FRIST POST EXCEEDINGLY TL;DR
Ok, so I've decided to extend my blogging ventures to here. I have another blog elsewhere that's been going for a while but I'm not going to link to it. It has a different reader base to the people that would read it here so I'll keep them both completely separate. Plus my other blog is just full of such negativity that I feel starting afresh somewhere else I can in effective be wiping a slate clean and starting over.
A rundown of me then. I'm 33 (34 in July). Generally, in life, I am a very unlucky person. So far it's never been in the catastrophic sense, just niggling little things that seem to haunt me throughtout life. This leads me to post alot of whiney blogs, and generally whine a hell of alot in general. I'm not a believer in all this "positive thinking makes psotive things happen" (and vice versa) malarkey. I believe there is something out there that controls our destiny and decides whether we're a person that's going to be tormented our whole lives or someone who gets left alone. I am very much the former!
So I've been playing poker (recreationally to start with) since around 2004. It doesn't feel anything like that long, but I remember the year vividly because I know for a fact I was playing poker just before my daugher was born and that was in 2004. I only got into it for one reason. At that time I was attempting to become a professional gambler, mainly in horse racing. The statistic at that time was that of all people that bet on the betfair exachange, litetarally 0.1% made over something like £50k a year. So the odds were damn slim! But I'd found a bonafide nuts of a site that offered GENUINE information, unlike 99% of ALL tipsters around the world who cold not proof their info and had no long term success at all despite their lies. This site I'd found had racing systems that were proofed over 10 years. Anyway, long story short, after perseverance with the systems the site had to offer I found my own system through another site. The site had on it a page that calculated thousands upon thousands of different racing stats and I devised my own LAYING SYSTEM. For those who don't know, laying is basically being the bookmaker and betting on a horse to lose. Now that definitely sounds easier than it is. Usually a 90% strike rate system is required to profit and for only laying horses under 16/1 this is the toughest thing to find on earth! But I'd found it. Again, long story short it was all going well when I split with the gf and had to withdraw all I'd made as I was potless. By the time I'd settled down in a new place I'd gone back to work properly as this racing systems business was very much little by little and couldn't offer a proper wage for about 3-5 years of investing.
Anyway's, the first betting site I'd gone to had a forum (and still does albeit virtually dead of activity now) and the guy who owned it all was who got me into poker; with these simple words. "Just try it, go to my site and read up on basic NLHE strategy and you never know, you could be a natural."
"PAH! Natural??!" I thought. As if! But I had an edge. I think I was probably at that time amongst 1% of people who actually read up on how to play GOOD poker before playing instead of just jumping in and playing every hand possible. I started off on Absolute poker (LOLZ) playing their daily freerolls. They literally ran freerolls every half an hour which was fantastic. You never found that on any other site on earth ever. I managed to get 1st places in 2 freerolls with over 2.5k entrants that earned me $10 a time, 8 hours of play each LMAO!!! There was also poker on betfair so I was playing the odd game on there using my racing roll. I even started out playing 10 mans there and remember VIVIDLY just how bad I ran. But I was only 1 tabling so each bad beat felt like the end of the world. I really cannot remember how I use to play those STT's but am pretty sure my strat would have been crap, having no clue how light I should have been pushing when it came to push fold mode.
My biggest regret about that time was that little did I know a place like 2+2 was already long in existance and that if I'd found the place I no doubt would have been able to find out about optimum strategy and be in a position to make huge money. But I missed that fucking train! 
By the time I'd found out that you COULD profit long term from poker and that it was indeed a skill game, it was well into 2008, by which time the games were already getting much much tougher.
T'was around that time that I joined grinderschool (no plugging obv, delete if necessary, I don't rate them all that much anyway) and stumbled on a COUPLE of good trainers. Namely glitlr. It was glitlir's vids that improved my game a ton and by mid 2009 I've given up my job to try and play professionally. Now my probem with that has always been motivation. Being my own boss my work rate has mostly been "LAZY" to say the least.
So anyway, from November 2009 on Pokerstars I went on the sickest downswing known to man. 330 buy-ins which was probably 50-50 9-mans with MTT SnG's. At that time I sought solace at Full Tilt. I had $400 on there but didn't play very often as I couldn't get rakeback. From then on I abandoned Stars barring the odd set to see if my swing had ended or not and played the FTP 90 mans; and crushed in a big way. I was constantly sharscoping the best player in those games shark365 and trying depsperately to get hold him personally to find out why his ROI was seemingly eons ahead of literally every other reg in the game. At the tables one time I did manage to get him to give me his email so I mailed him but never got a reply. Tosser. It didn't really matter though cos my ROI pretty much matched his after a while. Now, again, what I regret from that time is simply not voluming anywhere near enough! I had the opportunity to play as many hours a he did and potentially make $100k in year playing just 90 mans games, as he did! I regret it now because ever since Rush On-Demand SnG's were introduced their volume has slumped big time! And obviously now even more so with USA being banned. once again, FML, got on the train too late again, etc etc.
My Stars 2009 garf. It's 4% ROI abi $12.
How well were things going pre sick swing? This well. It's 7% abi $11. Bearing in mind even this graph is full of alot of bad beats, my 7% was definitely worth seomthing closer to 10-11%.
Here is my Full Tilt 2009 garf. It's 31% abi $7. Even here you can see a 100bi downswing which to be honest I don't even recall having, somehow I didn't notice it. Weird.
2010 wasn't too bad. On Stars I managed a 10% ROI in the $16 9-mans which (as I've mentioned in my downswing report thread) I don't really understand because not once did I get even close to a BOP position on any week, and I can confidently say that it was a million miles away from a smooth consistant graph!!
Here is both my Stars and FTP combined graphs for 2010 totalling 12% ROI abi $13.
And, finally. My garf so far for 2011.
^ That's getting for almost 4k games break even. So it seems like the odd number years are the one's where I suffer. Maybe 2012 will be an awesome year, but for now I'm doing everything I possibly can to get out this crap. I've gone back to glitlr to review some of my stuff and indeed he is squeezing out a few small leaks so I may continue with him over a longer period of time instead of just getting the 1 review session every year.
GL all and I hope future blog posts can be more positive than my other blog!
9 
9 
(a straight, Ace high)
