Poker after six months (part 1)

Wow, this blog was supposed to be a journal of everything I've done and acheieved, it's in fact not even been kicked off. But I never stopped playing, I pretty much acheieved what I could have hoped for when starting this blog, so it's time to start posting I think. I hope that in 6 months I'll look back at some posts I made here and laugh at how bad I was (am now), but we'll see.

So I'll kick start it off by saying why I managed to do in the first 6 months of poker.

First of all, I get a couple of hours a night where I can play poker. It's not every night of course, but many weeks has been. It's really taken a hold of my free time, and lunch hours etc. I'm just now trying to balance things out a bit, and make sure there are poker free nights spent wholely with my wife, and make sure even on nights I play poker, that 2-3 hours of playing straight is not essential. So far so good.

So I joined pokerstars (PS) as we all do, and depsosited $25. I played a few tournaments, SNG's, 1c/2c and 2c/5c ring tables (mainly 10 max). I was really a breakeven player, but most of my early winnings were from tournaments, where I'd play like a rock early, and wait for really big hands. I finished 7th in a $1 1000 man tournament, getting $25 prize money. For some reason SNG's were a drain on my money and the ring games were up and down a lot. As you do I went on tilt after a couple of nights bad play, and after a few drinks I put way too much money onto higher tables and blew my entire bankroll in one night. Not happy with ending my poker there I deposited another $25.

Now here is a turning point for me. Down a couple of dollars again, I entered a $1 1000 man tournament (I would pretty much play at least one nightly), and made the final table again, this time finishing 4th for $50. I think I realised at this point it wasn't pure luck, so I started dedicating a bit of energy into poker, looking at forum sites such as pokerforums.org and twoplustwo.com. I still lacked any real knowledge, but worked hard enough that I was competetive and 2c/5c (NL5) and could take a shot at 5c/10c (NL10).

TBC