1. The story so far....

Evening all,

A little bit about myself - basically I'm currently 17 and live in Kent, England. I've been playing poker for a couple of years now and I'm in the process of building up my bankroll. I hope to use this blog as a way of getting some of my poker musings down and hopefully someone else might read this - who exactly I'm not sure!

OK, so about my poker career so far. As you may have noticed, I'm actually not legally allowed to play poker at the moment (shock horror!!) but I'll be turning 18 in a month. I started playing for play money a couple of years ago, had great success on facebook poker (!) and then my poker career took off when I discovered my route into underage gambling - the poker freeroll.

The first site I played on was Coralpoker and after a few freerolls I eventually 'made it into the money'... but of course it wasn't money it was a ticket for a final qualifier to a live event! So, having learnt my lesson I tried to find a site where I could actually wins a few cents through a freeroll. And that site was hollywood poker.

Having had very limited Multi-table tournament experience I was very surprised how well I was doing. The freerolls usually had about 300 runners and the top 20 qualified for the next round and picked up literally $0.05 - I was managing to get into this top twenty about 50% of the time. Eventually my breakthrough came in September 2008. Having finished in the top twenty of a freeroll, I progressed to the 'quarter-roll' where I once again finished in the top 20, then onto the 'fifty cent roll' where I again finished in the top 20. As a result I'd reached the pinnacle: The Dollar Roll.

40 players, money for the top 10 and compared to the few cents I'd been winning, the possibility of winning a few dollars in one go was (embarrassingly) very exciting. And guess what, I won the dollar roll!!! I think it was $6.57 that I won and over the past 8/9 months I've built that up.

I entered a $1 + $0.30 hold'em sit n go, once again incredibly nervous/excited. I wasn't really sure if I was prepared for this step up given that all I'd really done before is facebook poker. But I knew I was a decent player and managed to win my first ever sit n go!

Through this $1.30 sit n gos by Christmas I'd reached a whopping $40. But then it kinda went all wrong and after a tough streak I was down to $25 and was fearing losing it all. I decided that there was no option but to try something new.

So, I tried $2.20 Double Or Nothing tournaments. Basically there are 10 players and the top 5 double their money. I thought it was something that I could adjust to quite comfortably and also it was something that I felt I could multi-table at effectively. After some promising early results I decided to switch to the turbo versions of these double or nothings. I know people usually say that there's a lot more variance in turbos and they're harder to win at in the long-run, but I've actually been doing better in the turbos!

I currently 3-table these turbo DoNs and I can play about 6 games an hour. At the moment by bankroll is $71 and my record so far is:

Double 54
Nothing 32

The way I like to look at this is that, over the course of 100 games, 55 doubles are required in order to break-even when the rake is taken into consideration. So, I think I'm making good progress to hit somewhere in the region of 60-65 doubles over my first 100 games - which I'm certainly very pleased about.

I've got a long summer coming up in between my final exams in a couple of weeks and when I go to university in October, so I'm hoping to play a lot of poker and keep building my bankroll.

My aim is to reach $130 ASAP, as once I reach that amount I'll have a big enough bankroll to move up to the $5.50 DoN level. Currently I'm making about $2.50 an hour, so at the current rate it's going to take me a further 25 or so hours of play to reach that goal.

By the time I go to university (October 1st) my goal to be in a position where I'm making $8 an hour consistantly - that would pretty much be equivalent to what I'd get for an hour's worth of proper work. I think it's an ambitious target but one that I think is very attainable.

See you at the tables!

Twisted Logic.