How long were you playing poker before you started to show...

[Aeioux]

"I deposited $50 two years ago. No deposits since."

Brag posts are so lame.

[Azhrarn]

A while. Around a year maybe? I had played Hold 'Em occasionally at our weekly home game (we usually played wild card games) and a couple of times in Atlantic City. I decided to learn how to play Hold 'Em for real, so I put a few hundred bucks in Paradise Poker and started playing 2-4. (Because that's what I played in AC. I thought it would be lame to play lower stakes. Snicker.) So'd I play 4-5 hours a week, eventually busting out and then reloading. Sometimes I'd go on a run, move up to 3-6, and then bust out. This repeated at least a half-dozen times.

Eventually I got the hang of it. Sometime in there I bought and read my first poker book and discovered this website. Probably near the end. Oh, and I started playing at Party, which was also around the time I became a winning player.

[MicroBob]

[ QUOTE ]
Every time I start going up I hit a bad beat or two and get knocked right back down.

[/ QUOTE ]



this happens to EVERY single player (whether they are winning players or not).

If you're bothered by a 'bad-beat or two' then I'm curious what kind of sample-size we are talking about here.

If you are in a situation where you can say 'Geez...I have played 1500 hands and I don't understand why I'm not winning' then you just don't understand the concept of the 'long-run' and that it takes a LONG time for a winning poker-player to ride out the variance that EVERYBODY has.
(this is a common mistake for new players btw).

[bdk3clash]

[ QUOTE ]
...a consistent profit?

[/ QUOTE ]
Still waiting. Your profits, if they come, will be far from consistent.

[bdk3clash]

[ QUOTE ]
Next 20 sessions or so were winners...

[/ QUOTE ]
Wow--20 winning sessions in a row?

[ QUOTE ]
Online on the other hand, took over $6k and 9 months to maintain enough discipline, focus and tiltlessness to become a consistent winner.

[/ QUOTE ]
!!!

[h11]

Bit over two months, at Poker Stars micro tables. I was following rigid rules I read - if you don't flop top pair fold sort of rules. Then I actually started to think, lying in bed before sleep, about poker and how it had to work. That breakthrough - understanding that it helped to actually think rather than just parrot what I read - lead to steep rises in my bankroll for three or four months,until I got enough money to move up, up, up to find my new, higher level of incompetence where once again it's a slow crawl, one or two BBs per hundred hands.

[imported_CaseClosed326]

6 months online. Maybe 5. I was previously lucky, but not much of a winner.

[Rosie5]

I busted out some free 10$ from pacific. And this will sound like a lie but 7 sultans poker gave me 10$ to start and I've run it into 1900$ playing nothing higher than 50$ PL/NL

I ran insane playing omaha at prima. Never put a $ into online poker (that wasn't poker winnings) except when I had to put money in as part of the requirement to cash out from 7sultans

I just took to low stakes omaha so well. I had 40$ from weak tight NL hold em and just started playing and it was 1000$ about a month later. All from 6 max omaha

I've moved to NL now beacause I don't like how high stakes omaha is and if I ever got there I think I'd go through a lot of money to learn how to beat

2k isn't that much but if I win the main event I'll be a huge poster boy for online poker [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] If you knew me you'd believe this story 100% since I don't have very much GAMBOOOOL in me, enough to play online poker but not enough to put up my own money to do so [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[protocol]

I started playing in the fall of 2001 and was a loser for about 6 months. Then, was breakeven or a slight winner for about 6 months. So, about a year before I was winning at a decent rate.

[stigmata]

Straight off the bat. I ran good whilst still learning, but the microlimits are so soft you don't need to know much. All you need to have is a starting hand chart and some idea of pot and drawing odds.