My Poker Story - Big Thank You to FTR !
Ok, well here is my story.
I am at university and study maths, and one of my friends had always been trying to convince me to go to poker night at the student union bar (i had never played Holdem before, knew hand values but that's about it), which basically is a £5 MTT. One night we had been in the pub together and the time had come around and the union bar was just across the road, and my friend managed to finally convince me to go along.
Bear in mind that i did not have any clue of good starting hands etc and basically i did not think about the odds of hitting cards, but i played hands if i had "a good feeling" about them. Anyway, as we all know, sometimes fish win, and i got stupidly lucky and managed to finish 3rd, picking up a profit of £20. My friend had also been trying to convince me to play online, so as i have made £20 from the live game, i decide i will deposit half of this online (at VCPoker.co.uk, it has very small stakes) and if i lose it, then so be it, i still have made £10 and had a lot of fun.
I start playing online, and find i am losing slowly. My friend then shows me this amazing site that has loads of tips and material to read on how to win at NL Holdem. This site was FTR. I read a lot of the material available on this site and do not notice a great change in my profits/losses, but i am not playing so many hands now. I win a couple of big hands in ring games at 5c/10c tables and get up to just over £20, and decide i will withdraw my initial deposit and if i lose the rest of my bankroll then i will quit playing poker online. I go down to roughly $5 at one point after some bad decisions in ring games, and switch to playing the 50c+5c SnG tournaments exclusively. I find i am pretty good at these as a lot of players will call anything because they are seemingly convinced you have nothing, and slowly make a profit.
Following this i read a lot more of the great advisory material on this site and slowly improve both my game and my bankroll. I have recently just hit £100 for the first time, and have moved up to be playing $5 + $0.5 SnGs, so far for a slight profit, but every time i have moved up levels i have taken a while before i have started to consitently make money at the level. Just before moving up i had a 68.5% ROI from the last 33 SnGs i played, but had suffered a big downswing before that, due in no small part to bad play and possibly a bit of overconfidence, after which i decided to reread some of the guides on this site and realised a couple of major things i had been doing wrong.
I would just like to say a big thank you to everyone on this site, as without my friend convincing me to play, a lot of luck along the way, and then this site teaching me how to play well, i would not have the enjoyment of playing and also the profit of over £100 (which is a big amount for a student - especially when it came from £5 !) over the last couple of months. FTR has transformed me from a lucky fish with a slight grasp of the game to someone who is continually learning and making a steady profit along the way. For this i am eternally grateful.
Nick
