The Experiment Begins
So I'm doing it.
Yea, I said it.
I'm making the leap - the dream of every low limit poker player - I'm going pro.
Well maybe its not as dramatic as all that, but it certainly is a big step here in my otherwise insignificant life.
Ok, lets take a few steps back, you know, lets get to know each other. Spend some quality "cuddle time" together and lets get an understanding as to what has brought me to this decision.
Alright lets back up 9 months.
It was mid-march, 2005. Life had put me in a particularily uneventful funk to which I was not resisting. I was in my last semester of school, barely scraping by (you can read all about it here - my other blog) and did what any rational young man would do, I started gambling.
The poker bug hit me hard and fast. I didn't play much up until late 2004 where my friends and I started having a regular texas holdem night for a $5 buyin tournament. No one knew what they were doing including myself, but it was all good fun. After a few weeks of this I decided to check out the online poker scene. It is here where I distinctly remember the moment where I knew I would be hooked for a while. I was playing on the lowly $0.05/$0.10 NL tables at Bet Holdem with the leftover money I had from an online sporting book after the NFL season had ended (just about $100). This must have been one of my first 100 hands.
(In my best Vince Van Patten voice) "I picked up the mother of all hands, the weapons of mass destruction, pocket aces" in a 6 handed game. I think this was the first time I had ever been dealt pocket aces in my life, online or at a home game. At this time in my poker career, I felt that pocket aces were essentially a free win, I had never seen them lose and treated them as unstoppable juggernauts. I can't remember if I raised preflop (probabbly not, that concept was foreign to me at this point) or not but I do know that I had at least 4 people seeing the flop with me (who cares how many opponents right? ITS POCKET ACES). I had about 2-3 people watching me play online as they were as curious as I was. When the flop came Queen high, everyone started to chant, "Go all in!". I Was so excited, thinking that there was no way I was beat, so I went all in, clearly the best way to maximize my profits right? I mean the pot was probabbly about $0.50 and I had at least $10 in chips. I remember getting two callers and laughing at them in my mind when they called, thinking they are obviously beat. Well in this case, they were, they both called with just the top pair of queens and I raked in the massive $25 pot.
I gloated all day. $25 bucks was a massive win. I went out for breakfast and picked up my friends tab's, I was the man.
And thats all it took. One hand.
I continued to play at the micro limits, getting my ass handed to me, and probabbly fishing it up real good for weeks. I had a lot of spare time, and am very comfortable spending an unhealthy amount of time in front of a computer screen. So I became an addict.
I continued to play on Bet Holdem, oblivious to the slew of perfectly viable and superiour competitors in the online poker biz, but I was having fun. I managed to widdle down my original $100 deposit to $0 in true donkey fashion, and went ahead and deposited another $100, convinced that my original losses were due to bad beats and the such. That deposit actually lasted a long while, and eventually I got it up to $1000 after months of play and a few limit increases. I peaked at the $0.50/$1.00 NL tables, when I lost pretty much my entire bankroll on a week or two of continuous losses. I was devastated, and ended up cashing out with about $100 left, my original deposit. But did I stop there? Obviously not.
Fast forward to today. About 10 poker books, thousands of hands of experience and thousands of bad beats later, I'm ready to make the aforementioned leap.
The leap being the one from playing poker as a part time pastime/hobby to a full time source of income. I've done the 9-5 thing, its not for me at this point in time in my life. I've just graduated from school and am not working for anyone. I'm also very aware of the various risks I am taking, but if it pays off I will be about 41.5x happier than if I had settled with any kind of "regular" employment.
At this point, I am very confident in my playing abilities. I'm no world class pro, but I know enough to play the percentages and slowly take the online game. My plan as of today is try this for one month. My goal is to average $200 a day, playing approximately 6-10 hours each day, at the $0.50/$1.00 NL tables, collecting deposit bonus' on various sites. I am starting with about $1500. I will move up in limits when the buyin to the table represents less than 5% of my total bankroll.
Example.
At the $0.50/$1.00 NL tables, the buyin is $100. With a bankroll of $1500 this represents about 6.6% of my bankroll. When I pass $2000 I will move up to the $1/$2 tables. Since I've been known to drop a buyin or two in a session, I don't want them to be too devastating to the old roll, so by having a buyin represent less than 10% of it, I can handle some decent swings. This strategy probabbly will change though since I havn't really ever done this before.
Certainly $0.50/$1.00 NL is not exactly professional credentials, but after playing there for the last 4-5 months or so, booking steady daily profits in the range of $50-$200, it will suffice for now.
So, I'm pretty excited. And if it doesn't work out, so be it, glad I gave it a shot. I have plenty of money to back me if I fail, so paying bills won't be a problem, at least in the short term.
Let the degenerate, waste of life begin.
Yea, I said it.
I'm making the leap - the dream of every low limit poker player - I'm going pro.
Well maybe its not as dramatic as all that, but it certainly is a big step here in my otherwise insignificant life.
Ok, lets take a few steps back, you know, lets get to know each other. Spend some quality "cuddle time" together and lets get an understanding as to what has brought me to this decision.
Alright lets back up 9 months.
It was mid-march, 2005. Life had put me in a particularily uneventful funk to which I was not resisting. I was in my last semester of school, barely scraping by (you can read all about it here - my other blog) and did what any rational young man would do, I started gambling.
The poker bug hit me hard and fast. I didn't play much up until late 2004 where my friends and I started having a regular texas holdem night for a $5 buyin tournament. No one knew what they were doing including myself, but it was all good fun. After a few weeks of this I decided to check out the online poker scene. It is here where I distinctly remember the moment where I knew I would be hooked for a while. I was playing on the lowly $0.05/$0.10 NL tables at Bet Holdem with the leftover money I had from an online sporting book after the NFL season had ended (just about $100). This must have been one of my first 100 hands.
(In my best Vince Van Patten voice) "I picked up the mother of all hands, the weapons of mass destruction, pocket aces" in a 6 handed game. I think this was the first time I had ever been dealt pocket aces in my life, online or at a home game. At this time in my poker career, I felt that pocket aces were essentially a free win, I had never seen them lose and treated them as unstoppable juggernauts. I can't remember if I raised preflop (probabbly not, that concept was foreign to me at this point) or not but I do know that I had at least 4 people seeing the flop with me (who cares how many opponents right? ITS POCKET ACES). I had about 2-3 people watching me play online as they were as curious as I was. When the flop came Queen high, everyone started to chant, "Go all in!". I Was so excited, thinking that there was no way I was beat, so I went all in, clearly the best way to maximize my profits right? I mean the pot was probabbly about $0.50 and I had at least $10 in chips. I remember getting two callers and laughing at them in my mind when they called, thinking they are obviously beat. Well in this case, they were, they both called with just the top pair of queens and I raked in the massive $25 pot.
I gloated all day. $25 bucks was a massive win. I went out for breakfast and picked up my friends tab's, I was the man.
And thats all it took. One hand.
I continued to play at the micro limits, getting my ass handed to me, and probabbly fishing it up real good for weeks. I had a lot of spare time, and am very comfortable spending an unhealthy amount of time in front of a computer screen. So I became an addict.
I continued to play on Bet Holdem, oblivious to the slew of perfectly viable and superiour competitors in the online poker biz, but I was having fun. I managed to widdle down my original $100 deposit to $0 in true donkey fashion, and went ahead and deposited another $100, convinced that my original losses were due to bad beats and the such. That deposit actually lasted a long while, and eventually I got it up to $1000 after months of play and a few limit increases. I peaked at the $0.50/$1.00 NL tables, when I lost pretty much my entire bankroll on a week or two of continuous losses. I was devastated, and ended up cashing out with about $100 left, my original deposit. But did I stop there? Obviously not.
Fast forward to today. About 10 poker books, thousands of hands of experience and thousands of bad beats later, I'm ready to make the aforementioned leap.
The leap being the one from playing poker as a part time pastime/hobby to a full time source of income. I've done the 9-5 thing, its not for me at this point in time in my life. I've just graduated from school and am not working for anyone. I'm also very aware of the various risks I am taking, but if it pays off I will be about 41.5x happier than if I had settled with any kind of "regular" employment.
At this point, I am very confident in my playing abilities. I'm no world class pro, but I know enough to play the percentages and slowly take the online game. My plan as of today is try this for one month. My goal is to average $200 a day, playing approximately 6-10 hours each day, at the $0.50/$1.00 NL tables, collecting deposit bonus' on various sites. I am starting with about $1500. I will move up in limits when the buyin to the table represents less than 5% of my total bankroll.
Example.
At the $0.50/$1.00 NL tables, the buyin is $100. With a bankroll of $1500 this represents about 6.6% of my bankroll. When I pass $2000 I will move up to the $1/$2 tables. Since I've been known to drop a buyin or two in a session, I don't want them to be too devastating to the old roll, so by having a buyin represent less than 10% of it, I can handle some decent swings. This strategy probabbly will change though since I havn't really ever done this before.
Certainly $0.50/$1.00 NL is not exactly professional credentials, but after playing there for the last 4-5 months or so, booking steady daily profits in the range of $50-$200, it will suffice for now.
So, I'm pretty excited. And if it doesn't work out, so be it, glad I gave it a shot. I have plenty of money to back me if I fail, so paying bills won't be a problem, at least in the short term.
Let the degenerate, waste of life begin.
posted by RikkiDee at 7:48 PM
2 Comments:
And so It begins. The road less traveled is for a reason smithers....GL, GG,
people will always endure hard times, its those of us that bluff with a 6-7 suited that will forever be remembered in the lore of exsitance jtothestone
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