT is a ridiculously good value, and frankly I'm kind of surprised they charge a relatively small flat rate for such a good piece of software.

As far as Full Tilt, I'm not familiar with their policies as I don't have an account there, but I believe it's impossible to create a second account under your own name, but there has to be a way around it, eg. create an account under your girlfriend/parents name & address and all that. It might be problematic to deposit / cashout, as some sites require the name on your account to match the name on your bank account / credit card. There is definitely good info about this on 2+2 somewhere, maybe RB forums.

A prop player first cannot have a pre-existing account with a prospective poker room, but I'm sure there are exceptions & ways to get around that. They would be 'hired' as a prop usually by a 3rd party who handles prop deals, or directly by the poker room in some cases. Prior to signing up they would be offered certain terms and conditons, including a fixed rakeback rate (up to 100% or slightly higher) and possibly other perks like bonuses, tokens, etc, so to answer your question, you would do all your signing up and negotiating your rakeback through whoever is offering you the prop deal.

I really appreciate the feedback & you guys are all more than welcome. Actually I want to thank you because I have my own poker website stalling out in the blueprints stage at the moment, and I feed on this stuff for motivation. As someone mentioned, I like to be concise & pack as much information into as few words as possible, so I would be really happy to receive topic suggestions and comments here.

I hope once you get that website going that you revisit this thread and post a link. Awesome stuff here, Raze.

^
What she said. Thanks for the effort and insight, OP.

Wish I'd known about RB before signing up at every poker site I could find.

I'll try sending a letter to FT as one poster suggested. Can't hurt.

Let us know when. Hopefully you will post your orginal thread there I think it will help a lot of people.

I was wondering I have pt3 and I know yall talk a lot about -ev and I know theres not a part for your over all ev average on PT so what key things do I want to look for that I can say hey thats way high I need to lower that or whatever the case might be.

I have 26k hands since April 13th it says with 437 sessions and 325.60 hrs at 22 diffrent limits and I lost a bunch of hands is this a lot?

Good Post for Newbie's

big thanks!
I put it in bookmarks

very nice, thank you. i've put $100 aside for online poker where should i deposit it and what site would you recommend for rakeback?

thanks

Thanx!

awesome post. love the poobah posts. very helpful.

Let me add my thanks for your post. Great information. My hope for your second part is to explain how you structured your learning.

I am fairly new to the game and only got serious about learning around 6 months ago when I read SSHE and realized the level of complexity there is to the game. I have a well paying job that will continue through next Aug and then I will be unemployed and am hoping to have learned enough over the coming year to make poker into a modest secondary income.

My problem is that I haven't found a good balance of reading books/ reading online (forums etc)/ playing micro limits/ learning how to use PT etc... I find what usually tends to happen is I read and reread a lot of the same information on the internet in various forms and at different sites purely because there is so much available and pretty soon I realize that the entire time I had allotted to poker is gone. Don't get me wrong, I have learned a tremendous amount from reading this forum (I am constantly amazed by experts such as yourself who are willing to spend the time to pass on so much good free information) and I plan to continue doing so but I think that sometimes it comes at the expense of actual playing experience or at the expense of fully digesting the information in the books I have such as SSHE.

In other words I would like to know the following things:

1. Approx what percentage of time did you spend playing, going over past hands, reading online, reading books and/or anything else poker related when you were first starting out?

2. How much time in general were you spending at poker each week before you made it full time?

3.Out of curiousity, where did you learn to play short handed limit? (I keep reading about how 6max tables can be more profitable but I haven't figured out all the adjustments that are needed)

In general, I am just looking for suggestions on the best balance of my time over the next year to prepare me for a more serious go at it. I know these type of questions have been asked many times so I appreciate the patience and wisdom of those of you who point us in the right direction.

Thanks!

I remember when I was new to the game, and I too spent so much time reading strategy articles that I never ended up playing.

1. When I was starting, I probably read and played 50:50, maybe even more reading than playing. As I got better and moved up, I played a lot more and read less, to the point where now, playing in mid-high stakes games, I feel I gain a LOT more from observing opponents and getting experience while playing, than I do from reading books and strategy articles. I do watch CR training videos religiously, and I feel these are an amazing value for the price.

Certainly at the small-stakes level and below, I read everything I could get my hands on, and I feel this was very important to my success.

2. Before playing more or less full-time, I played maybe 10 hours a week, and spent at least 10 reading books, etc.

3. I picked up short-handed limit mostly from reading 2+2 strategy forums and poker strategy websites, and it was a struggle. There was/is a LOT of bad advice out there and it took a long time for me to learn to filter it out. Again, once I picked up a training video membership (Stoxpoker at the time), my game improved many, many times faster than sifting through posts in the limit forum.

If you want to be serious about this game, get a CR or Stox membership. These guys who win millions of dollars a year are handing out their keys to the game for like 30 bucks a month, and they provide videos all the way down to micro-stakes. I know when I was playing NL25, these training vids added way, way more than $30 a month to my winrate.

I consider myself tight-aggressive. I see between 18%-21% of the flops. Is that about right?

That's tight aggressive preflop, can't tell your postflop tendencies from that though.

not even tight aggressive preflop if youre not raising a significant portion of those hands.

Yeah...for some reason I read he was 21/18 because I'm cixelsyd

great post.

thank you for this excellent post!

there is so much knowledge in this post!
U know balze, guys like u and pokey and some others from this forum should be sitting at the biggest cash game events... i dont think many of the "well know pros" think as complex as u guys do

Just a bump, I'll advise every starting (2-4 months) player to read this post, and follow it.

It's changed my 'fortunes' a hell of a lot, I'm taking notice of position a lot more, I'm folding hands a lot more and winning a lot more out of the hands I do play, really superb post.

Thanks for taking the time to give us a fraction of your knowledge.