How did you get where you current are?

[bobdibble]

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A reply to noone in particular but it seems that nobody has grinded his way from microlimits. And everybody has been lucky in the beginning..

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I came up from the micros .5/1. I wasn't terribly lucky during the 1/2 phase and ran flat for a long time, although, chasing bonuses kept my BR growing even though I wasn't running great.

[bernie]

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I started my latest roll with $.15 on a .01-.02 table.

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That's only 7BB! That's horrible bankroll managment and is a good way to go broke. You may want to read up on br managment in the beginners forum.

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LOL...Yeah, I may've had to look in the cushions of my couch to replenish that if I needed to. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

b

[Dazarath]

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I started my latest roll with $.15 on a .01-.02 table.

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You're playing way over your BR. Move down in limits.

[Captain R]

I did the traditional, conservative method. By nature, I'm pretty risk-adverse and conservative so this worked for me.

I've played games my whole life, starting with hobby board games at a young age (7 or 8) through high school and then switched to video games in college. Post-college, I decided video games were a waste of time and money and switched back to hobby board games and cardgames and then started watching poker on TV like everyone else in 2003/2004. From that I started to grasp some of the basic concepts of poker strategy. February 2004 I decide to play a little 2-4 poker while skiing in Lake Tahoe and win something like $20. I prepped by reading Lee Jones and was happy with the outcome.

Spring 2004 I decide to drop by my local cardroom during lunch with $100 in my hand. Played 2-4 live for an hour and won a little money. Went back and got hooked and started playing 10-15 hours a week. I read SSHE and tried to apply some of the concepts correctly. I got it about half right. I grew my bankroll to about $1200 playing 2-4 and decided I had enough to play 3-6 live (the rake was killing me in 2-4!) and did that for another 6 months. My bankroll at this point was 200 BB for the 6-12 game so I switched to that. Did well for a few weeks, and then reality set in and I lost about half my bankroll in about a week. Went back to 3-6 for a few months and realized how little I knew about the game and took some more time to build up my bankroll and skills.

Had one very informative session playing 3-6 live with a friend of mine who regularly plays 40-80, and he pointed out about 3 or 4 fundamental flaws I was making:

- you need hands that can stand a raise in a maniacal game
- you can slow down on the aggression, just because you raise preflop doesn't mean you need to go pedal to the medal throughout the whole hand. i.e., it's OK to check! [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]
- putting people on hands

I think this one session was worth a couple of months playing alone, so I definitely see the value in coaching or playing with better players who will critique your play. I corrected those mistakes, built my bankroll up again and hit the 6-12 tables. This second time around I had the skills to beat the 6-12 game and now my normal game is 8-16 (sometimes 1/2 kill), so I guess I sort of qualify to post in this forum (12-24 kill pots [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]).

Now I'm trying to apply HEFAP and MLHE concepts to my game to take me to the next level. Still learning a little everyday.

By the way, what is the "way behind/way ahead" concept? Is that where the idea is to check and call because you're either one or the other?

[SomethingClever]

Came home (to Portland from LA) for some reason in 2003 and my brother (billygrippo) was really into poker. I played some play money on his Stars account and cleaned up.

Next I played a live game with him and his friends, sucked out a lot and came up $65. I was hooked.

Deposited $50 into Party Poker and ran it up to $350 playing $25 NL. Lost all of that in about two weeks on an agonizing downward spiral of tilt. I still pretty much had no idea what I was doing preflop, but I believe I was OK postflop relative to the competition.

I deposit another $50 and lose it pretty quickly.

I borrow $11 from billygrippo to play a SNG and win. I take that $50 and turn it into $550. I lose that down to about $300 and decide to cash out while I'm ahead. I start playing $0.01/$0.02 NL on Stars.

I book a winrate of something like 35 bb/100 in that game and decide I need to learn limit because my brother in law (balkii) seems to be making a killing at the 3/6. I lose money at the .25/.50 on stars, then the .5/1, then I say what the heck and put $300 into a new Empire account and begin play.

Ran damn hot at .5/1 for a long time, began mixing in 1/2, ran hot there as well, began mixing in 2/4 where I got owned. I was a weak tight nit with a vpip of about 12.

I started playing 6-max. This taught me a lot about the game. Crushed the 1/2 for a while, then had my first 300 BB downswing, followed by an amazing upswing. Played some 2/4 6-max on Stars and ran well.

Started 4-tabling the 5/10 6-max. Ran horribly and booked a winrate of less than 0.2 over 38,000 hands. Dropped to 3/6 and sucked there too.

Currently back grinding 2/4 6-max on stars with an eleventy billion BB bankroll, taking shots at the 5/10. [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

[Mempho]

Well...I'm not an everyday poster and I don't claim much in the way of poker greatness, but I thought I might chime in here. Strangely enough, I seem to be one of the older posters here at age 27...but my story is very similar. I started out in 2001 at Paradise Poker simply because I was dateless on a night when all of my friends had date (I was a senior in undergrad at the time). I immediately fell in love with the game. I noticed some people walking around the play money tables with 100,000+ chips when they only issued you 1,000 at a time. I immediately recognized that the skill element in poker was very real. As a result, I just had to figure it out.

Time went by and I struggled at first. I went to Tunica several times to play 2/4 and dropped a rack each time. After some help from PSO, I started to beat the .50/1 game immediately. In fact, I pick up 700 BB within a few weeks. I went to graduate school for a year and got a masters degree in accountancy. I graduated after the Enron fallout and, as such, I was left high and dry without a job . I played 50NL on PartyPoker for December (the biggest NL game on Party at the time and most nights only 1 or 2 games ran). I made a $3,000 bankroll and cashed it out. I took the bankroll to Tunica and thought to myself, "well, I guess I'm a professional poker player." I was immediately making $1,000 a week until I left for work. All told, I made it as a live professional for 5 months (until I got a job). I went to the 2003 World Series where I met a soon-to-be-famous group of players around my age. I came back home and started a "real job." I watched my friends on television, and, as such, I've always wondered what could have been. My job is good, however, and I enjoy it. I am now a semi-professional and I had a decent year last year but, of course, I really miss the opportunity to play more than the average of 10 hours a week that I now get to play.

This year, I began to run especially bad in live play. I knew it was bad luck, and, as a result, I looked toward online poker due to the speed of the game. My reasoning was that I could get to the "long-term" faster in online play. That said, I find the game much more difficult. My tell-reading ability gets me in and out of marginal situations during live play. I simply don't have that in online play. That said, my dream is to get together about $120,000, buy a business, and play poker.

[Catt]

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A reply to noone in particular but it seems that nobody has grinded his way from microlimits. And everybody has been lucky in the beginning..

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Then I'm the exception to both.

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Me too. Deposited $1K. Played a few hundred hands of .50/1. Moved to 1/2. Played ~20K hands; didn't run hot and didn't run bad; did OK. Moved to 2/4. Played ~35K hands. Did well. Went on a 200 BB downswing at the end, but was convinced I was playing well and better than my competition. Moved to 3/6. Played ~20K hands and ran really well. Moved to 5/10 full; played ~5K hands and did well; decided to learn 6-max. Played 5/10 6-max. Rough learning curve and a long breakeven stretch, but heck, I was learning the game. After ~55K hands moved to 10-20 6-max. Think I'm doing well and I'm winning, but too soon to tell how I stack up. Will begin taking shots at short 15/30 and 20/40 sometime soon, hopefully.

So, started at micros, never really ran hot for an extended streak until a nice burst at 3/6, and still chugging away.

I read and reread a bunch of 2+2 books through the course of this and spent a lot of time soaking up the forums. Being willing to argue reasonably and cogently for your point of view (no matter how inaccurate it is) and being willing to listen to others and understand why they're making sense and you're not, combined with a resource like 2+2, is hugely beneficial.

[AlexSem]

I met a dude who told me he played poker and made serious bucks in one of those totally random places on IRC. What a fluke that changed my life around [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

He told me to get some poker books (you can guess which) and I was off and starting my poker career at .5/1$ limit on party.

I had no money of my own, in fact, I was flat broke and my parents wouldn't even consider giving me any to gamble away with. My now friend Doc basically gave me 100$ to start with. I lost that in 2 days. Lol! the devastation and the hubris of the defeated.

I think I was depressed the whole month of September 2004. I lost 300$ of his dollars but at last... learned my lesson somehow and got off to a good start bumping it to 500$ in October.

Moved to 1/2, to 2/4, to 3/6... By January I was at something like 3500 and trying 5/10 SH.

That limit was [censored] hard. I was getting crushed... And I kept getting crushed 4 times resulting in 2k worth of losses before I finally got a good break and won some at it. That was end of February I beleive...

I ran really good at 5/10 and moved straigh tto 15/30 with a roll of... I can't remember. Maybe I had 10k, maybe 12k. I believe I had 10 but man... I doubled that in 2 months and was at 20k and feeling like a superstar...

I went on to try 30/60 and had a good run there... The rest is just building my roll and making sure I don't fall [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]


I don't know where I am headed. I am not even sure if i am playing correctly at times, I tend to raise so much junk people like to call me a fish :P but hey, it's working and I am winning, so I guess it's all good.

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Question to BK, Scheids and the like - when'd you move beyond 30/60, how do you play them high high limits, etc.

[daryn]

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A reply to noone in particular but it seems that nobody has grinded his way from microlimits. And everybody has been lucky in the beginning..

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last summer i was dead broke... bankroll = $0. i borrowed $600 from a friend and $600 from my brother and started playing 2/4. within a week or two i had paid them back. then climbed the ladder, 3/6, 5/10, 10/20, 15/30, 30/60

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For some reason, I thought that you were an NLHE player...

I'm also curious about how the hell you became broke, but that's not really any of my business. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

How long did it take you to climb the ladder?

IIRC, I determined that I'd need to spend about two weeks to a month on a limit if I was beating it at 2bb/100 and wanted a 300bb roll for each limit. This doesn't take into account minor shifts in bet-size though (3/6 -> 5/10).

(Notice I said bet size, not talking about game quality.)

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i paid for a lot of stuff. i spent a lot on things like a brand new drum set, trips everywhere, and college tuition. i had like a 4k bankroll during my last semester of college and i went broke playing 10/20 6 max

[yellowjack]

It looks like the trend here is that you have to take shots to get anywhere, unless you want to take years to get from $1/$2 to $30/$60.

This thread has been toggled [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]