Graph from the first week of 2011..

As you can see I ran like hell towards the end of the week. There were some pretty sick beats there, and probably a few BIs of tilt. Made an epic comeback on the last day or so which made me feel SO much better.

Just started a 14 day trial at the training site dragthebar.com. I've only watched a few videos, mainly BlackRain79's Crushing the micros series. Pretty good as far as I've gotten into it. Not sure yet if I will purchase a membership once the trial runs out, I'll have to decide that closer to the end. I'll give my thoughts on the site here if anyone might be interested.

Well, getting offline now, maybe watch some TV or just crash early tonight. Goodnight blog.

First week of 2011 in review...

Well for the first week of Jan 2011 I played just over 10k hands and have made a pretty decent profit. Towards the middle of the week I hit a bad run where I ran several BIs below EV which had me in a pretty bad mood. That is something I want to work on also as I progress in my poker career. I don't want my attitude towards non-poker related things to reflect the current trend of my graph.

I feel I am playing pretty good right now and hope to continue. I haven't taken any shots at 5NL yet, mainly because of the swing I experienced in the middle of the week. I plan on revising my BRM strategy tonight, after I finish up my sessions for the day.

Regarding Ironman I have reached 50 FPPs for 5/10 days. I took Saturday and Sunday off to go to a bonfire... Yes, it is January. Yes, I live in northern Michigan. Yes, I said bonfire. It was a really fun time. I was torn on whether I wanted to go or to grind out two more days of FPPs. I decided on going since I was sick over New Year's Eve. I dont regret it at all, it was one of the more fun bonfires I have went to, and suprisingly I stayed pretty warm considering we were in <20 degrees F, and out there for 6 or 7 hours. Of course, the alcohol helped a lot =P... No time right now to upload any pictures, dinner time, then I have to finish the last half of my daily sessions. Will post a bankroll update as well as a year-to-date graph. See you later, blog.

Welcome, 2011...

Happy New Year! I hope to start 2011 on a good note and so far it has been good. I feel like I am playing some of my best poker and I hope to hit some new career highs in the next few months. Played one short session tonight, just had the urge to play and figured why not, played for an hour. 9 tabled 2NL for an hour and ended with a grand total of 500 hands. Up a BI and a half for the new year so I cant complain.

In 2011 I hope to achieve quite a bit. Each month I will have at least the Bronze level of Iron Man to reach for. I am going to see about how many Iron Man points I get per 500 or 1k hands to give me a rough estimate on hands per week/day.

Bronze has the lowest points per day (pp/day) at 50 and I must get 20 days worth. 25 days with the same pp/day and it is Silver which seems pretty easy. Over the 500 hands I played tonight I gained 13 Iron Man Points (FPPs as I will refer to these now.) So hopefully I can reach bronze/silver pretty easily.

Goals Jan 2011-June 2011:
Reach at least Bronze level by end of May 2011
Have 25+ BIs for 5NL+
Reached each monthly goal
Reached my weekly goals each month


Goals Jan 2011:
Reach at least bronze level Iron Man
Play 50k hands
Take shots at 5NL when rolled

Those are some general goals for the first half of the year, as well as the first month. Time for bed now, hope to get a good and early start tomorrow and post my goals for the first week of the new year. Leave ya with a graph of my last 15k hands or so. Hope to keep going up.

Stats and graph over about 37k hands...

Just a quick post with my stats at 2NL so far. I started several weeks ago getting used to Poker Tracker 3 since I only really used the HUD when I had the trial. PT3 is a must have if you actually want to make money playing online poker. Even with only one table it is a major asset. More than 4 tabling even 2NL would take a tremendous amount of concentration and notetaking with no HUD and is pointless when using the HUD you can easily double the tables you play with a HUD and would be much easier to concentrate.

The last 10k hands or so I think I have my game closer to where I want it, although, as you can see, I am still pretty much break even player over 37k hands. I beleive I have plugged several major leaks along the way, add that to running below EV for a large portion of the time and I guess BE is a good result. 37k hands isnt really much either and if I can avoid running awful I think I can be taking shots at 5NL rather soon. Knock on wood...

A few things I will work on are opening up my 3bet%. Not by much, mainly just 3betting a little lighter vs certain villains. Say 3bet bluffing vs villains with high FoldTo3bet% over a decent sample size. Another thing I will try to play more hands in the Hi Jack position and less in the SB, table dynamics provided. I beleive playing too loose in the SB is a leak I have to fix and by shifting %age to LP might be the ticket. Will share the results..

Goals n stuff..

Well obviously my goal is to become a winning player at the highest stakes i can reach. Getting there is going to be a difficult task. Each month I will have a set amount of goals, nothing to do with results, more like volume goals for the month, hand analysis on a couple forums, Ironman staus, etc. I will also attempt to have similar weekly goals, as well as yearly goals..

My bankroll management system will more than likely change as I move up in limits. Generally, through 10NL, I want to have about 20 buy ins to be playing each limit, while taking shots at the next limit.

At 2NL I currently only have 12 or so BIs but being the lowest limits I cannot drop down. I will start by grinding 2NL between 6-9 tables until I reach 22.5 BIs ($45.) Then I will substitute one table of 5NL on each session until I drop below 22.5 BIs and will substitute one more table per 1.5 BIs earned at 5NL (shot tables as I will call them.) I will try to use this method until I reach 20 BIs for 5NL ($100) then I will attempt the same with 10NL until I have 20 BIs there. Once at 10NL I will revise this plan most likely by upping the BI requirements. This is mainly because I have little exp with anything higher than 10NL.

I am going to attempt to use a mental stop-loss in this BRM system. Until I am comfartably rolled for 2NL (20 BIs) it will be a relatvely low thresh hold. Something around 2-3 BIs, until I have a roll I dont like to play after I lose a significant portion of my BR. 3 BIs is about %25 of my BR and I feel I would tilt too often and not be playing my best. I admi this is something I have had trouble with in the past, chasing losses. Sometimes I worked but when it didnt it was a really bad feeling. Of course this is all just the framework, Im sure I will come up with something better later.

At each table if I double up I will leave the table before the next blinds. There are a few exceptions, like if I have 2 or 3 fish to my right with full stacks, or even 1 deepstacked, table dynamics have to be very good for me to stay after doubling up, something I struggle with.

Table selection will be mainly no more than 2 short stacks (40bbs) and none can be on my direct left or right. I will choose table with a high average pot and the highest players per flop, 30%+ is good. After 2 orbits I will look over the table and decide if I want to stay. If there are loose players (~30% VPIP) to the left of me (closest 2 or 3 seats) I will leave. If there are no players with a VPIP of over 25% to my direct right I will leave the table. I will be playing 9 tables to start and maybe moving to more when I have a larger BR.

Well thats it for now, quite long. Next I will have some basic goals, maybe a graph and some stats. Peace.

Can you say... blog?

Ok well this is going to be blog I will try to update weekly. It will be a place for me to type out my goals, thoughts, rants, etc. as I take on the task of grinding the lowest stakes of online poker. I have no idea whether anyone will read this or not, but if you do feel free to leave a comment.


A Little About Myself

I am currently 22 years old, and have been playing poker recreationally for about 5 years. It started with homegames with several friends, nothing too serious just something to do and have a few drinks. Really none of us knew what we were doing, out of the 10 or so people that would play.

I have never played online until I seen some ads either online or on the television for PartyPoker. I installed it and messed around with play money for a while. The game interested me from the start and I started looking online for strategies and other info on the game. I ran across a few forums in which I liked from the start and started reading as many posts as I could. Most of the things I read I had no idea what I was reading yet I kept reading. I tried to use some of the concepts I read while playing playmoney but still had no idea what I was doing.

I started getting better and spent many hours reading, I moved to full tilt after hearing that there was free entry into tournaments that paid out in real money. I played these nightly for a while but never made anything significant. I continued to play with playchips and started doing good. I made my way up to 100k and before I knew it I was at 20m or so. I felt like a pro and decided I should deposit some real money, well, $50 was real to a young kid making min. wage at a fast food joint.

I put the money on and within seconds I had $50 on my online poker account. It was time to make thousands... That was the idea at least. I jumped into a 10NL table (the lowest stakes on FTP at the time) and started playing. I started doing good, made several buy-ins and felt great. Then all hell broke loose, before I knew it I was down to $25 in a day. I got my ass handed to me and I knew it, so I went back to studying as much as possible.

Eventually I found my way to $1 and $2 sit and go tables and found they were similar to my regular homegames. I read as much as I could about them and started playing a few of those every day for quite a long time and over several months made it to about $80 or so. Then I had to move and lost access to the internet for about a year so I ended up cashing out most of my money.

I have just recently been playing and made my way from about $10 to about $25 playing micro single table tournaments. I have now taken an interest in cash games and have finally invested in PokerTracker 3. I plan on seriously attempting to put in as much volume as possible starting at 2NL and working my way up.

I am by no means a good player, there are many leaks in my game that I try to work on constantly. I will post goals and starting bankroll in the next post, as well as the bankroll management plan I will attempt to stick too, at least until I reach 10NL or 25NL.