A great way to start the blog rolling

Seeing as I am now writing a poker blog then I suppose that I best play some poker. Although I did actually on the 1^st April 2010 (the date has no significance as I just like to start things on the 1^st of the month) embark on a challenge where I started with $100 and tried to turn that into $10,000. I started at the $2 games at no limit cash games. Well to cut a long story short then I reached the $10k landmark on December 30^th 2010. It hadn’t been easy and was probably the toughest thing that I have ever had to undertake in all my years as an online player.

These days though I play at www.pokerstars.co.uk simply because the site has far more action than anyone else. However what I did on the 1^st January this year was make a decision to take the challenge onto $100,000 from the original $100. I am not playing $0.50-$1.00 games with $100 buy-ins and have just past the $40,000 mark and so have made $30,000 since January 1^st.

I do have the bankroll to play far higher but NL100 is my niche really as the online games are proving far tougher than live games. I haven’t played live poker in ages and playing online and writing is taking up my time now. I could play full time but I did that once upon a time and it did my head in and sitting at the same chair for eight hours a day simply isn’t my idea of fun.

The long term effects of sitting at a computer all week are probably not known yet as widespread use has not been with us all that long. I have been successful on other fronts as well and went on a strict food and health regime in July and have lost 26lbs in weight and so I am very pleased about that and so it isn’t just the Texas Hold Em that is going well.

For new readers then I also write for three major poker magazines in Poker Pro Europe, Online Poker Pro and Player Ireland. The challenge isn’t all the poker that I have been playing though and I have had had a good year short stacking Pot Limit Omaha and No Limit Texas Hold Em games and made around $10,000 from that also. If I could write less and dedicate myself a little more then $100k isn’t out of the way for me as there is a lot of weak money at the lower levels. I try and stay clear of the good players these days.

Life is never dull…..or is it?

I wanted really to discuss my Texas Hold Em online poker and what my ideas and philosophies are in this blog but I also felt that discussing a little about my history would help readers to see me in the real light so to speak. After working as a croupier from 1990-1998 then I became a financial consultant for a while but hated that job and left. During the period from 1998-2002 then I played blackjack semi-professionally (don’t know if that is the right term) and I was asked to write a book about it which I later did. Blackjack although easier to get away with in the UK than the US also became played out with the arrival of the shuffling machines and the automated games.

But I had been playing online poker since 2000 when I was playing on a site called Planet Poker but the software was terrible and only about a couple of hundred people were online. Only yesterday I logged onto www.pokerstars.co.uk and there were nearly 200,000 people online and it wasn’t even peak time. But anyway I played limit hold’em back then. I wasn’t very good by today’s standards and I had read Sklansky’s books and a few by Ciaffone but that was enough to get me an edge up to and including $10-$20 limit games.

I made a decent living for a while but by 2005 then it was clear that the limit games were getting very tough and I had played relatively high stakes at $50-$100 for a while but I simply hated the financial swings at that level and moved back down. The game was the first to become theoretically solved and so by 2007 I had become extinct as it were as a limit player. In 2008 then this was my most eventful year to date as a poker player but it was also my least productive. I had switched to playing NLHE and was playing at levels as high as $25-$50 which looking back was clearly far too high.

I had managed to secure a financial backer and so the risk wasn’t mine. I suffered my worst ever dip as a full time player when I dropped twenty buy-ins at $5000 a throw. Being $100k in the whole was sobering but even now I don’t know how I clawed that back. I more or less got the money back with some high variance good fortune but the whole saga left mental scars and I found that I no longer wanted to play high stakes poker or had the stomach for it even if I had a backer.

So I eventually moved down to the level that I am now which is $0.50-1.00. I learned new skills and how to multi-table effectively and suddenly I was playing poker not like a “poker player” but far more automated that I had ever imagined. I had discovered that to make the most money in online poker for someone with limited poker ability but bags of heart and potential involved playing in an almost anti-poker style……..I hope you will find my exploits and diary informative and revealing.