Happy New Year Everyone!! Technically its not actually New Year yet but I thought I'd get this out of the way before I get totally inebriated. I'll be spending a quiet night in tonight watching Sky Movies and working my way through a crate of budweiser, a litre of vodka and a box of heroes. Usually I go out on NYE and this will be the first one that I've just sat in and chilled out, although I might play a bit of poker...But now back to my story of how I got into poker.
After watching Ed Miller's video series ('Poker Made Simple') on Stoxpoker I managed to build up my bankroll on Fulltilt from $49 to $300 after a couple of months or so. It was at this point that I became aware of Rakeback and Prop Playing. Prop players are players that are paid, via very generous rakeback, to play on websites. Rake is how poker sites make their money, usually around 5% of each pot is taken away as rake, so if you win a pot of $10, the site will take 5% (50c) as rake. However a site will pay you some of your rake back to you if you sign up through certain websites, so that if you pay $100 in rake, you will get a certain percentage back (eg 30% will give you $30 back). Normally a website will offer around 30% rakeback to play on their site, and will pay your rakeback on a weekly or monthly basis. For prop players websites will offer a higher percentage, from 75% to 110%. However these websites tend to be smaller operations with a limited choice of tables to play on, but on the plus side tend to have very bad players on them. So I joined a site called Pokertime as a prop. I only lasted a week as I wasn't really properly bankrolled to play as a prop effectively. I took just one bad beat, but it was enough to destroy my bankroll. It was a $170 pot after flopping the second nuts straight, but my opponent had flopped the nuts straight and that one hand nearly halved my original bankroll. As a result I quit Pokertime and after I received my rakeback I decided to move on and just get a normal rakeback deal. If I had won that pot.... well who knows?
After my brief interlude at Pokertime I instead decided just to get a rakeback deal and after careful deliberation joined Celebpoker. I had trawled through various poker websites and this site was considered to be one of the most fishiest, with a lot of traffic. However I had to earn at least 100 euros a month in rake to get any back. I thought that this would be easy to achieve but playing NL10 I was barely racking up $100 worth of rake a month, let alone 100 euros (for those who don't know $100 equals about 72 euros). But on the other hand I managed to get my bankroll back up to over $300, so its definately a good site for making money at micro-stakes and, who knows, one day I may return to that site when I move up stakes. But I needed to get regular rakeback so after a few months or so I moved on to Poker4ever.
A friend of mine had recommended this site for a while and had built up a five figure stack from $200 in just a couple of months, although he was a prop player earning 85% rakeback. So in October of 2008 I joined poker4ever, with 35% rakeback, hoping to emulate my friend's achievements and build up a huge five figure some in no time at all. So far I've been playing on poker4ever for about three months and my stack has grown from $200 to a whopping $330, though it did hit a low $127 at one point in early November. The picture above shows my graph from the 16 November until Christmas Eve (its probably best to click on it to see it more clearly).
So there you have it in a nutshell, or three blogs, my story of how I got to where I am today. To be honest I haven't progressed much fiscally from last year but I think I am probably five times the poker player that I was this time last year. Hopefully as this blog progresses my bankroll will grow as per my Project (see first blog below) and this time next year I'll have three grand, thirty grand or even 300 grand!!
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