A Personal Milestone

Before I spent any of my own money on poker I stayed on the play money tables, promising myself that I wouldn't go into my pocket until I amassed $1M in play money chips. It took me over a year but I did it actually leaving ~$1.5M in my Tiger Gaming play money account.

In January of this year I plunked down a whole $25 of my hard-earned cash. The new deal with myself was based on knowing that real money games would be vastly different from play money tables. This time, I would only put up $25 at a time until I got better at the real money games.

For most of this year I was going into my pocket for $25 about once a week. Sometimes more or less but that's about the average. I've never had a stack bigger than $200. Many times I was down to my last few bucks and I would patiently and carefully rebuild the stack playing ultra-micro tables and SNG's. I'd do well for a while then it seems that every donkey with a nose smelled my stack and came after me handing me one bad beat after another.

The only thing worse than an idiot is a lucky idiot and the only thing worse than that is a lucky idiot that thinks they're good.

The biggest table I play on is $0.25/.50 so far. The biggest SNG has been a $20 buy-in. The only MTT's I play are freerolls and the Blogger Poker Tour at Poker.com.


Any way, the last 15 days have been the longest I've gone on $25. I put together a string of SNG wins and have generally been able to keep my biggest foe (me and my bad attitude) in check. At the risk of inviting Lady Bad Luck to move in for a while I felt I deserved a pat on the back. Even if it's only from me.

Once I am more certain of my skills I will start playing live games and bigger tables and trying to develop the vulture-like patience needed to wait for the right situation to come up at the tables.

--PB--