Carrera

I was always fascinated by the idea of playing poker.  I liked to see it in old westerns.  I remember a time when we all played at a big family gathering (just for fun, but with chips) many many years ago.  However, I was always reluctant to play for real money.

Several years ago, there was a friend who would sometimes play in a local dealer’s choice home game.  I went to watch once, but I noticed that they mostly played strange variations with lots of wild cards (I now know that those are the games the fish at the table like).  It was not for me.  This friend and his wife also watched some poker shows on TV, and told me about those.  Around that same time, they played a bit online too.

I finally decided to give it a try.  I made my first online deposit in late 2004.  It was $100 on Paradise Poker.  At this point, I barely knew the basic rules of the game.  Certainly nothing about what good starting hands are, and certainly nothing about pots odds etc…

I played a few hands of play money beforehand, but never really got into it.

I started out as a limit player.  I think I must have started out at LHE 0.01/0.02.  I was too scared to play anything higher.  Bankroll management you say?  What’s that??  Friend was playing 0.5/1 limit at the time.  I never thought I would be able to play that!  Boy do we laugh at that one now

I also liked to play in cheap tournaments.  One of my favorites was the Paradise Big Buck.  The buy in was $1.  I distinctly remember that at that point, I would play any two face cards.  I would write down all my hands on a piece a paper, note the ones I played, and the ones I would win.  Manual poker tracker lol.

I signed up at Party Poker through an affiliate to get a playing system document.  It gave hand ranges based on position (what’s that? ;)), and post-flop action based on your hand, and other players actions.  I think I deposited $200 at Party.  I developped a program that told me what to do based on this document.  It was able to read the Party hand history file as it was being written.  The good thing about doing this was that I really went through that document a lot!

Sometime after, I heard about this neat thing called rakeback.  I was able to get an account at PokerNow (a Party skin) with a rakeback deal.  I made my final online deposit of $100 at this site.  I think it was at this site that I had my first +$100 session (still limit).

I quickly learned about bonuses.  This was during the great monthly bonus period at Party.

I don’t remember too much about my initial wins and losses, but I never busted out on any of the sites.  In March 2005, I opened my NeTeller account.  I learned to cashout near the end of the month to be able to deposit and get the monthly bonuses at the beginning of the month.  Bonuses were what allowed me to increase my bankroll.

Total deposits $400.  My records say that I reached $12k around Dec 2006.  That includes money cashed out the the real world ($3.4k).  Since then, i’ve given a fair amount back.  I’ve decided to take it more seriously, and hopefully get back on a good winning pattern.

This post has been in draft form for a 4-5 days, so I’ll just go ahead and get it out now.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 2:45 am and is filed under Poker. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.