Alright chaps,
I've decided to start a blog here on PokerStrategy.com because the constant jeers of a colleague calling me a fish (cruelly but accurately) have spurred me to action. No longer will I donk money at NL2 and NL5 and, with time and effort, will become competent at this game.
As you may have inferred from the cool forum badge I actually work at PokerStrategy, in the Gibraltar office. This is my first job since leaving university (I read Economics & Management) and it's been enormous fun so far. I'm an intrapreneur intern in the B2B team, mostly looking at online marketing.
So a little of my poker background, my first poker game was in my first year of university. the tournament was a £5 freezeout I think and the guy who organised it was mad keen on James Bond so we wore black tie and were served questionable martinis. It was in that year I signed up to PokerStrategy.com and got the free bankroll on FTP. Needless to say I ran through it pretty quickly and decided to augment my rise to the top with my own capital, it didn't work. I looked up my graph on Sharkscope a little while ago and it was just hilarious, a pretty unbroken downward sloping line with one wild swing upswing which was very quickly lost.
Two things prevented me from chucking in the game altogether and doing something more +EV. The first was that when I was in India after my first year I brought a copy of 'The Theory of Poker'. Some people find religion in India, I found Sklansky, The second was that I started going to the university poker society which had a pretty perfect environment of a couple of good players mixed in with some really bad ones. The games I played were probably -EV but not so much that it bust me and was a great learning experience.
Ever since then I've been playing live and online with fairly mixed results. Out of curiosity I loaded my FTP hands into some tracking software and discovered I was up something like $10 overall. This was mostly due to the fact that about a fortnight before Black Friday I two outed somebody in a $500 pot then insta withdrew. Ever since then I've been playing on Stars (untracked because I didn't set my account up properly). I've played a lot of live poker at The Vic (which has probably London's biggest poker room), I wouldn't know how to estimate my overall win/loss there but it can't be hurt by the fact that in my 2nd/3rd session I ran £100 into £1500 then spent the best fortnight ever with a few mates blowing it all (on alcohol, not gambling).
Stars has not been particularly kind to me and I've definitely lost there. When somebody asked me recently what I'd estimate my overall lifetime winning to be, when I replied 'about break even' he laughed and told me everyone who says that is significantly down (which is probably true).
So anyway its time to give poker another shot, I'd like to think I have most of the general abilities you need to be a winning player and so if I lose this time using sensible BRM at least I'll know I can't blame negative variance; it will genuinely because I either lack the ability or didn't put in the requisite study time.
I'd there were/are three things which have really held me back as a poker player
1) A wildly inflated perception of my own skill
2) Incredibly poor BRM
3) A short attention span
I've become more realistic about 1), can deal with 2) and as for 3) we'll see.
My goal is to start playing as soon as FTP relaunches, in fact I've already made a 'greatest profit' prop bet for November with a fellow intern who is also playing the micros (loser wears an 'I am a fish' T shirt for two days). Starting at NL5 I'll see how far I can work my way up (if at all) and keep you posted with the results. In the meantime if anyone is curious about the inner workings of PokerStrategy.com then ask me (but bear in mind I reside on exactly the lowest rung of company hierarchy).
Wish me luck!
Will
