It has taken me almost two years and hundreds of thousands of hands to get to this point in my poker career. I haven't put in as much effort in learning and developing my game as I should have (probably the reason it has taken me so long to get here). I remember sitting in my room the freshman year of college - 9 tabling .01/.02 cent with a 40$ roll thinking I was becoming a better player.
DON'T DO THIS
When you start out. Play 1-2 tables - put twice as much effort into learning as you do into playing: If you play for 30 minutes, watch 60 minutes of video or post/review hands in a forum. Do not just play hands to play hands - you are throwing money away. The rake will eat you at the super micro's.
I'm honestly not sure how I didn't go busto when I first started. My cousin shipped me 5$ and taught me the basics of playing online. I went on a small heater playing the micro's (thankfully) and this kept me afloat for months playing .01/.02 on pokerstars. I eventually moved up to .02/.05 somehow and didn't go busto.
I had been playing for two years with little to no success at all and my cousin, who runs in godmode playing nl100 and nl200 decided to give me a small stake so that I could eventually play on my own roll. He had staked me once previously and ended up getting his money back and I grinded a small roll from rakeback. Two months ago he staked me 500$ to play 25nl. We would go over hands and mikogo a couple times a week - I felt like I was starting to get somewhere. The first few weeks of the stake I was running awful - I was 10 BI's below equity over a very small sample size. I was told to stick with it and continue to work on my game daily and I would overcome this. After about 15 videos and plenty of hand reviews/strat posts on 2+2, and plenty of rakeback, I've grinded the roll up to 800$ - and that is where I'm starting this blog.
UPDATE 6/16/2010
Since I started this blog, I've switched from grinding rakeback on ftp, to playing 45mans on stars. Many people believe that cash is the best game to play if you want to become a professional. Tournaments are nice when you win a $25,000 score, but that could happen twice a month, or once a year. It is hard to make a living playing big MTTs. You have to deal with variance. Some of the best MTT players buy in on sunday with $5,000 at noon, and don't finish playing until late Monday morning if they go deep. They don't get the credit they deserve. They have to deal with variance at its worst. They have to play the longest sessions (cash players can quit whenever they get annoyed), mtt players can't, they have to play through it.
I'm not going to say one is better than the other, you can't compare apples to oranges. I believe that it us up to the player to decide what games are best for them to play.
- Do you like the thrill of going deep and having a 5 digit score one night?
- MTTs are probably good for you.
- Are you up for learning to play cash, and grind the rakeback and constantly get better as a player in the evolving cash games?
- To be successful in cash games you must constantly review hands, watch videos, and get better. I made the mistake of just grinding rakeback when I first started playing cash. I was happy breaking even and getting my 100-200$ at the end of every week. Who knows where I would be now if I would have tried to win and get rakeback? We can't dwell on the past.
- Do you want to be a grinder? Do you want to be a bankroll nit, and grind and grind and grind a steady profit?
- Although you can do this in cash, SNGs are the games you should try. In cash, if you lose a hand, you can tilt and spew much more money than you would if you just got sucked out on in a sng. If you are playing a $6.00 SNG and we lose, we still have other games, and we can compartmentalize our bad beat, cut our losses and keep playing. In cash we could get sucked out at 50NL for $50.00, then whine to ourselves about how much of a fish they are for calling, and lose much more money than we have too.
All in all, I'm not going to say one is better than the other, you can't compare apples to oranges. I believe that it us up to the player to decide what games are best for them to play.
Why am I doing this?
I am doing this because it shouldn't have taken me two years to get this far in my poker career. It has taken me this long for a few reasons:
- I didn't put the effort in I should have when I started, I just played.
- There are plenty of videos for higher stakes on deucescracked but not many for the micro stakes. Things that work at higher limits don't work as well at the micro stakes. The fish are bad at both levels, but the table dynamics are completely different. I want this to be relevant to microstakes players.
- I want to help you become the best poker player you can be - as quickly as possible. I will be the first to admit that I don't know it all - there are thousands of players who know more about poker than I do, but I really want to help save you the time and effort that I wasted at the beginning of my career. And get you to start thinking like a poker player.
Feel free to post any questions or suggestions you have about how I'm playing, how your playing or anything you'd like me to go over.
Good luck at the tables.
