Greetings and Has this ever happend to you?

[gabuk]

Hi fellow forum members!

First time post but somewhat of a lurker.

Brief history. Started online poker about three months ago. Deposited $100 dollars into PartyPoker and quickly lost most of it to SnG's and .5/1 using no Poker knowledge what so ever. Biggest waste of my life.

I decided that I had no idea how to play. So, I ordered several books, TOP, SSH, ITH and WWLH. Spent the next three to four weeks reading and not playing at all.

I then had the urge to deposit $120 bucks back into Party. Once again, I read too fast and not really studied. Dropped to $20 bucks and stopped to re-read again. This time, I got PokerTracker and went over my hand histories. I learned I was playing way too many hands and chasing that miracle card. Using better patience and control, I built it back to $270.

This is when I got over-confident. I went back and read certain sections of SSH. And no fault to the book, I played over-aggressive on Party which tends to be a mistake when people call to the river.

I am now starting from scratch (for the third time) with a fresh mindset. Every night after a poker session, I look at the hands where I lose 2BB or more. I analyze them to see where I was too aggressive or drawing dead. I now understand (much better than before) where I lost extra money (I should have folded but decided to play the big pocket pairs was a common mistake). I then come back to these forums to read hand samples and see if I make the same calls like the better players/posters.

For example, last night, I went back and saw that I lost 20BB over hands I was playing dead with on the turn or river. If I would have folded, I could have saved some money. I started thinking that over a year, this poor play will add up quickly.

I just wanted to say thanks to TwoplusTwo (and their fine library), ITH and the countless posters that have helped me in one way or another to become a better poker player.

But back to the strangest thing that has ever happened to me in my brief online poker life.

Several nights ago on Party, I flopped JJ four times in a row. Of course, I lost three of those hands to better pairs. And the weird thing is, two hands later, another JJ pocket pair. I lost this one too. So in six hands, five JJ pre-flop. I looked in my PockerTracker database and out of 4.75k hands, I have gotten JJ 44 times and sitting at -.8 BB. During this anomoly, I tried raising, pre-flop, limping and limp-raising, nothing worked. Oh well, that's poker [img]/images/graemlins/ooo.gif[/img]

Thanks for listening to my rambling.

Good luck to all!
Gabuk