[davidross]

I am just completing my first year of Poker. At 42 years of age I discovered the game via the internet (I had played some informal home games in my 20's but it couldn't be called poker). I have played almost exclusively online because of the lack of free time (full time job and 4 kids to be driven to activities on the weekend), and no local cardrooms. In the last 2 months I have had some time off between contracts, and a cardroom opened 1/2 an hour from me so I have begun to discover the very different live game too. But I start work again in January so I think online is my future for now. I play almost every night for a couple of hours after my wife and kids are in bed. I estimate I have played about 80,000 hands online so I think I have better than an equivalent year of live play.

SO if you are still with me I will try to get to the point of this post. I just want to share my findings with other new and experienced players. Ask the better players for advice on how to continue to improve and maybe help others trying to do the same thing.

First let me say I am pretty much a break-even player. I have put in $900 total to my Paradise account. I have taken out $500 and I have $1,600 in my account right now. SO I'm up $1,200 over an estimated 700 hours playing 2 tables. If I'd gone to Macdonalds to flip burgers I'd be way ahead. BUT!!... I think I'm still way ahead of 75% of the other players. AND...I keep my results by the stakes I'm playing. I am up $4,000 at 2/4, Down 1,800 at 3/6 and down 1,000 at 5/10.

I started like any other newbie trying to play every hand and win every pot. I bought Lou Krieger's book and began to get an idea of starting hands and positional play. I do recommend the book to any new players. Then I discovered the 2+2 forum and a whole new world opened up to me. I bought HPFAP, but to be honest, very little of it sunk in at first. I am reading it again now for about the 5th time (Some sections have been read 30 times at least) and only now is some of it making any sense at all. I loved to read the mid-high stakes posts here at 2+2, but again, I didn't understand what they were talking about, and most of it isn't relevant to the games I play. But the low stakes posts were an unbelievable aid to me. The advice and tips I got here was invaluable. You do of course have to weed out the good advice from the bad, but you can figure out pretty quickly who's opinions to respect and who you can ignore. Also it was important to find people who play the game the way you want to play it. Now after a year of improving I find myself reading the mid-high sections much more than the low.

So what have I discovered?

1) No matter how well I play, most of my winnings comes from bad play by others. This is more common at 2/4 and that's where most(all) of my winning has taken place.

2) You need to make the most from your winning hands (I think I do a good job of this) and lose the least from your losing hands (I do a very poor job of this). In the next year I want ot work on making that extra value bet or check-raise on the river, and getting off losing hands sooner. Specifically I have a problem when I have raised pre-flop. I can't seem to switch gears when someone plays back at me and I continue to chase my unmproved AK or AQ, or my big pocket pair when facing an obvious AA. THis will be my biggest challenge if I want to go to the next level.

3) There is no perfect play in poker. I used to play some competitive chess and in chess there was always the right move for a situation that was fixed on the board. In poker, everything is dependant on information you don't have so you need to estimate. Against one opponent you make one play and against others you make a totally different play in the same situation. This is difficult for me, but I am improving at it.

4) I need to stop trying to win every session. Especially live when I get to go so rarely, it seems I start to play hands that are too weak in the last hour before my departure time. I have turned some modest losses into big losses that way. Online is a little easier for me because I will play again tomorrow, but I need to improve my discipline live.

5) the differences between online and live are considerable. The 2/4 online game seems to me to be as difficult as the 10/20 game live I play. But they are very different. Online you can often win a pot with a flop bet. Live this just never happens. Almost everyone see's the turn. If I get a free play in the Blind with T9 and the flop comes 9 high, I cannot bet out and expect to win that pot. Online quite often you can.

there is so much more information available live. Just looking to my left from early position I can usually count how many people are going to fold pre-flop. What an advantage. However, I am much less likely to bluff live. I find it harder to do staring at people who are right there.

If you have gotten this far, thanks for letting me ramble. It helps me to organise my thoughts when I write them like this. I thank all of the 2+2'ers that have exchanged information with me this past year and all my paradise buddies that I have learned to stay out of pots with. I hope I can update you this time next year and tell you I am now beating the 3/6 and 5/10 games too.