Johnny

So, here’s the obligatory intro. 

I’m a part-time poker player, right now living at $1/$2 NL on Full Tilt.  Cash games are my preferred playground.  I’ve done alright in some multi table tournaments along the way, and I’m just getting into dabbling in ICM and Sit and Gos for fun.   I’m an art dealer, picture framer, and designer for my day job.  This makes cash games more practical as I’m normally very busy during the biggest tournaments on the weekends.

It was St. Patrick’s Day 2006 and I had been thinking of checking out this poker thing for some time.  We chose to stay in that night and cook some corned beef and cabbage, have a few beers, and stay cozy because it was cold.  I mentioned my interest to my girlfriend, Spammy, and she directed me to a site that gave you a bonus for signing up to poker sites. Hey, free money!  And that’s how I started that night, like so many others, signing up for Party Poker with a $100 free bankroll and getting $20 and a free t shirt along the way for joining the Poker Player’s Alliance.

I dabbled a tiny bit in the beginner’s micro tables on Party, but I didn’t want to really play until I understood more about the game.   I didn’t even know how blinds worked.  Searching for information I came across some really great people who loved talking about poker, and those guys are my current comrades here on the forums at Felt Poker.

Back then I read some really helpful articles, absorbed the strat forums while reading people discuss hands where they had hundreds of dollars in play and that seemed so far away to me, and originally registered on the forum in order to take advantage of the tutoring.  Pretty quickly I learned about this Sklansky guy and what he had to say about the ranking of hands.  I learned about how I was trapping myself.  I learned about bankroll management.  Once I had some basic strategy down I hit the Party beginner’s tables running.  I was still doing some awful things like limping with AA or KK until the river then pushing, then crying on the forums when I lost of course, but the knowledge that I did pick up right off the bat made me an overall winner.

I can’t say that I truly ran up that $100 in free money to my current roll because I used thousands of my own money to continually deposit for bonuses.  However, I’ve never put any money outside of the profits derived from that $100 on a table.   It’s been a slow progression compared to a lot of people and I’m still striving to build my first $10k, but I’m more than 1/2 way there after 19 months of learning and around 130,000 hands played.

Because of the way I’ve progessed, I’m a big believer in the importance of bonuses and incentives to cushion the bankroll of beginning players.  I did not play a single hand for over my first year when I wasn’t also earning some type of bonus.  It’s just now, after a year and a half, that my monthly wins and losses have begun to dwarf the impact of these incentives.  They are why I can say that, overall, my bankroll has grown 17 out of the 19 months I have been playing.  And, now that I’ve published that in a blog, here comes the brag curse!   Someone ask me for a dollar.

So with this blog I plan to record my progess in achieving my first $10k stack, post about beats and interesting hands,  record some of my thoughts on how hands played out, and just make general bloggy type posts.  Hopefully when I’m dead wrong one or two of my friends from Ridge can make a guest post and set us straight.  As I get used to what this blog software can do I can hopefully make them interesting or at least funny!

Tags: poker

This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 11:23 am and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.