The following post was originally made on the 2+2 poker forum in response to the question of how people started playing poker. I have updated it a little to bring it up to date.
My motivations for starting are perhaps a little different to most...
My exposure to online poker was fleeting for several years. I pretty much thought online poker was akin to Yahoo Chess or Tangleword. Whenever I did have a look at it, people just seemed to be going all-in and hoping for the best. Even watching poker on TV that seemed to be the case, so I just wasn't that interested.
Back in 2008 though, my boss (at the time) said that a bunch of people from the office have a regular poker home game and asked if i would be interested. I said perhaps, but thought that, prior to accepting, I should have another go online, not really to build up skills as much as understand the mechanisms of the game so I didn't look dumb if I played with my colleagues.
So, I downloaded Pokerstars and deposited £50 just to understand it all. Cash games at the time scared the bejesus out of me as I had visions of losing my bankroll within seconds, so I concentrated on the micro-stake SNGs and ordered a book online which concentrated on this type of game, by Colin Moshman. After skim-reading the book and playing a few sessions, I started to find myself doing okay and min-cashing fairly frequently. It was at this time two pivotal events happened which switched my interest up to max...
One was - I was made redundant from my company. Whilst I was obviously going to spend quite a bit of time looking for work, I figured I should invest some serious time in becoming half-decent at the games, mainly to keep my mind stimulated rather than vegging in front of the TV and well, you never know, I could win some money...
Second was - a phone call with my father. Now my dad was a n extremely good snooker, english billiards and 8-ball player when he lived in Belgium as well as a maths grad in his younger days. He became deeply interested in card-counting in Blackjack a few years ago and read pretty much every book on the subject before giving up on the idea after a bad session at a european casino where he believed the distractions in big games made it difficult to be profitable. Anyway, I chatted to him about poker and we became embroiled in a skill vs luck debate. He felt it was like 10% skill 90% luck and was essentially saying that it was a mugs game. I argued that since looking into it, luck does play a huge part but the skill percentage becomes greater the further up the ladder you get. This debate raged for a number of days to the point where I really wanted to prove to him that with some studious learning, you can be a winning player or alternatively, would reach the same conclusion. He never doubted that there was a skill element, just that I felt it was greater than he did.
[Note : I'm still working this out, and will post more about this in time I'm sure!]
So I ramped up my play online - again mainly SNGs. I tried to play fairly tight and downloaded pretty much every available poker TV show from the last few years to watch. I bought the Harrington books, Daniel Negreanu's power poker book, Sklanskys book, Caro's book and a bunch of other non-instructional books (Big/Bigger Deal, Biggest game in town etc) and grinded away. During those first couple of months I min-cashed quite a few large-field tourneys, won a 27-man SNG and finished second in a couple more and scored my biggest cash in finishing 3rd in a 180-man SNG to win $450. Then I went on a mad losing run which, partly because I was now playing well above my bankroll ($20 min buy in games) meant I went bust a few weeks later.
Not to be discouraged I re-loaded my account (something I became quite used to) and moved down some levels. This worked for a while until I realised that my game wasn't aggresive enough in the middle stages of tourneys. Spending some time to adjust, I went on another massive downswing. I had become waaay too loose aggresive and it took some time to be able to naturally tighten up again. Anyway, the pattern continued - reload the account, make some small cashes then hit a losing run.
The key thing for me was to be able to learn the game, and quite honestly I don't mind being a losing player if I am trying new things out as it will ultimately make me more rounded. If I just played the same game all the time and never scored any results then I would just give up.
I grew to love and hate the game in equal measure, mainly depending on results. After only winning a few hundred in 2008, I went on to have a less than stellar 2009...whatever cash I made was outweighed by the tournament bust-outs and I hated looking at ROI numbers during this time. But I still felt my game was improving, in the sense that I felt like I was making far fewer mistakes than before and during this time I became more philosophical about the dreaded 'bad beats'. Ultimately, if you make the right decision and get unlucky, then you still played well regardless of the result. A year before I would write this down to the poker gods hating me, but I started to realise that if you keep making the good decisions, the results will follow eventually.
During 2009 I also tried grinding cash games, but lacked the discipline to continue this. I appreciated that starting at micro-stakes and playing cash would be my most profitable route and would reflect skill levels far more (especially when moving up the levels), but I couldn't stay away from the adrenaline rush of big field tournaments. After all, why play for hours only to make a small profit when you can take a chance on a tournament and possibly make a big return. It is very much a numbers game at the end of the day and I actually preferred the high-variance loss-leading nature of tournament poker. I will go back to cash games as a specific challenge but I can't see me becoming a 'cash game player' anytime soon.
I was also firmly ensconced in a new job, which made it hard to commit as much time as I would like, which certainly reduces the allure of 'grinding' anything for long.
So after a disappointing 2009, I started 2010 with a new approach. I was going to go back to the single table tournaments (STTs) and grind these on Pokerstars. This was moderately profitable and felt comfortable after a while that I was +EV in the low stake games although rather like the cash game period (see above), I found the lure of multi-table tournaments (MTTs) too much to continue seriously beyond a few months.
But then I had a couple of half-decent wins on Full Tilt Poker, and took down my largest field MTT to date. It was around this time that I also started playing the FTP 'Steps' system, working on the basis that my STT experience would stand me in good stead. Over a period of a couple of weeks I had the best result of my poker playing days so far - turning an $8 stake at Step 2 into a $12,000 WSOP main event package. After some deliberation, I chose to cash the package and instead go to Vegas to play some preliminary events at lower buy-ins, leaving me enough for a nice holiday later in the year.
On returning from Vegas, I had a few more good results from MTTs, totalling around another $1.5k, and I started to feel more confident in the later stages of the big field events - again, something that surely comes from experience.
So that brings it up to date. I'm still reading every poker book I can get my hands on, and I still consider myself a learning newbie player although now I feel things are starting to come together and hopefully I can take the knowledge and confidence into more good results in the future.
I'm staying realistic though. If poker can pay for a holiday each year then I'll be happy and I will always have something to learn from players who are better than me. But at least my overall ROI is looking much more healthy now!
But I've still not concluded the skill vs luck debate with my father....
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