The story so far

So our little journey begins on November 16, 2007, whereupon Hero was called into the office of his boss and informed that the decision had been made to terminate his employment for reasons of excessive Internet usage. Despite a worthless snark of "You know, you could have just given me something to do; that would've worked", our Hero is drawing dead in the face of a company that has clearly stacked the deck against him, to the point where he feels justified in making use of excessive poker metaphors in telling the story.

Hero goes home, has a captain and coke or four, and proceeds to tilt off around $70. Whee!



That Monday I left for Wisconsin, in a trip I'd already planned, to go see some good friends over Thanksgiving. I brought my laptop but didn't bring the power adapter, and wasn't really feeling up to playing much poker anyway. I was drinking a bit too much, lol. I have a nice talk with Camille about my career decision. "If anyone can do it, you can." My friends tend to look up to my intelligence a bit too much, but it's nonetheless very encouraging.

I get back and decide to dive straight in, eight-tabling the NL25 tables in an effort to build up my rather meager Full Tilt bankroll, which is nevertheless currently my largest.

The first week is actually somewhat encouraging, if a little bit on the side of epic variance.



The next is a bit rougher, although in this time frame I also managed to score a bit in a $10 tournament at Pokerstars that I entered on Sunday night to blow off a little steam. Of 20,000 entrants I came in 54th, which paid $280. Not great but it helps.



This was, overall, a bit frustrating. At least I'm winning, but the rate so far has been pretty pathetic. Over three weeks at NL25 I've won a grand total of $226.55. That's just over 30,000 hands, enough to iron out a lot of the variance, and I'm running at the rip-roaring clip of 1.48PTBB/100, and with a multitable ratio of 6.61, makes for a whopping hourly rate of $3.58 per hour. Not exactly what I pictured myself making at 29 when I graduated college with a degree in electrical engineering, Magna Cum Laude.

At this point I take a long, hard look at my game, and looking into my hand histories I discover that the majority of my lost money is coming in specific situations. Namely, I'm stacking off in far too many marginal situations: top pair and the like, with a propensity for cold-calling in marginal situations that should be more raise-or-fold. I'm trying to apply too many small-ball deep-stack tournament plays to cash games, and I'm not good enough postflop to pull them off. I retool my preflop game and start playing all but my biggest hands much more cautiously.

The results pay off immediately. I only had to play another 6k hands at NL25 before feeling my roll was sufficient to take a hearty shot at NL50. The remainder of my NL25 hands look as follows:



Now that's what I'm talking about! Almost as much progress in 6k hands as I'd made in the previous 30k. With three days at $65 a day, we're almost talking about the sort of cash I can sustain myself on, although, of course, we're only at NL25 and we're still talking pauper's dollars.

The sick thing is I really felt that I ran *terribly* during this timeframe, with most of the downswings coming on ridiculous coolers or plain old bad beats. But I discovered there were more than enough donkeys just looking to give their stacks away to make the difference :)

Of course looking at individual days this closely is a bit of a mistake, but it's immensely psychologically satisfying to plug a few leaks in your game and see immediate (and drastic) results. During this timeframe I pulled 6.5PTBB/100 and my hourly rate was around $12 an hour. We're still talking McDonalds wages, of course, but also still just in bankroll-building mode at NL25.

The switch to NL50 occurred on Thursday, 12/13 (for a brief session), and that's what I've played since. It's only been a few days but the results have been quite encouraging to say the least:



My PT stats for NL50 so far:



So, just baby steps so far, but I feel like I'm off to a good start!