Newbie but doing well :P

Hi Scott, welcome to Pokerstrategy!

Those are some very impressive results for your first games ever, great job! ♠_thumbsup:

The first thing I would advise you to do, if you want to start playing real money games, is to set yourself some strict bankroll management guidelines. Many new players underestimate this crucial part of poker (including myself, when I was starting out), but it is arguably even more important than your actual game at the tables. You mentioned something about playing £5 games in the future. Assuming you're talking about MTTs, you actually need a pretty big bankroll for these tournaments, since the variance in this format is very high.

So, how much are you willing to invest in your first poker bankroll? Keep in mind that we also have some free money offers here to get you started. This will also give you a tracked account and the ability to get a higher status, so you can get access to more content on this website.

And what format are going to play? Either way, we'll have plenty of material for you over here.

All the best, and I hope to see you around!

I actually just sent in y ID for one of your free money offers, just waiting for it to be accepted, and I want to try out tournaments, £5 buy in or below, and I'll most likly deposit £50 to start off with and if that goes down the drain I'll go back to freerolls for a while

Originally posted by ScottBatiste
I actually just sent in y ID for one of your free money offers.

All right, great!

I wouldn't really recommend playing £5 tournaments with a £50 bankroll, though, to be honest. Our beginner's MTT course suggests that you have at least 150 buy-ins for your current limit in your bankroll. As I said earlier, MTTs are a very variance-heavy format, so it would be quite easy to lose your investment early on, even if you're making all the correct decisions.

In the end, it's your decision, but I would advise you to either look for tournaments with a much lower buy-in, if your poker room offers them, or you could try to build your bankroll up by playing other formats that involve less variance, like single table SNGs or cash games.

I have a higher bankroll if need be, just only using £50 of it

Do you mean that you want to deposit a higher amount, but only use £50 of it? Or would you want to re-deposit in case you lost the £50?

I could re-depoist if I wanted to

I would agree with Harrier88 to start with low buy in tournaments. The field in £5 tournaments will be less reckless but will still be aggressive and a lot of the players getting to the bubble will reasonably skilled players. When you start buying in to tournaments you will also need to place further up to be able to make a profit as on the bubble you barely get your money back. At least before you go ahead try and get a bigger sample size of frerolls or low buy in tournaments.

Best to start with a modest bankroll and as it grows so will your skill level. Pokerstars might be worth a look as they have a lot of modest buy in MTTs such as 11c, 27c and 55c and also 180 and 90 man Sit and Gos. Even at the low buy-ins there tend to be less kamikaze action compared to the Pokerstars frerolls. The low buy in tourneys at Ipoker e.g. WH tend to be rebuys and these can get pretty crazy. Ipoker is good for beginner STTs though and you can take advantage of the freerolls that you can take part in with the WH points.