My Start

I first played poker back in about 1989 with friends in a home game. We played once a week probably 6 months out of the year for 3 or 4 years.

I remember going to a casino in 93 or 94 in Lake Charles and having a blast. I think I only lost $20 playing poker and feeling like a winner.

I didn't really play more than a couple times a year after that until first getting online in August of 2003. Party Poker was where I played and pot limit hold em was my game of choice. My first hand online was AA (no lie) on a .50/1 limit table and it got cracked. Welcome to Party Poker.

I think I deposited $50 and cashed out $10 to $50 in profit probably 5 or 6 times before quitting for a few months. Sometime in '04 I opened up an account on PokerStars and played mostly .25/.50 NL before figuring out that limit was much more my style. I would usually book 5 or 6 straight small wins in NL before blowing through a buy-in or 2 on bad/unlucky plays.

In June PokerStars had their billion hand promotion. Basically if you were at the table that was dealt the 900,000th hand, the 910,000th hand, etc up to 1,000,000 then you got $500 cash. If you won the hand you got $1000 I think. This is when I learned that multitabling is the way to go. Before that experience I really thought it was impossible to keep track of more than 1 table and be profitable. I deposited $50 just for this promotion and ended up hitting the money on the 990,000th hand for $500. I cashed out $350 and left the rest on there to experiment with on the .05/.10 tables mutitabling 4 ways.

My record keeping started in June of '04 and it shows me cashing out $42 that month while building my 'bankroll' from $135 to $170.20. Wow. I was playing an average of 8 or 9 hours a week. In July I started playing .05/.10 limit with a passion and cranked out $35 a week for a couple of weeks.

In August I deposited $100 on Party Poker and made $181 that first week playing .5/1 limit. I cashed out $131 and kept on going. The second week I made $183 and cashed out $133. The 3rd week I played sitngos and 2/4 cash games & made $248 so I cashed out $198 and had an online bankroll of $303. I quickly crashed that into the ground playing 2/4 (this was before I knew about the 300BB rule) and quit again for a few months.

In April of '05 I sold a losing stock for $500 and decided to give the online poker thing a semi-serious shot playing 1/2 and 2/4 and multi tabling trying to grind out a profit each week and letting my bankroll grow. I guess I really didn't understand the 300BB rule yet because I dove right in with that $500 and did this:


4/11/2005
$602.75
500 dep + 2.75 + 100 bonus
4/11/2005
$93.87
Mon 730p 830p 2 tables 1/2 96 hands
4/12/2005
($33.50)
Tues 330p 430p 109 hands several bad beats
4/12/2005
$27.22
Tues 840p 940p 105 hands down 30 at least whole session until last 12 minutes. Wow.
4/13/2005
($65.09)
Wed 819a 919a 1 bad beat and lots of ugly cards -berry berry bad session
4/14/2005
$4.12
Thur 315p 406p 3 tables - 1 great 1 good and one down 40 playing badly
4/14/2005
$29.25
Thur 1045p 1145p 3 tables - got up $50 quick with flush but took 2 bad beats. Played very well. Fish woropay
4/16/2005
($15.56)
Sat 5p 615p bad beats were bad and I didn’t play so great after that
4/16/2005
$101.50
Sat 640p 730p 2 $2/4 badbeat tables - saw some amazingly bad/aggressive play
4/17/2005
($59.50)
Sun 4p 5p 2 $2/4 bb - played too loose
4/17/2005
$24.86
Sun 915p 1025p 2 $2/4 bb - was down 50 at one point & then stopped bluffing so much

Bankroll at $709.92. Not a bad week at all for playing above my means. More later...