Sunday 26 July 2009

The Grind Begins

Starting from today, i am now home alone for the week.

As i don't often get the opportunity, i thought this would be a good time to get in a high volume of sngs. I'm still playing the $3.40 9-man sngs on pokerstars, and my aim for the week is to play 100 of these. I know this doesn't sound a large amount, however i have never been able to play this amount in a single week since playing online. I'm hoping that by the end of the 100 sngs i will finish with a significant profit, and am also able to place high on the battle of the planet leaderboards...

Speaking of which, tonight i played in this months battle of the planets shootout. I didnt think much of the players on my table if i'm honest. They all seemed to be playing too tight, so i decided to step up the agression. I made it to heads up play with the two of us on pretty equal chips, the winner of this would move on to next table and net $195. After a few hands i get dealt AQs on the button. He raised it up, so i shoved. Was heartbroken when he turned the AK. I couldnt improve and he had me just covered... GUTTED!!

Anyway, back to the grind. Today I woke up late. This is the result of a late one at a friends house the previous night. For this reason i only managed to play 4 sngs. Didn't do too bad though. Came 1st in 2, 2nd in 1, resulting in a $21.9 profit. Not off to a bad start. Lets hope this continues for the rest of the week!



On a side note... Currently playing the 250k on pokerstars after satteliting in. I'm currently 1844 out of 6487. Will let you know how i did in the next blog.

Ciao.

Saturday 25 July 2009

My Poker Career!!

This is my 1st entry, and would love feedback from those who read it.



Brief history of my poker career, from introduction to now...

I was initially introduced to poker about 3 and half years ago, when me and a group of my friends decided to skip school for the afternoon, got together, and had our 1st home game. At this time, none of us really knew what we were doing. Our basic knowledge of the hand ranks was enough to see us through. These home games then became a regular occurrence, with the same group of friends playing week in week out.

Looking back on it, the early games were of a very low standard, and were regularly won by the same few people. The rest of us believed they were just getting lucky consistently, however they were the first ones to realise the importance of strategy, especially that of folding and playing in position.

After around a year of this, I went off to university. Here one of my flatmates introduced me to online poker. He was a good player with a consistent win rate online. I decided to deposit $20 and take a shot.

I started playing $1.20 9 man sngs on pokerstars, and beating them consistently, i slowly started to increase my roll. At this point, i hadn't read anything on poker strategy, but managed to increase my roll to around $150.

During the latter stages of 1st year, and early stages of 2nd year, my BR started to dwindle. At this time i was playing online cash with my friends where we would just coin flip for fun. Although my bankroll dropped significantly during this period, i never needed to redeposit.

In 2nd year, my housemate started staking me for the $4.40 180 man mtts, believeing i had an edge over the over players who entered. After a while, i managed to get a number of cashes, including a 1st place finish which pushed my bankroll toward the $250 barrier. During this time, i also read a lot of articles on poker stategy and improved my game significantly.

Recently, grinding the $3.40 9 man sngs, i have managed to increase my bankroll further. This was fortunately helped by a significant bonus for placing on pokerstars battle of the planets leaderboards.




So 3 years of home games and online poker brings us to where I am now...

My bankroll today stands at: $471.16