My Poker Story: A Donk Tells All

Like many amateur players, I started my poker career watching Rounders, playing Texas Hold’em poker for play money on Pokerstars, and being inspired by the likes of Chris Moneymaker, Greg Raymer, Joe Hachem and Daniel Negreanu. I quickly developed a passion for the game, and dreamed of one day winning my own World Series of Poker bracelet.

I never gave much thought to the difference between cash and tournament play. I approached the game with a fixed strategy that, as my poker education continued, would prove to be rather flawed.

I started ordering all the poker books I could get my hands on. I quickly read the poker books as well as online poker forums. Of course I started with a big ego, thinking I had it all figured out.

My first love was No Limit Texas Hold’em. I started not caring much for Fixed Limit Hold’em. I was playing home game No Limit Hold’em tournaments with friends, $25 No Limit cash games, and $10 sit and go tournaments online. I quickly built a bankroll from $500 to $3,000. This only reinforced the fact that I knew it all.

Like the donkey I am, I cashed out my bankroll to help my wife get a new car. Then Hurricane Katrina hit. So my poker playing took a backseat while we recovered from that.
After I began reading and playing poker again I started realizing that

1. I wasn’t as good as I thought
2. There were a lot of differences between cash games (limit and no-limit) and tournaments
3. I am the very donkey I yell and scream and laugh about

This was a pretty scary realization. I started to  understand that every game should be approached strategically different. I realized that the way you play any given hand is situational and based upon your opponent’s stack size, position, playing style,  and your history together (multi-level thinking).

Poker was no longer just having the best hand or bluffing everyone else out, it became a game of endless scenarios and possibilities. This was new and exciting, but terrifying at the same time.

So that’s when I decided that to master poker, I had to not only understand, but apply all the poker theory and strategies I’d been reading about. I invested in good poker software to help analyze my hands and my opponents. I also invested more into my poker education by signing up for a popular online poker training site. These things helped my game tremendously and led me to playing professionally for a while.

Due to some unfortunate circumstances, I needed to cash out my entire bankroll and quit playing full time. Every since, I’ve had fun building a bankroll from next to nothing to a few hundred dollars  and then cashing it.

Now, my goals are to focus on building a quality site about how to play poker online, build up a monster bankroll nearly from scratch on Pokerstars, achieve Supernova Elite within the next two years, and play in next year’s World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.