The Story So Far

My entire strategy the first month or so I played could be stilled down to the following core:

Slow play pocket aces.

It was not a winning strategy.

I had no money to invest in my online account and no access to small buy-in live games at the time so I was running back-to-back and concurrent Full Tilt freerolls. This meant 360 and 180 person free games for 100 Full Tilt Points... This is, I think, about how many points you earn if you process 10 dollars or so through that site. So, in short- pennies. These games suffered from so much "all-in madness" that I had to adopt a personal rule of folding EVERY HAND until 100 people were out. This actually worked fairly well for getting the games to resemble real poker. Sadly, at the time I wouldn't recognize real poker if it bit me in the face.

Once I had a rough grasp of the mechanics Truth got me started on my reading. My first books were Harrington on Hold'em volumes 1 and 2. It is a rough truism that if you don't grasp the concepts in HoHV1 you are playing a different game entirely. A game called "giving money away". Without poetic language and a dedicated blog I couldn't begin to describe the difference between my play before and after that first book.

That said, I was still a donkey, but I was a dangerous donkey. I played poker 8+ hours a day every day for months. Sadly, a lot of that time was burning bad habits into my system. I was routinely winning the freerolls and had moved up to the 2.25 and 1.25 buy-in tourneys. I was winning and cashing in those routinely too, but still bleeding off money.

During this phase I was peppering in some live play, but mostly just being eaten alive. I did go pretty deep in a 100 buy in 150 person tourney in Tahoe, but its not something I am proud of. I quintupled up on an insane multi-way all-in pot by slow playing AA and them holding up. I was the chip leader for over an hour, but it only lasted that long because it took a while for people to realize I would give the chips out for free. Once that rumor got out I was hosed.

My play continued to improve- I wish I'd been writing about it- and I won a little money at cash tables, I cashed, but did not win at a couple of Reno tourneys. I final tabled a couple of times (without cashing) at the local card room, Bay 101. And was up and down online. Overall I was losing money over time- just slowly.

Then I took first in a 90 person 40 dollar+add-on+rebuy tourney in Reno. This (re)motivated me to improve, but my style was so riddled with bad habits this was going to be a major project.

Meanwhile Truth was pulling in solid money over-time including many 2.5-5k cashes, a 25k cash, and winning some big seats. I wish I'd been chronicling the history in detail.

I'm sure I will include some flashbacks.

- Ninja