Moving to a higher stake

(May 28, 2008)

Early this month I finally exceeded the $60 profit target on 2NL, so I decided to move to 5NL on Party Poker and picking up a free bankroll bonus at pokersourceonline.

First few sessions were a disaster as I quickly lost 5 buy-ins. I wasn't sure why that happened though the opposition seemed a little better. So, I looked at all my big loosing hands and quickly found a couple of holes (more like craters) in my game. More aggression, less limping, less hands overall and caution when countered in a hand seemed like the way to go. Even though I got a bit lucky, my last two session were a lot better and I'm gradually heading towards a positive overall result.

I must add that the use of HoldemManager is a great help, as it really shows how opponents play and I'm able to respond to that (better).

So far, I've also picked up almost 100 party points, so 25 more to clear the $125 bonus from pokersourceonline and 100 more to clear the $25 bonus from party poker.

Harrington on cash is arriving soon, so I've got some reading material for the holidays!

In order to quickly pick up those party points I sat down at the 25NL tables with a short stack, planning to fold everything except premium pairs. That was definately a rollercoaster: in the first hand I get pocket queens so I puch all-in and pick up the blinds. Next hand, I pick up pocket kings and push again excpecting to get called of course (I would too). Two guys call and only after two hands I'm at $14 :)

A couple of days later I sit down again and loose $10 in 8 hands :)

Because it looks like I'll be able to clear the bonus playing the 5NL, I won't doing that again, but it sure was exciting.

May the cards be with you!

In the beginning

Poker seems to have become very popular these days, so I got interested in finding out why. Because I had never ever played the game before - yup a real noob - I thought it might be fun to keep a log of my journey.

So here we are, my first post on my brand new poker blog.

To get things started, I created an account on PKR (http://www.pkr.com/), a rather new kid on the block with nice 3d graphics, downloaded the client and made a first deposit of $40.
Since I am destined for to become a world famous pokerstar, you might want to write this down: my career started at October first, 2007.

Obviously, one should act with caution and humility, so I figured the microstakes table would be step 1 and I took my chips to the $0.02-$0.04 No Limit cash tables. I quickly learned to rules of the game, read a few tips and pointers and took off...

... making my first profit of $0.93. Hey, this is fun and easy!

I finished october with a loss of $6.64, including a bad beat of $-10,29 and I only had played 1 table at a time.

Hmmmm, maybe I should read a bit more.