Diary of a Newb (5 month checkup)

[itsmarty]

Great post. Thanks for taking the time to lay it out like that.

Martin

[MAxx]

sorry about the discussion of the rakeback. its great to see you succeeding..... congrats.

i started playing poker with friends in college occasionally (and we sucked). i kind of developed an interest in gambling somewhere along the line, and it was not real productive or healthy until i started studying poker.

for a while i was playing on the net at pokerpages.com in playmoney tourneys (about a year and a half ago). it was fun and i was learning. i bought a few poker books, and read.

i laid down $150 in this local tourney that friends of a buddy was organizing. it was around thirty some people in this no-limit tourney. my first and only live (yet smalltime) tourney. I won the damn thing and walked out with $1800 in cash.

I then decided I better play limit ring b/c you can go a long time in tourneys with out placing in the money. I dont like that. So I played in micros, being careful to learn before i lost my wad. I beat .50/1, then I beat 1/2, then I beat 2/4, (then i lost a quarter of my roll playing blackjack in AC), then I beat 2/4 again, then I beat 3/6, then I played mostly 3/6 with some 5/10. I cannot say that I have beat 5/10 full, I kind of lost interest. Now I am working on 5/10 short as it seems more profitable.

I read a dozen books, made 700+ questionable posts. Had a great time and built my pretax bankroll from 0 to around $8500 in a little over a year. Am i setting the poker world on fire?- nope. Am I makeing a little money on the side- yes. Do I have a great hobby- yes.

I am a tax accountant, so I feal obligated to pay tax on my earnings. I "lose" about 30% of all my winning to the tax man. This and the fact that I started out at .5/1, I think have slowed my roll. However, I think I have gotten a lot of growth.

i joined 2+2 around a year ago. i did not start being an active poster till probably some 3 or 4 months later. this was probably in my early 2/4 days. this site has helped me immensly, and it is very entertaining.

i had my growing pains with JTo kinda like you.

i had a lot of fears about moving up like you mentioned. and it takes a while getting used to the increased amounts. but the more i play, the more i think f--- it, i got the roll, the skills, time to get up.

thanks for sharing your post, much more of it sounded like my journey than i have mentioned. i am just a lazy sob and cant write anymore.

I am still just in the begining, I want to take it to much higher limits and I have a lot of learning to do still.


again good post and thanks for sharing, its like a lot of our experiences.

[beginner]

Thanks for your post, it gives me hope as I'm just starting out myself. My experience was similar in many aspects as I try to improve my play and climb higher in limits and bankroll.

In July of this year, after playing for free for a couple of months and slowly doubling my free credits on Pacific I decided to make my first real money deposit. I did this having never read anything about poker, and knowing almost nothing about strategy pre of post flop. Not surprisingly, my deposit of $40 and the first deposit bonus were gone within a week. I took a few weeks off, but convinced myself to deposit another $50 and give it another try being that I was sort of addicted to the game.

Within a few weeks I've increased my bankroll to $150 playing at the .10/.20 tables playing horribly. I then, mistakenly, started considering myself an intermediate player. Which caused it to be real hard when I dropped back down to $100 at .10/.20 short-handed tables in a two day span. Next, I decided that online poker was not my game and withdrew the $100 yielding a $10 profit planning to never play again.

In mid-August (just a month and a half ago) I logged into my account and noticed that I had built up a $2 bonus by playing, which I never cashed in. I went on to play .05/.10 tables, and started reading information on the net (which led me to this site - a goldmine of information). I've learned pre-flop game selection and post flop strategy by reading the board and applying it at the table. I've set bankroll goals for myself to move up to higher limits, and over the past month and a half, breezed through all limits until the current $2/$4, while building a bankroll of $1,000. Through it all I've been through 140BB downswings, so it was not all a good run of cards as most people on here would say.

In the past 5 days I've experienced another downswing and dropped back down to $700, and seem to be stuck there. I guess, aside from posts like yours, which give me hope, an important part of it is that none of the money I currently play with is mine. Although its a lot of money for me, I am not afraid to lose the remaining $700, and that keeps me level-headed and allows me to concentrate more on the game than my remaining bankroll. I've just started reading SSH - my first poker book and already picked up a few valuable concepts.

Although my overall game is obviously profitable, I think I still suck at poker and don't expect anyone here to take my posts seriously for a while. Thanks for sharing your story, I am way behind you, but its nice to hear stories of success for encouragement to keep learning and improving.

[jmark]

Great post.

Sounds like you've had alot of the same fluctuations I've had. Unfortunately I'm also going to ask about the rakeback -- my understanding was that you had to sign up with an affiliate before you signed up with party. If you already had a party account, you couldn't add an affiliate on. Is this not true? Or did you switch to Empire somehow?

[sprmario]

I feel exactly the same way. I know enough to know that I don't know all that much yet. I think the games up up to 3/6 are not that hard to beat and a basic knowledge of the game along w/ decent starting hand selection can be profitable. I plan to continue to read and learn and try and incorporate that knowledge into my game to improve it. I know for certain that after 5 months I'm still a newb and have a lot to learn and have a lot of room for improvement.

[ QUOTE ]
Although my overall game is obviously profitable, I think I still suck at poker and don't expect anyone here to take my posts seriously for a while. Thanks for sharing your story, I am way behind you, but its nice to hear stories of success for encouragement to keep learning and improving.

[/ QUOTE ]

[MAxx]

P.S.

I am not an affiliate either, just a player. Hate spammers. Please no more pm's on the rake rebate.... do a search- its common knowlege.