Brag: Finally reached $10K (very long with cliffnotes)

[DMoogle]

BBV Cliffnotes:
Brag: Finally reached $10K from poker
Beat: Took me about 180K hands
Variance: Started with 90 cents. Fun graphs below.


Even when I was a kid, as young as 8, I had been totally fascinated by gambling. I really liked video games (still do), and I got a gambling game called Vegas Stakes for my Super Nintendo. I thought it was awesome, and I thought being a professional gambler would've been the coolest thing in the world. I never really played poker until I was 13 or so with my friends for $5 or less at a time.

A year and twelve days ago, I got $.90 for free on a small site call All In Poker for some really crappy promotion they had. I was seventeen years old and still in high school (I graduated a year early because that's how I roll). The lowest limits on that site were $.05/$.10 Limit, so I only had a 9BB bankroll, but that was enough for me to gogogogogogogogo.

Well, I obviously didn't go broke. I was already a 2+2 member, and was soaking up all the information I could about this game. I read a guide on how to build a bankroll, and that 300BBs is a solid start. So I decided that I was going to build up to $30 then move onto PokerStars, which I heard was rake-free in the lowest limits (I believe they originally only raked the limits of Limit $.50/$1 and above, but when I joined, the highest limit that was rake-free was $.05/$.10). The reason I waited until I reached $30, a 300BB bankroll, was because that was the minimum amount required to cashout from the small site I was playing at, which I believe was a part of the Prima network. I remember when I reached $5, a person joined my table and bought in for $700. He claimed that poker had no skill, and to prove his point he didn't do anything but raise the entire time he played. I tripled my bankroll through him for a cool $15.

So I eventually I built up to $30, moved to PokerStars, and just grinded all the way up to $100. I think I only played one table at that time, so progress was a bit slow. I moved to $.10/$.20 when my bankroll reached $80 because I didn't think the rake made it worth it. After that, I moved around a lot of sites just looking for free bonuses that were easy to clear. A site called empirebacker.com gave me $50 on some Prima site for signing up, and that was a very easy bonus to clear. Then the owner of that site came up with another site, freepokerquiz.com, that gave other bonuses for taking poker quizzes every day and getting $10 here and there. I won one of their special monthly quizzes for a free iPod when my bankroll had reached $300 (playing $.25/$.50 and $.50/$1 on Titan Poker at the time). That was a nice gift.

In addition to low stakes Limit, I'd occasionally dabble in Sit-N-Gos, and I still do play them, but they're not really my thing. I usually play them as a way to relieve tilt. The freepokerquiz.com bonuses on Titan Poker were really nice for my bankroll, so I stayed there for a while. Unfortunately, Titan Poker didn't save hand histories to the hard drive at the time, so that part of my poker career is missing in my Poker Tracker database.

I've always been a very frugal money spender, and that shows in my bankroll management skills. I'm a total nit with my bankroll. I eventually moved to the Cryptologic network when my bankroll reached $450 or so, because of bonuses+rakeback, which I heard was excellent for bankroll building. I believe I was playing $.35/$.70 at the time, and started to experience some variance that was practically non-existent at the levels below that. Up to this point, I was kind of afraid of NL (which, ironically, was the only game I had ever played live with my friends), but I started to dabble in the $.10/$.25 games. It was at this time I played three donkaments and cashed in all three. The first two were about 50 people, and I think I came in 3rd and 5th. The buy-ins were really low, so it wasn't too much money, but the third one was about a $25 buy-in with nearly 200 people, and I came in second for a $1000 prize. I remember at the time I only played donkaments that had enough overlay to completely make up for juice. Boy am I a nit.

After the $1000 boost, I decided to actually spend some of my hard-earned money on one of the 1600x1200 monitors I had heard about that were oh-so-perfect for playing poker with. I'm a computer guy, so I did a lot of research on which was the best one, and finally decided on the Dell 2007FP (there was originally some kind of color banding problem with 2007FPs, but by the time I was looking for a monitor, this had been fixed). I waited for it to go on sale and I spent $425 on it. It was quite a nice upgrade from the 1024x768 CRT that was 5+ years old that I had been using. I still consider it one of the best investments I've ever made.

So after the monitor, my bankroll was about $1100. I suddenly had the urge to play heads-up NL. It's what I usually played with my friends, and I thought I was pretty good. I crushed the heads-up $.25/$.50 NL games on the Cryptologic network for about 15PTBB/100. While doing that, I decided I wanted to really learn NLHE, since I had heard that it was much more profitable than LHE (did I mention that the entire time I had played 6-max games, because FR sucks?). I did beat the $.25/$.50 and $.5/$1 NL, but it was very swingy. I was committed to playing a thousand hands a day, almost everyday, four-tabling. Overall I think my winrate was about 4PTBB/100. I built up my bankroll up to $2500, but had a $1000 downswing at one point when I tried moving back to $3/$6 and $5/$10 Limit which totally destroyed my confidence. I did pull out of it though.

I had heard of Party Poker having the softest games, but I had stayed away from it because I didn't think it was worth giving up rakeback for softer games. Someone posted that Party rakeback was actually possible, but it was that very week that I had planned to switch over when a certain bastard named Bill Frist helped get the UIGEA passed. Interpoker (the Crypto site I played on) took about two months to send me my check, but fortunately I had kept half my bankroll, which was about $5500 total in Neteller just in case.

I had already set up rakeback accounts at Ultimate Bet and Full Tilt Poker. I tried UB first because the rakeback was higher and the bonus was about the same. I didn't like the interface at all, so I quickly withdrew my money and moved (along with nearly every other 2+2er) to FTP. Between October and December I really had trouble beating the games (I was regularly playing $.50/$1 NL). During that period, I pretty much broke even even AFTER bonuses and rakeback. I had (have) a weakness for donkaments, and am probably $2K in the hole lifetime from those damn $150+$13 and $69+$6 Guaranteed donkaments. Fortunately I've learned proper donkament bankroll management (I thought 30 buy-ins was overrolled [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]), and now I don't play any higher than $24+$2, even though I'm way overrolled for that.

Around the middle of December, I really didn't feel like I was beating the games, and the $1000 I had initially deposited into FTP had winded down to about $400 when it had been up as high as $2400. I didn't totally quit, but I barely played at all in the second half of December, January and the first half of February. Also, my PT database had kind of gone wacko, and I had to start a new one. You can see in the new one's graph that in the beginning, I didn't make any money. In fact, I was about $2500 in the hole lifetime at $1/$2 NL. I think that game is where the money starts messing with my head. Most people say they become somewhat weak-tight when they move up. I became the opposite; a reckless loose-aggressive style that resulted in me making bad bluffs in pot after pot.

After my hiatus, I thought that if I was to one day become a real professional player like aba20/sbrugby/Brian Townsend (one of my idols), then I had to get off my ass and start working on my game. Unfortunately, I had (and still have) $3800 stuck in Neteller, so the only money I had to work with is the $400 or so I still had on FTP. I decided to start from the basics at $.05/$.10 NL and work my way up when I felt ready. This was in the middle of February, and I moved up pretty quickly from $.05/$.10 to $.10/$.25 to $.15/$.30 (I think I play well deepstacked, or at least I run hot [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]) to $.25/$.50 (not too much), to $.50/$1 with $.40/$.80, and, as of today, $1/$2. I bought a CardRunners subscription at the end of March, as I've heard that they've vastly helped many players' games. Since then, I've been playing, I think, extremely well, and running super hot. I'm up about $1350 (plus $250 for last month's rakeback [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]) in the past three days alone, playing $.40/$.80, $.50/$1, and $1/$2. I still stick to my 1000 hands a day schedule, and I hope to be disciplined enough to continue to do so. I also usually play between four and six tables. Anymore than that and my concentration and game just go way down.

As promised, here are my graphs. Database #2 follow directly after database #1.
Database #1, dollars:


Database #1, nicer graph in BBs


Database #2, dollars (sexy upswing, isn't it?)


Database #2, BBs

[dibbs]

Congrats man

[Sleek]

Nit! [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

Congrats and well done.

[The Velour Fog]

congrats

[fitnessfreak]

nh sir

[Spechel EDD]

im also a huge nit but 180k hands? really? im sorry to hear that :/

[effinA]

ull be be loosing/winning 5bis every hr in no time!

[feesjah]

nice

[DMoogle]

I was really tired last night when I wrote this, so there were a few details that I left out.

(1) When I was at the point where I just couldn't make any money, and donkaments + $1/$2 NL sucked up my bankroll, the lowest point I reached was $4500. But I felt there was like a "wall" between $6000 and $7000 that I just couldn't pass. That's one of the reasons I'm so proud of what I've done since the middle of February.

(2) I really feel that Cardrunners immensely helped my game "click", even though I've only been a member for about a month. I didn't even play for the entire first week of April (I was at the beach), and I've made about $2500 so far this month. My hourly rate is slightly over $50/hour. And that's almost entirely playing at $.40/$.80 and $.50/$1. I'm up $767 in $.40/$.80 in just 1815 hands. 26.41PTBB/100!

(3) I still have $10K to go to beat Chris Ferguson's achievement of $1 to $20K, but I'll definitely get there. And I'm sure it won't take as long as it took to get from $.90 to $10K.

EDIT: Occasionally people tell me that they're surprised at how disciplined I am with bankroll management. But I DO get urges once in a while to play in a really big (buy-in) tournament, just put most of my roll on a $25/$50 NL table, etc. Whenever this happens, I just think about how crappy I'd feel in the likely scenario that I do lose it. The urge then soon goes away. It's really not that hard for me.