And still they lead me back to the long and winding road The Beatles
Five years ago the only poker game that I was involved in was an occasional home game among friends, played at my place. This game was played five or six times per year, so I was playing maybe 30 hours of poker per year. By this stage we had already added Texas Holdem to our list of games, having seen it played on TV on ESPN. It was seeing this TV coverage, with its cast of poker professionals, that really got me thinking about the game and how it was played. So sometime around the end of the year I went down to the local library and borrowed a couple of "beginners' guides".
I don't remember the name of that first poker book (I think it was written by Ken Warren), but it was something of a revelation to me. I came to realise that there were certain basic principals to successful poker play, based on simple mathematical concepts. By applying these principals correctly, you could become a winning player and there were even people who made a living out of playing poker! This book also pointed out the importance of two things: bankroll management and record-keeping. So I set about applying some of the things I'd learned, starting with record-keeping. I got a notebook and started writing down the details of the games I played in, including the type of game, my bankroll balance, the amount won or lost, and the hours played.
The first game that I recorded was played on Saturday 11th October 2008, at 7.30pm. This was a five-handed home game, dealer's choice, with a betting limit of $1-$5. I went in with $80 and broke even, coming out with the same amount. I played for 5 1/2 hours. There were many games to follow that and when I'd filled up my notebook I graduated to an exercise book and started drawing up tables and recording results for particular game types separately from the overall totals. It all got rather complicated but I could never complain about not having enough information about my games. If anything, I was suffering from information overload.There are only two other entries for that year; one more home game and my first ever casino game, played on Christmas eve. In 2009 things changed a bit. The year was book-ended by visits to the casino. I'd got into the habit of playing a few No Limit Texas Holdem cash games at the casino during the Christmas holidays. Meanwhile, the home games continued, and I also played a few other games at a local pool club. By the end of that year I'd played a total of 82 hours since my records started and was ahead by a handful of dollars (no, nowhere near a fistful).
I played a lot more in 2010. This was the year when I discovered the Friday night Texas Holdem Tournament at the Phoenix Tavern. My regular home game fizzled out in March and was replaced by a regular visit to the Friday night tournament. This game cost $20 to play in ($10 buy-in, $10 re-buy or add-on), and my bankroll started moving into negative territory, $20 at a time. It wasn't until October that I had my first win, by which time I was several hundred dollars in the red. I had enough wins after that to reduce the deficit, and by the last game of the year (Christmas Eve again) I had almost got back into the black. At this stage I'd played 178 hours of poker.
2011 started out much the same as the previous year, but then I started playing online. My first ever online poker game was on February 8th, playing in a Texas Holdem ring game on Fulltilt Poker. From that point on I was playing at least once per week online, first on Fulltilt, then on 888 Poker. And I was still playing in the live tournament every couple of weeks up until October when they stopped playing. By the end of the year I'd played another 250 hours of poker, taking my total to over 400 hours. Considering I was playing 30 hours annually a few years before, this was a huge increase. Poker was starting to take over my life.
By March of 2012 I was playing exclusively online and had hit the 500 hours mark. At this point I considered something I had read in that same poker book several years previously. The author had pointed out that poker is not for everyone; that some people just didn't have the knack for it. He suggested that if the reader was still not a winning player by the time they'd played 500 hours, then maybe poker wasn't for them; maybe they should take up macramé, or topiary or something. At this point my results were not very good. Although I was ahead, it was not by much, and my win rate was barely above zero. Not a great result for 500 hours of play. So I did consider giving up and taking up the trombone. Briefly. Very briefly. Actually, I was hooked on poker and was probably never going to give it up. Maybe if I'd used up all my poker reserves and had to start paying back into my bankroll I would have considered it. Maybe.
Now, fourteen months later, I've just passed the one thousand hours mark. So the first 500 hours took me nearly 3 1/2 years; the second 500 took just over a year. My bankroll has got healthier in that time too. Although my balance dipped into negative territory in the middle of last year (see 'Mid-Winter Nosedive'), it recovered around the beginning of this year and has been more or less climbing ever since. In fact my poker stake hit an all-time high in the middle of April, although it's dropped back a bit since then. Since I started concentrating on SitnGos things have been looking up. But it's still very much a learning curve, and every game presents a new challenge. That's the great thing about this game; after 1000 hours of play there is plenty still to learn.
Now that I've reached this milestone, I can look forward to the next one: 2000 hours? 5000 hours? Actually, I've set myself some more modest goals, some things that should be achievable in the short to medium term. These include:
*Moving up to the next level in 7 Card Stud (if I can manage a few wins at the current level)
*Moving up a level in SitnGos (I just have to get out of my current flat patch)
*Making a withdrawal from the 888 poker site
*Playing multiple online games
*Getting back into a live game (got to get my bankroll up a little higher first).
And of course there's always the goal of increasing my poker stake. Maybe the next milestone I should be aiming for is a $1000 bankroll...
I'll keep you posted.
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