Mission Improbable 3: A Journey (tl;dr)

[illini43]

I figured I would post this here because I began my poker career with MTTs and I have been hanging around here since Feb. 2004.

The following is a trip report of my poker career which might be of some interest for someone who is bored and wants to read a personal story…

My story begins with playing play money games on Stars my senior year of high school. One afternoon, someone popped into the chat box and offered to trade real money for play money. People started calling this guy a scammer, but he grabbed my interest. So I ended up contacting him at another table on Stars and arranged a deal. He would trade me $.50 for 90,000 play chips. I really don’t know why he wanted play chips so badly, but I figured, why not... if he is a scammer, they are only play chips. So he sent me two installments of $.25 and low and behold I was ready to play for real money online!

I grinded .02/.04 LHE for a few days and built up this meager bankroll to around $8. I entered a few $1 tournaments for fun, but my first few were unsuccessful. Then, I hit it big. Having never played 7 card stud in my life, I entered a $1 tournament on afternoon. I ended up besting the field of ~ 560 and won $140 for 1st. None of my friends believed me, and it took a while for me to explain to my girlfriend that I had won “real” money and not some fake online money. Anyways, I ended up cashing all of my money out and I was so proud (and lucky) of my success.

Fast forward to May of 2005. I had the urge to play online again, but I had no means to deposit. My parents are against online poker, so using their credit card was out of the question, and I didn’t want to go through the hassle of setting up a Neteller account. I found another poker forum that ran some freerolls on Stars (usually $100 prize pools).

Around 150 people showed up for the tournament, and I eventually made it down to 4 handed. One player was sitting out, so we all agreed to fold around to sap him of chips and knock him out. One player starting raising other peoples blinds to try and take advantage of us, so I re-popped him all-in once. The other player who was sitting in said he had AA and folded after I told him I would transfer $2 if I won. Sure enough, my AQ held over the raiser and I went on to win. I received a whopping $30, and I did actually transfer $2 to my opponent as I had stated.

With this slightly larger starting roll, I dove into the wide world of online poker. I built this roll up into the hundreds by grinding SNGs, playing low-limit MTTs, and dabbling in 25NL, but never kept more than $500 at a time online. Over the last year and a half, I have made ~$1800 from this meager start. This is a drop in the bucket for most posters here, but for a small-time college student grinder, this extra money was excellent to buy books, go out to dinner, etc.

In February of this year, I decided to cash my remaining $400 or so out because the climate for online poker seemed to be getting unfavorable for my tastes. I was lucky and cashed it out using e-check a few days before Stars cancelled the ability to use that service.

I haven’t really played any poker since February. I’ve been busy with school (I’m a sophomore at the University of Illinois – Champaign Urbana) and other stuff, and really haven’t had an urge to play poker. Last week I played in a charity tournament on campus just for fun (terrible structure btw), and it has rekindled some of the fire I used to have for the challenge of poker.

I was fortunate enough to win $3.75 in a PPA Freeroll on Full Tilt yesterday, and I am beginning to embark on another journey. Hopefully, this will not fizzle out in the early stages and I will be able to continue to play for a while. I am in the process of setting up an e-passporte account, which may or may not be a good thing from what I have been reading the past few weeks on 2p2, so I can re-deposit if need be.

Anyways, I guess the whole point of this is to show that you really don’t need to start with a whole lot to make a few bucks in poker. Taking a few months off has really refreshed my thought process when it comes to poker, and hopefully I can turn this rekindled love into some more profit. If anyone is feeling burnt out or needs to refocus, seriously take at least a month off and don’t even think about poker. I haven’t look at a thread on 2p2 that isn’t in an other topics forum for quite some time, and I feel I am much sharper on poker-related issues because of the break.

Thanks for reading!

[ItalianFX]

Cool story. I like reading things like this.

[gobboboy]

You're a good kid, Nick. Good read. Let me know if you want to go out to dinner again before you leave for home.

[illini43]

Update (7/3/07):

So...after reading about bots, and not having the drive to grind a bankroll up from $10 at Full Tilt, I decided to redeposit on Stars using Moneygram in mid-May for the 10 billionth hand promotion. I was grinding .25/.50 and .5/1 limit to clear the 25% bonus, then I started playing my bread-and-butter cash game, $25 Full Ring, and ran at a completely unsustainable 14 BB/100 over about 5k hands. Reading NLHE Theory and Practice really, really helps...

By the beginning of June, I had improved my online roll to about $750 from my initial $250 deposit. I had been playing an hour and a half or so each night after I got home from my 9-5 summer job in downtown Chicago (paid internships FTW!) By the middle of June, I was hardly playing at all. My girlfriend and other friends finally got home from school and I didn't have too much time to play, which is probably a good sign that I have a life.

Anyways, I started playing tournaments again the last week of June. I continued my amazing streak of not cashing in a 4/180 (23 in a row now!) and was mixing in some of the larger $3.30s and $5.50s on Stars. Last Friday night I was stuck home babysitting my siblings, so I decided to fire up a bunch of tournaments. I went 1/8 in cashes, but that cash was a chopped first place in a $5.50 big multi for $1130, my biggest score ever. I cashed out about $750 from my roll to get it back into my hard currency bankroll in the actual bank and have left the rest online to continue playing tournaments and begin to play the $10s and maybe dabble in the $15s and $5.50 rebuys.

I think my story might be one of the slowest moving "career" reports, and I'm definitely nitty when it comes to bankroll management. Anyways, just figured I would update... Maybe I'll eventually make it to the levels where some of you guys play down when you are just messing around [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[EGO]

Nice read. Keep up the good work.

[Shocker101]

good work keep it up...