In the Beginning…
OK, so I am embarking on a new era in my life where I am actually writing a Blog. Being a techie by trade, I’m quite familiar with them of course; it’s just that I never thought I’d ever sit down and start one.
I remember - oh, about 7 or 8 years ago one of my bosses approached me and said, “What is a Blog”. My reply to him was, “It’s the new fad that all the kids are doing. Mostly sharing things that they shouldn’t share online to complete strangers”. He said, “You don’t have one?”. I said, “Hell no, nobody wants to read anything I would write”.
Well, I think I still feel that way, however, I’m hoping that maybe, just maybe, someone will read some of my Blog and it will inpire them start to learn how to play better poker. I could write my Blog about my personal life, and although little bits and pieces may bleed into it, my goal is to keep this to the topic of Poker and my trial and tribulations in trying to become a better poker player.
I’ll make my first entry by explaining how I started playing Poker Online (for real money) only 4 or 5 months ago up to where I’m at today…
Let me preface this, buy saying that this will undoubtedly be my longest Blog Entry since I want to tell the whole story of how I started this Online Adventure of mine.
I had been playing poker online with Play Money at PokerStars and Poker.com for a year or so in my spare time, just to keep myself amused. I always did pretty well, but also figured that playing for real money would likely be a completely different story.
As time went on, I started watching and getting into the different TV shows on poker from WPT, to the various WSOP events and such. I don’t remember where I first heard about Phil Gordon and his Series of Books beginning with “The Little Green Book”, but I knew I wanted it and thought it would help me play more comptetitively in my Play Money poker games. That year (2007 in fact,) I asked for and got it for my Birthday in January. I read it over the next few weeks, and it opened up a whole new way to play for me. I remember the first 100 or so times I played in the Freerolls either on PokerStars or Poker.com where I would be knocked out inside the first 15 minutes like EVERY TIME!!! I tried using some of the principles in the book both in Freerolls and in Play Money Ring Games. The results were nothing less than UNBELIEVABLE. I immediately started finishing in the top 10-20% of every freeroll tournament I entered in except for the few exceptions that were out of my hands (pun intended).
Sometime in October or Early November, PokerStars started running this Daniel Negranue Caribean Adventure Freeroll Series. Each PokerStars PLayer was allowed one entry per week, and it offered real money for something like the top 800 players or something, I don’t remember the specifics. After not doing so well in the first two tries (early in the week), I decided to wait until later in the week for my 3rd attempt in week 3 since hopefully all the really bad players had used up there sole attempts by that time.
Whether it was this startegy or not that helped, I don’t know, but out of the 12,000 entrants in the tournament, I managed to finish in the top 300 and took in a whopping $4 REAL MONEY. I say that only 1/2 sarcastically, since at the time, it seemed like $1,000,000.
So Now I have the start of my bankroll that I can start to multiply into 10’s then 100’s then 1000’s etc. etc. etc. right? Well not so fast. I immediately sat down to observe some real money tables and it became obviuos to me just how different real money was from play money.
As luck would have it I was in between Long Term Full time jobs at the time and was working at a place where I had tons of free time and access to the Internet. No, not to play poker 
, but to research ways of becoming better to get me to the next level in order to make my miniscule bankroll grow.
I figured that there had to be Forums about Poker since they had forums for just about everything else. Unfortunatley (but not really as I will explain later), my job had a pretty intensive Internet Filter in place, so sites like 2+2 or any other widely know gaming site of any kind was found.
I Googles everything I could think of and went deep down to the last pages of each search in order to find a Poker Forum that would get through my @work filters. When I was about to give up, I stumbled across a site called ridgepoker (now feltpoker). To be continued…