[obloni]

Hello Freelancer,

I am a 23 year old student doing my 4th and final year in an engineering course in London. I haven't been playing poker very long, and by chance I found out about this site by someone talking about it on PokerStars. Good luck for me I guess, since I wouldn't have seen your post if I didn't.

1) What site do you play?

I currently play on PokerStars, but of course I will not have a problem playing at the other major sites.

2) What limits do you play?

Most of my time spent has been in the $10NL ring games. Occasionally I have gone up to the $25NL for a try and change. However, I haven't yet felt confident enough to be able to play regularly at the $25NL tables.

3) Experience?

I was introduced to poker in the winter of 2005, but only as an occasional game at home amongst friends. Online poker, I have played for about 3 months now. I have had not much live poker experience; been to some home games and joined a tournament in Gutshot Card Club (London).


4) Goals with poker?

I am about to graduate in June this year, and I have had some job offers, but none that I am particularly keen on taking up. I was considering taking one year off to play poker full-time seriously, and then see how it would go from there.

Ideally of course, I would want to be able to play and hold my own in the biggest limits on the internet, and be confident enough to enter some big live tournaments. I suppose though that that would be too much of a far cry, but I think the minimum goal for me would be to reach the $1000NL tables playing all variants within a year. However, if your specialty is hold 'em, that is very fine by me too.

5) Drive

If I am chosen to be your protege, I'm not sure how you plan to conduct the training sessions, but I am prepared to put in 6 hours per day on weekdays (since I still have a project to finish) and up to 12 hours on weekend working on my poker. (i know i know, it sounds a bit nazi like the way i put it; btw no offense to anybody if i did step on some toes saying this)

When I was a teen, I used to play chess for my country, and I spent probably 4 hours a day on studying and loads more travelling around during the weekend playing tournaments. I am no stranger to putting an effort into something I want to do well in, and I currently feel that my poker game is far below average (I only scored 103 on the donkeytest) and I really do want to improve it by several notches. Since I'll be graduating in June, I will have plenty of time if I decide to take a year off to explore online poker with more depth.

I do have several real life friends who take poker seriously as well, and sometimes during home games we would play hands and then everyone would show their hand after it was done so that the whole group could participate in a discussion of how best it would have been to play that hand etc. This didn't work out very well though, as it tended to take too long for the discussions; and we all agreed that if we did this all the time everyone would know each other's style too well.

During my time playing poker I have tried to read up as many books as I can, i.e. Super System 1,2 , Theory of Poker, Ace on the River, Making the Final Table, +some really horrible poker books (amazing what bookstores can sell nowadays).. but it does seem like the best way to learn poker really is to play it and have people around you whom you can discuss ideas with.


Finally, if you do decide to take me up; I will be more than thrilled to put up the $1000 bankroll to match yours (I currently only have about $300 in PokerStars); and if you don't-- I'll look forward to reading all of your posts in the future.

Thanks very much for your time.