Journey To Being an Online Poker Pro

Happy New Year everybody!  Hope everyone has had a great holiday season and a great New Year’s Eve.  Unfortunately I had to work and got to witness all the drunks staggering around the hotel and out front.  It actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be but I’m extremely tired right now.  I’d go to bed but I started playing this small buy in tournament on PokerStars when I got home.  That was 4 1/2 hours ago and I’m still going.  Blinds are really catching up to me but I’m hanging in there, standing 24th out of 28 remaining right now.  I’m also playing .50/$1 on Full Tilt right now and I’m up $135 so far.

Every year people make their New Year’s resolutions and I was thinking about certain things I’d like to accomplish with online poker and life in general this year.  Below are some of my goals for the year: Read more…

I’ve been out of the loop as far as any recent happenings in the high stakes online scene is concerned so I did a little reading up last night.  I remember posting about a week ago that Isildur1 was rumoured to be broke but I just found out why.  It turns out that Brian Hastings took $4M off of him in one session.  An amazing feat to be sure but what’s even more amazing is the circumstances in which this happened.  Read more…

First off let me wish everyone a very safe and happy holiday season.  This year has been especially hectic for me as I’ve been working both jobs, 15 hours a day every other day for close to a month.  Throw that in with having my son and it was inevitable that I would get as sick as I did this week.  My second job is in retail and I have never done anything like it before.  The absolute chaos yesterday on Christmas Eve was unbelievable.  I knew as the day approached it would be crazy busy but I never knew how bad it would be until I actually walked into the store.  And it didn’t stop!  Crazy is almost an understatement.  I got home afterwards, poured myself a glass of wine and settled in for the night.  I hadn’t wrapped anything yet but I knew I had time because this year my son was going to wake up Christmas morning at his mom’s house, a reversal of how we usually do it.  With the recent deaths in our family my dad wanted the family to be together for dinner and my son’s mom had no problems with that.

So, I figured I’d waste some time and play some poker.  Shocking, I know!  But on the heels of a recent successful run in a tournament I played in the other night I wanted to keep going.  Read more…

Things have continued to progress for me at both Full Tilt and PokerStars.  I put in some long sessions, playing .25/.50NL for the most part.  I did move up to .50/$1 at Full Tilt one night but had a rough night so I moved back down pretty quickly.  I keep a Post It note on my computer screen reminding me not to get greedy and to stay the course.  I’ve gotten into trouble before by moving up before my bankroll could take any significant beats and went broke more than once.  When you start to hit some hands it’s very tempting to just jump up and hope the same thing continues.  I know I can play the upper levels but anyone can beat anyone at any given time and you have to be able to withstand the bad runs you will inevitably go through.  It’s all about bankroll management.  Read more…

After having a few days to be with my family and our recent loss, I was able to sit down and play some poker.  Now, I was a little hesitant to actually sit down and play because I always preach being focused with no distractions.  However, I thought that maybe if I played for a little while, totally concentrating as best I could on the game that I would be able to put the other stuff out of my mind.  And am I ever glad that I did! Read more…

I’m writing this with a heavy heart today.  Today my family was dealt one of life’s “bad beats” as my grandmother passed away, about a month after the passing of my grandfather.  This is all after my aunt passed away in March.  All on the same side of the family and 2 out of 3 from cancer.  I feel so sad for my Dad and my uncle.  They lost a sister, a mother, and a father all within 9 months of each other and I can’t even imagine what that would be like.  I don’t want to know either.  We were a pretty tight family growing up.  My aunt and her three daughters lived about 7 houses down from us.  My two eldest cousins are both around the same age as my oldest younger brother (I’m the oldest) while my youngest cousin and youngest brother are a few years apart.  Read more…

I was reading through some older Bluff Magazine articles and I came across a great one on bankroll management and requirements for moving up in levels.   I tried to follow these standards even before I read the article and I wanted to share some of the key points with you.  When talking in earlier posts about the requirements I use, I guess I was a little vague.  I had said that when I have 10x the big buy in, I will move up a level.  This is true but there are other factors involved besides just having the right amount to move up.  You want to be able to accurately assess whether your game is good enough to move up.  Maybe you went on a serious heater with great cards and a few suckouts thrown in to warrant you thinking about moving up.  Read more…

The past couple of days have gone really well for me at the ring games.  Tournaments…not so much.  Other than the one I recently posted about it’s been rough going.  Recently I played an $11 buy in tournament and was doing really well when the following hand came up.  I was on a pretty good heater up until this point and was in the middle of the pack when I got dealt pocket kings for the second time in about 7 hands.  I was in the BB and action folded around to the button.  He was the only one at the table who could bust me and not by much.  Blinds were 75/150 with a 20 chip ante and we both had about 30K.  Read more…

I played in a small buy in online tournament last night and did pretty well.  I looked at the structure before registering and saw that it was a $3 buy in, with 1 Rebuy and 1 Add on (adding chips for $3 during the first break).  I’m not a big fan of rebuy tournaments because the first hour is just ridiculous.  People are  shoving with 9 high, hoping to double or even triple up and if they miss, so what?  Rebuy and do it again.  Yes it drives the prize pools up but it just isn’t poker and to do it for an hour is painful.  This tournament started you off with 3K in chips and the rebuy was for 3K as well.  If you wanted, you could just take your rebuy right away so you’d be starting with 6K in chips and the blinds were 10/20.  This meant very deep stacked poker which, for me, is a very good thing.  I’m a very patient player when it comes to playing deep stacked like that and would look to pick my spots throughout.  After the extended registration was over there were 1100 entrants in total. Read more…

There are a lot of misconceptions or myths when it comes to the game of poker.  I’m going to list some of the popular ones and why they just aren’t true

Online Poker is Rigged

This one actually makes me laugh the most.  It’s really amazing how many people actually believe that online poker is rigged.  They take a really bad beat and automatically it’s because the online site is out to get them.  “This never happens live”, and “This site is so ridiculous” are amongst the many things you’ll see in the chat box when the bad beat happens.  For the record it does happen live and it has nothing to do with the site.  The truth is, it only SEEMS like there are more bad beats online.  This is because there are more hands being played per hour.  There’s no shuffling, no waiting for chips to be pushed to someone, cards being brought together to be shuffled, cards are dealt much faster, etc.  Typically there are double the amount of hands being played per hour online than in a live game.  We also have very selective memories.  Think about it.  Which hands are we likely to remember?  The time we had AA and our hands held up like it’s “supposed to” or the time  someone called our raise with K 7 suited, rivered the flush and cracked our aces?  We are also less likely to remember the times we did it to others.  Instead of blaming the site for being rigged, maybe we should examine our own play.  Ask yourself, “Did I give the other player the correct odds to call for his flush?  Should I have bet the flop instead of checking it?”  Go over your own play before thinking that the site is rigged. Read more…