Hey guys, I’ve been mostly lurking here off and on for a bit more than a year now and have finally gotten to the point where I think a blog will be a great help in furthering my game. I am a twenty year old university student (OMG! U2!?) coming up on an extended break as I will not be returning for at least one semester. I’ve been having some commitment issues with my academic studies and it seems like its probably a good idea to take a break from them. I am living on my own and am going to get a job, hopefully no later than mid May, to support myself until then I have a couple courses to finish up and all the free time in the world. My goal is to commit the bulk of this time to poker grinding and studying and then continue to do so in the hours I am not working.
Where I am as a Poker Player:
I have only been seriously studying/grinding the game since the new year, in this time I have learned a great deal and my game has gotten to the point where I am neither winning or loosing mostly just vacillating between the two. The basics of poker have been seared into my brain and I am making mostly correct decisions now though I do spew a bit and still find it hard to fold in some bad situations. Working on my mindset has been one of the hardest things about the game but I have grown to accept the ill fortune this game seems to throw at you.
Here is my magical underwhelming lifetime graph:
In January I pushed my multi-tabling pretty hard, up to FT’s max of 16 which is how I got such high volume in. I’ve cut back to 10+/- 2 tabling now depending on how I’m feeling which lets me concentrate more. Most of my work in February went into increasing my Non-SD win rate from its abysmal depths, less tables helped with this a little and I met with some decent success nearly erasing passivity from my game and am much happier with it now. Most of March was taken off to concentrate on my academic studies which were somewhat ignored for the first two months of the year But am getting back into things now.
Since not really much about a player is apparent from a graph (except how epic wins they are 
) here are my poker tracker stats from NL5 as I feel my current style is better represented in my NL5 play than my whole sample.
So obviously my results are not spectacular so far, in fact every dollar I’ve won, which is not many, has been a monumental struggle. This game is not as easy to make money at, even small amounts at the low stakes, as I thought it would be when I started out. I really believed I would cruising at NL25 by now when I started in January, which I am no where near to doing, I guess I was pretty naive at that moment. I don’t feel like the time I’ve invested so far has been a waste though, I’ve built a small level of skill at the game and I am ready to push even harder into that tiny regime of winning players.
Over the next weeks as I get back into playing I will write up some posts about what I think my major leaks are and hopefully something will come out of that, even if its only me thinking about the problem more objectively.
What my Goals Are:
In the short term as stated above I want to become a winning player and really begin to grow my bankroll which is something I haven’t really done much of yet. Midterm I’d like to be cruising in NL25 towards the end of the summer at the latest. This will obviously take some work but a goal shouldn’t be something that is easily obtainable. In the long term my goal with poker is to be able to withdraw >$1200 a month to live off of while still appreciably growing my bankroll. Of course that’s always the dream, to go pro and live if not luxuriously than to still live off the game. I am definitely aiming to go beyond this but that is the minimum I need before I can go pro. I do not expect this to happen soon, I expect it to take years and maybe a university degree in between before it happens, if it happens. Priorities do change and I if between now and November, which is when I have to decide on whether I am returning to school for the winter semester, I see too little progress at poker I may have to put this dream on a much lower priority and settle into something more conventional.
What I hope to contribute to the community:
At this moment I am a pretty humdrum poker player with no particular stand out abilities to speak of but what I lack in expertise I hope to make up with enthusiasm. I may not be able to comment in a discussion with a spectacular analysis but I believe I can contribute something worthwhile. At the very least I hope not to embarrass myself.
What I hope to get out of the community:
Mostly the thing I hope to get out of this community is a small part of the collective knowledge of those who participate in it. There is so much talent in this community and I greatly appreciate the way you all share that hard won knowledge and skill.
Secondly I hope to find a group of players near to my skill level to work closely with at improving our game. There are so many examples of this working really well for many players on the forums and I think it would be foolish not to look for something like this. I have never really participated in anything like that before though so I’m not really sure where to begin. I’m even still in the dark on what a sweat session actually entails. I get the gist of it but the details are murky.
Thirdly I hope this blog becomes a really great way for me to discuss aspects of poker with the community, to highlight my game, and get some great feedback on my progress and what I need to look out for and/or start doing.
Thanks for reading that’s all I have for this first post, I really appreciate all the knowledge you guys drop in your own blogs and I hope I can start to give back in some small way, I don’t know what I would do without this community.
TL;DR
See you at the tables.
Best of luck with your goals!
but I set everything up on my laptop and will be transferring over my hand history from my external hard drive tomorrow, got everything but the morning session on it =), which will take an hour or so. Any way here is the afternoon session graph:
