Hiyo here, there, wherever you are. Got on pokerstrategy only recently so here is a brief (brief is a relative term, so beware!) background story on how I came here and how the story is going so far (doesn't look like it will have a happy ending >,<)
Few years ago, an online friend from USA told me my way of thinking reminds him of some great Danish poker player so he sent me some online book about poker, even said he'll deposit some money for me to get things rolling.
Anyway, I flipped the first page of that book, saw it has numbers, numbers and some more of 'em so it was an easy fold for me 
since I hate Math. After that poker became more and more involved in my online home world, StarCraft. That was actually few years after a quite known StarCraft player ElkY switched to poker.
Until then it was just a few top players that were known for switching to poker (Mondragon, whole teamliquid.net crew and others) but ever since pokerstrategy came to people's ears, suddenly everyone started to play poker.
That was around last year. Again I didn't find poker interesting because I always thought that all card games depend too much on what cards you get, plus the whole ranking of hands in poker was too much for me to learn because the game didn't appeal to me enough to make an effort to learn it.
Things changed this year and for a few good reasons I had to force myself to learn poker, thought to myself damn, this game might not be that bad once you get into it, why not give it a try.
Read the whole basic article part for nl hold'em and thought I'm ready to pass the quiz. I failed, mostly because of not memorizing the whole hands chart well and mixing up big blinds with buy-ins for some questions (until then I was oblivious to the fact that these two aren't the same). After that I decided to opt for something more reliable than studying - naturally, cheating.
Copied some of the important charts just for the sake of reminding myself what hand is better in what situation and I passed. The whole concept is kinda good because you're forced to actually know something about SSS in order to pass the quiz.
Things started well on partypoker, took around $45 from one guy in 3rounds of nl 0.5/0.10, made me feel confident and made me tilt - well ok, the part until I got down to 20 bucks was tilt, I admit it, but what happened in the following 2days....
Bad beat after another, like AA all-in preflop losing to 43 and such, got down to like 1dollar and 30cents. Turned out you need 2dollars to play at any table so the natural course of action was to start playing freeroll tours.
This all happened 1-2weeks ago, no need to go into great details how and why so to cut the chase, finally yesterday I managed to get to the 2nd place in a freeroll bankroll tour. In general everything went better in tournaments because I could bluff a lot more and I could play 5hands in the entire tour (until top100 out of 2k+ or so) if the situation made it necessary.
Whole experience was kinda cool, lots of tricky situations, might be easy for some pro but it sure was hard for me Story behind ending 2nd and not 1st is again not big but big enough to prevent myself from adding another paragraph here.
So now I'm trying to get the whole SSS concept going (again) but I just can't. Only purpose to the SSS I see is to get some discipline and learn to fold - hardest thing to do. Don't have enough cash to play it BSS style so guess I'm stuck with SSS which is kinda limited to playing 1% of hands against specific type of opponents, specific tables and specific time of the day.
Basically, poker teaches you how to be a successful coward. There is no honour among thieves, ok my play style in StarCraft was anything but fair, but still, being a cunning, gay, sneaky player who never plays "normal" isn't quite the same as running around like a chicken and looking for fish (chicken don't eat fish but eh, for the sake of this example they'll have to).
Either way, main reason for coming to this section of the forum was a coaching I listened to on Thursday.
-hmm darn, I'm gonna miss the Gus boxing match 'cause of writing this post, darn and double darn
So, as I was saying, Hasenbraten has a nice coaching session and this week I realised just how low I currently am in the poker world. Coming from another online community where people actually know your name, where you can actually get involved in discussions,etc. Seems like a whole lotta work ahead of me to progress in poker (both game and community).
It became clear how people who just started StarCraft feel like. Too many things and too many ways to learn. Never realised how can it be so hard for them to learn when we had to learn the game without any of those things and still got this far, so basically it's one of the main reasons why I'm not giving up because then I would be just like them - another lazy bastard for whom even things on a plate aren't good enough.
Emphasis on one of the main reasons, the other reason is hasenbraten's videos/coaching, roxy's sexy voice which actually makes those coachings worth listening and the first reason why I like poker - the players, you can just never get bored in poker, it's like big kids playing a game just like teenagers play pc games, only difference is that they play for money so it makes them adults. Phil the Poker Brat comes first on my mind here
On the topic, I still think poker has way too much luck involved, especially in critical moments. Like Esfandiari making a perfect read and calling Negreanu and then losing because of the river card. It wasn't about odds, outs or whatever, it was just two guys flipping a coin and the one who was actually more inclined to lose ended up as the winner...
The way I see it, you can't argue about it, you can't deny it, you can just accept that's poker and live with it, otherwise you'll start tilting every time cards don't like you.
Either way, I do have both negative and positive opinions on poker thus far, don't take any to your heart because my view will definetly change. For example the whole luck thing - it's your fault if you let it come down to pure luck, then you can cry all they long how you got so unlucky but most of the time the fact is you could've dodged the bad beat if you played your hands before that one properly.
