As the title says, I lost the $50 starting money.
At first it was all going fine, I played SSS on NL .05/.10 levels for the first few games and soon got up to $60. I then fluctuated a bit and didn't seem to be getting anywhere.
At this point I decided to try making a few moves whenever I was going through a dry spell of not hitting any of the hands on the SHC, instead I was doing things like raising with QT in LP or raising with AJ under the gun when I knew really I should be folding. More often than not this got me into trouble, but my bankroll was still around $55.
I then bought into an MTT, the $1k guaranteed rebuy on partypoker and ended up finishing in 7th place for around $60, taking my bankrll to around $115.
I then got stupidly overconfident and started playing SSS at the NL .10/.25 levels. I fluctuated up and down for a few days and then had a big win where I bought in for $5, doubled up to $10, won a few more pots and then won a massive pot with a full house, leaving me on about $40. I then left that table and had $155 in my account.
I didn't play for a few days, but then came back, and lost around $20 playing my stupid version of SSS, raising with marginal hands or in EP, instead of just sticking to the SHC.
I didn't play for about a week, as I was very busy, and then played some live poker at a friend's house. We played two £2.50 buy-in mini-tournaments with just 4 of us, and I lost in both and made some silly calls and weak plays which my friends wound me up about (they play quite a lot of poker and watch a lot on xxx etc so think they know what the right play is in every situation).
This, in a strange way, put me on tilt, and I returned home and immediately played some high buy-in MTTs and sit and go's, a stupid move given that with MTTs there is absolutely no guarantee of getting money even if you play perfectly, and I had hardly played any SNGs before at all so was completely unprepared.
I gambled my way down to around $40, and then did the worst possible thing I could have done - brought it all into play on a .50/$1 OMAHA table. Now I know how to play omaha and some basic strategy but I don't know all the subtleties by a long shot, so this was another stupid risk, especially with all of my bankroll at the table, it's just that by this point I was so pissed off that I'd lost all my profit, I wanted to win a lot of it back immediately - I wanted to get up to $100 asap and this seemed the easiest way.
Needless to say, I lost it there and then, despite getting up to $75 at one point, I donked off a lot of it back down to around $40 and then went all-in on the river with the Q high flush, needless to say it was beaten because in Omaha you draw to the nuts, which was the K high flush my opponent was holding.
So that's it, I took a couple of days' break completely, and today I played 3 freeroll touranaments, one on partypoker and the other two on pacificpoker, which I registered with ages ago, but never deposited on. The first two I didn't get too far, but the third one I finished 6th out of 2500 players and won the huge sum of $1!
I'm too scared to deposit any of my own money so my plan is now to keep playing freerolls and try and get up to $5 on one of the sites, and then start again from scratch.
I'm also going to make the whole thing a lot more organised, keep records of my results, stick rigidly to the SSS and SHC, move up and down the limits as suggested and actually use this forum! (I completely ignored it last time, I thought I didn't really need to bother...)
If there's one good thing to come out of my horendous loss, it's the fact that I really do now appreciate the importance of BR management! I'm not going to play any more omaha or SNGs, and I'm going to limit myself to playing one low buy-in MTT a week, and only if I've made a profit that week.
I think I might also give myself set time slots to play-in e.g. 2 hours on a sunday evening and 2 hours on a thurs eve, does anyone else do this? If I do this hopefully it won't become consuming like it did last time!
Anyway sorry for the mini-essay but by posting the whole sorry story like this hopefully I can stick to what I'm suggesting here.
P.S. The odd thing is I'm normally an extremely patient person, I have a long attention span for almost anything, but that seemed to get shot to pieces playing poker, hopefully it was just because of that big tournament win I had and then the big win in the cash game got me thinking I was a lot better that I actually was!
