Monday, April 30, 2007

Goals, Results, and New Ambitions

For those of you that don't know how sit and go's work, I'll explain a little bit. Basically, I play 9 person tournaments that start as soon as 9 players sit down at the table. They are no limit tournaments with blinds that go every few hands or every few minutes depending on the structure. 50% of the prize pool goes to first place, 30% to second, and 20% to third. These tournaments make up approximately 99% of the time that I spend playing poker. I'm going to try to make a habit out of posting my results here. Here is the first installment of those results:

Today: 30 sngs played, -$204

April: 629 sngs played (I've been way too lazy this year), +$3,212

2007: 1684 sngs played (again I need to stop being lazy and play more), +$14,140

Like I said in my last post, sit and go's currently make up a large portion of my income. I don't really consider myself an expert player, but I am fairly accomplished, and I think I'm one of the best players at the limit I play. I'm currently in the beginning stages of writing an SNG book for beginner's and intermediate players looking to improve and beat low limit SNGs. Obviously I am doing this partially because I feel that I can make a decent amount of money from selling my book on the internet (amazon, ebay, clickbank, etc.), but that's definitely not my only motivation for writing this book. I also have a genuine desire to accomplish something big. I really don't feel like I have had any real major goals to accomplish since I graduated from college last year. This will definitely give me something to shoot for. I'd like to get this done by the end of the summer. This isn't going to be some crappy ebook...its going to be a full instructional book. I expect to get to 100 pages pretty easily and I could see it getting to 200 without too much elaboration. Obviously getting a book that size done in a few months is an ambitious goal, but I think its doable.

My goals for the summer go something like this:
1. Write the book!
2. Get in shape - I'm not a huge lifter, but doing a fair amount of running is probably something I'll do.
3. Play a ton of poker.
4. Quit my real job and find some other source of income besides poker.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Hello World

My name is Adam. I am a 23 year old semi-professional poker player. I'm starting this blog in order to chronicle my progress - both as a poker player and just in life in general. I graduated from college about a year ago and, for the next few months at least, I have a real job as well. After that who knows.

I started playing poker, like so many others, after watching Chris Moneymaker win the WSOP Main Event in 2003. Up until that point I couldn't have even told you the hand rankings outside of a few I learned from playing various card and board games as a little kid. When I started playing I noticed pretty quickly that I was better than most of my friends. At that point I figured I was the best player in the world, and couldn't lose. My first real money deposit on Party Poker was definitely a humbling experience that made me realize otherwise. I blew through my first $50 deposit (which I figured I was going to make millions off of) in about 15 minutes at the $0.25 tables at Party. Whoops. After that experience I was determined to prove to myself and to my friends that I was a winning player. I searched everywhere I could for poker strategy. I stumbled onto a pretty solid (or at least I thought so at the time) sit and go strategy from poker blogger F Train. Note that this strategy is outdated and probably isn't good for beating anything more than $5 and maybe $10 sit and go's at this point. I'm not sure if it was ever the greatest advice, but it was definitely a winning strategy in the very low limit SNGs that I decided I was going to give a shot. After about a year of up and down play where I was basically breakeven I finally started to show a small profit. During this time I had also ventured into cash games and a few multi table tourneys with a little success there as well. I had begun playing online in January of 2005 and by May of 2006 I had made about $2500. Considering the amount of time I had spent playing that was a pretty pathetic hourly wage, but I was very happy with the progress I had made.

In the middle of May 2006 I graduated from Huntington University. Soon after I took a job with a local radio station while continuing to make a small amount of money playing poker online and a couple local places that had some pretty friendly games going on in "back rooms." About a week after I graduated a friend introduced me to online casino bonuses. Basically, online casinos offered deposit bonus which you had to wager a certain amount to be able to withdraw. If the house edge was small enough that you could make a profit (including the bonus obviously) over the course of the wagering requirement, then it was a bonus that I played. In about a month I made about 10k from these bonuses. This is when I really started to take poker seriously. After I did all the really good casino bonuses I left a bankroll online of about 4k. It was about this time that I discovered Absolute Poker which had some great sit and go games. After playing there for a couple months and making about 5k I moved to Party Poker and started playing the $55 Speed SNGs. When congress passed the UIGEA last October I moved to Stars before moving back to Absolute Poker where I am currently playing.

I ended up making just over 20k in 4 months as an official professional poker player last year and I've made just under 15k so far this year. My goal for the year is 70k, and there is no reason that I shouldn't attain it other than my own laziness...which is part of the reason I'm starting this blog :)

Right now I'm 7 tabling the $44 sngs at Absolute Poker and playing 2/4-5/10 Limit hold'em when I need to mix up to keep my life from becoming too much of a grind. Sorry this post turned into my complete poker story. More about me another day. I'll try to at least post my results here every day that I play and I'll probably post other miscellaneous stuff a couple times a week as well...cheers!