Total beginner - clearing PS $50 sign up bonus

[sooooooted]

Well ive finally decided to deposit money online after about 2 months of reading a few books and reading this forum. I have deposited $50 into pokerstars to get their $50 sign up bonus. What games should I be playing to clear this bonus? I am in no rush to clear it, I want to use good bankroll management and hopefully not go bust. I am thinking about playing some $1.20 SNG's and $1.75 turbo 18 seaters to start off with and moving up accordingly after I see what happens.

Also is there a good program where I can record my SNG results where it tells me ROI, ITM etc... and with a graph of profit/loss?

Thanks

Any help/advice for starting off would be great.

[Nightlight87]

I personally like the microstake cash games on PS. But if you prefer tournaments then playing the $1.20s and the $1.75 turbos seems like a good place to start.

And I'd recommend you get Poker Tracker as soon as you can, it allows you to import hand histories and tournament summaries and will track your ROI, ITM and a lot more. And you can use Poker Grapher to make some graphs if you like [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img].

[sooooooted]

Thanks for the advice, is there anything free what tracks just SNG results, I have used the free 1000 hands on PT and will be buying that when I start cash games after I have built up a decent bankroll.

[dcf4]

sharkscope is free, well you get 5 free searches per day

[resboard]

Create a excel sheet. Make some basic columns for date buyin players finished place amt won etc and you can calculate the numbers you want easily

[MrWooster]

As resboard says - use excel for the moment and buy Poker Tracker when your have enough money.

The microstakes cash games are good on PS, but take note that you only get a FPP when the pot is bigger than $8 (I think), which is unusual at stakes lower than 10NL, so you will have a hard time clearing the bonus at the 0.01/0.02 micros. If you are more of a SNG person, I would suggest doing those until you have enough to play 10NL.

[Lyrrad]

I managed to clear my initial bonus by playing the $1 SNGs also exclusively. It'll take a while, but it's doable.

Also note that Sharkscope shouldn't be used. It's now on the banned list from PS, so don't use it while the PS client is open.

I made a Google spreadsheet (http://docs.google.com) to keep track of my results.