BLAMO!

Here it is a compilation of my thoughts and progress as a losing poker player : ) I am the one that continues to make poker profitable for everyone else.

Fade back to dec 31 2006, the night of my wedding. I was getting married, in Girdwood Alaska at the Alyeska ski resort and hour and so minutes out of anchorage alaska roughly 8 hours away from my hometown of Fairbanks Alaska. In our hotel room in which we were both getting ready in. There was a review of all the final tables for the previous year on one of the espn channels. I just remember thinking to myself. "Look at all that money those people are winning" The same people pretty much were at every final table or so it seemed. "How hard can that be" I thought, the same people consitantly winning events and making it to the final tables. "An absolute proof that there must be some kind of skill involved". I don't know why seeing these episodes hours before my wedding grabbed my attention so strongly. Maybe because we didn't and still don't have cable where I live, who knows. I had seen the movie Rounders before and knew about poker. At my fathers work they played poker every friday night for a while and I would just watch but was never drawn into it. But after I was married and we drove back to my hometown of Fairbanks I purchased a poker book and it all seem to start from there.
I read a book or two and really didn't even understand what all the terminology meant at all. But rather than take time to understand I found, at our local office max. Chris Moneymakers Texas Holdem pc game. And I began to play this in my spare time. What a letdown this game was, I suppose now it may seem different but at the time it represented nothing like real poker. I soon after purchased the Poker Accademy texas holdem software where I played online for free against people in canada. I seemed to do ok playing on this for about a month or so until a friend I was working with told me about playing online at a sight called PokerStars. I had actually signed up with FullTilt first and tried to play the play money games then stopped. I found out how to put real money online on stars and went from there. At first I only played in mtt's as this was what I was first introduced to on tv. I played for a month or so until I won my first tourney. I think it was a $3 mtt with about 900+ people in it. I was so hooked and stoked that I could win that much money doing something that I was having alot of fun doing. Soon after I won a satellite for the Sunday Million on Stars and thought that I was destined for success. Soon after I started as I had not purchases pokertracker or anything equivelent, graphing all my tournament results. Finishes, cashes, overall winning for weeks months days. With the help of the bluff database. And slowly watched my averages continue to go up. Although I continued to see a trend of swings in my graph I continued and probably if not due to the amount of Sunday Million tourneys I played in would be about even. Every time I would make a big cash I would dab in the cash games only to loose my money as I had no clue the difference in playing in them verses in the tourneys. I would loose my money in the cash games that I would win in the tourneys when I had any money at all. There was a repeated cycle of me reloading and going broke. With some wins in the tourneys mixed in I would just loose that money as well. I never really understood bankroll management and never adhered to it. I factored in what I spent as an entertainment expense which never seemed to escalate more than $25-$50 a week. I started finishing on avg higher in the tourneys but started to realize how much of a crapshoot they really were. I started to adhere to bankroll management at this time but never won enough to move up in stakes in the tourney's. And everyone who knows and plays at the mtt's in the $1-$10 range on stars has a pretty good understanding of what "loldonkaments" means. So with getting more and more frustrated with tourneys. I decided to stop playing in them and start playing mainly cash games. This was sometime around sept, nov of 07. This was a rude awakening for me as it was like learning how to play over. And I was unsuccessful to say the least. By this time I had started a live .25-.50 game at my house and had built three of the internet style poker tables. They were and probably still are the nicest ones I know about in my town. And I have since sold two of them. I had a live bankroll and an online one at this time. Which the live slowly built and the online kept busting. By this time I had read almost two dozen books. All the big name and famous ones that everyone recommends. Except I just read them, didn't really study them like I should have. Or reread and applied the information that was provided in them. I was playing .25-.50 and .50-1.00 on the internet and loosing my money and reloading. My live game probably due to the quality of people I was playing against was showing a very slow profit. And as my live roll grew to $1000 I move my live game stakes up to
.50-1.00. Which at the time I thought was enough to be rolled for. Having 1000 bb's of whatever stake you were playing at was enough. Oh well live and learn. I made my live roll into $2000 and started playing elsewhere live in my town at some $1-$2 games while moving down in stakes to .10-.25 online. This new stake online was noticably softer and easier to beat than the nl 50 and nl 100. I started winning online at this point but my bankroll was so small that I would always just seem to take a couple bad beats and still have to reaload but not as often. I went to vegas for a friends wedding early in May and did well at the live $1-$2 games there which bolstered my confidence. So much so that I went back with a friend a month and a half later when he won a local satellite to play in one of the small buy in wsop events. This time I felt I played really well and made what seemed to me all the right moves. All the right laydowns, all the right calls which ended up being fairly correct but ran into some really bad variance and lost my whole live roll of $2400. My wife at this time was pretty fed up with the amount of poker I had been playing and was glad I had gone busto. As probably like many other people I am very involved and pursue continiously whatever I am trying to succeed at. And this had worn on my wife who had been very patient for some time. As I was no longer able to play live and my game previously before going to vegas the second time had been shut down. Due to a rash of robbery's of local poker games in my town. I went back to playing on the net again. Still playing at .10-.25 my reloads were getting less frequent. I had pokertracker and poker academy prospector at this time and was reviewing my bad results. I had joined stox poker and had watched and downloaded most of the no limit texas hold'em vids. Which at this time I have not watched all of. I was trying to set goals for myself to reach a certain limit at certain times to push myself forward. I was very prone to being tilted and this would effect my game tremendously causing me to go on spewing sessions.
This is bringing us close to the present now. I went through one big spew session then followed up by myself understanding how much my tilt was effecting my game. For some reason I bought back in and for the lack of a better description began playing without fear. I had always been very nitty and gave extreme implied odds to people. And not easily being able to fold hands like top top and sets on straight and flush boards. I made one last session of playing without fear trying to represent hands against players that didn't work playing with all my money on the table with every buy in. I made one last deposit of $150 and dropped back down to .10-.25 and ran a little cold decked. At this time I was trying to four table but had no bankroll to do so. My roll ran down to $75 and at that time I watched this interview with the Dang brothers on cardplayer tv. And listened to there story of how they started and where they were now. The younger brother had started playing .01-.02 online until he could beat the game. I had played .01-.02 before but thought I was to good to play at that level and thought of it as a joke. I mainly played there to blow off some steam and play with a friend online heads up which never worked as our lagtard playing style would immediately draw other players. So there I was with $75 left in my account on stars a closet full of pokerstars clothing and some serious demoralization going on within myself. But the interview on cardplayer gave me some serious hope. These two super successfull players had started at the bottom and worked there way up so that meant I could to.
Timeline three weeks ago....
I began multitabling nine tables at .01-.02. At this time there was a new update with my pokertracker and pokerstars and pokertracker no longer was importing any new hands so I had to start writing down my results. I nine and 12 tables at .01-.02 until my roll reached $150. I took notes on my days play and was roughly hitting 2000 hands a session. I began just simply folding to all raises to my bets and playing super nitty. And was still seeing positive results. I took a shot at .02-.05 and hit a big heater running my roll up to $225. After that I pretty much stayed at .02-.05. I ran my roll to $242 before taking a dive down to $210 then slowly working my way up to $250. So this is where I am now, tired of losing trying to push my game to the next level. Trying to focus on my mistakes and sticking with serious bankroll management. I won't play in a level unless I have 25 full buy'ins at that level. Here is my projected bankroll requirements that I have given myself that I will try to stick with.

.01.-02 $100-$150
.02-.05 $200-$300
.05-.10 $350-$450
.10-.25 $500-$750
.25-.50 $1,000-$1,500
.50-1.00 $2,000-$3,000
$1-$2 $4,000-$6,000
$2-$4 $8,000-$12,000


So here I am hopefully this blog will show where I started where I am and how I am progressing in my search to become a winning poker player. I'm not sure if I will do a daily report or a weekly summery. And yes I know I cannot spell.