“I have a $20 bankroll and I’m willing to gamble with it.” So I sat down at my first online NLHE table and within 20 minutes I lost it all.

When I came to FTR I was just looking to find the best online poker room. I read the site reviews, analyzed the bonuses and dove in for the free $10 on Royal Vegas (okay, so I really lost $30). I don’t have lots of extra cash and I knew my wife wouldn’t appreciate me reloading everyday so I took a step back. I read many of the threads here and started seeing why I lost my $20 – I’m a fish. I was playing Q4o and flopped trips, that’s 75% of 4-of-a-kind . . . of course I’m pushing my last $16.00.

So that’s March. I then made an agreement with my wife that I would only load $20 a paycheck - and only if I busted with the previous $20. So I quickly found two things: 1) that the NL ring games (at any stakes) can eat up $20 in minutes, and 2) if there was no river card that probably wouldn’t be the case.

So during my step back I realized I needed to see a lot of Hold’em hands. I needed to know what kinds of hands I can expect to see and how often I can expect to see them. So I bought a software program for $50 (thinking it was actually saving me money in the long run) and played against the AI. Between reading FTR everyday and using this software, I worked the AI over at every skill level within a week and I knew I was still a fish. So I wasn’t real satisfied with playing against a program. I reloaded.

Now, I needed to make this $20 last for two weeks. How? That’s when I found another tab on the poker room lobby: “Sit & Go”. “Look at this, it’s a $2 tournament.” Just what I needed: To see a lot of hands for a little cash and play against real opponents. And, with $20 I can lose ten of these. If I win one then I can lose even more! I really wasn’t thinking about making money just yet. I just needed to see a lot of hands and I liked that I could do that and only risk $2 at a time. Epiphany.

Within a month of playing SnGs I gained enough experience to actually grow my bankroll and not have to reload (thank you Rippy, Rada, and Dav). I grew it enough to cash out from RVP in May and take advantage of some bonuses by loading it at Empire (that required ring game play which I won’t get into).

I haven’t had to put my own money in since May. One reason is that I found a way to make even more $$ on my $5-10 buyin: “Multi-Table Tournaments”. These will take 3-4 hours (hopefully) and when you get a win you will get money that is actually worth mentioning to your friends. I got practice at sharpening my reads on players because in MTTs I could get moved to another table at any time. I learned valuable lessons the “hard way” because I’d spend 2 or more hours building a nice stack with good play and then bust out by making a bonehead move. I still make bonehead plays but there is no teacher better than experience. And when that bonehead play costs me 2 hours of valuable time just to bust out on the bubble, that play is sure to stick in my mind for a while - even though I went into “auto-tilt” when I re-raised my TPTK into a made set, “wasted” much of my time, and gave some lucky bastard a gargantuan stack, that experience is worth gold in my mind – well worth $5 and 2 hours imo.

So, a couple of wins and a few ITMs in 150+ player MTTs (along with some bonus whoring) and my BR got over $1,000 – of which I put in about $100 between March and May. This post is simply a way to help out any beginners who may be iffy as to which direction to head when starting out online.

To me, tournaments are by far the best way for new players to get the experience they need in order to actually win at poker. I do sit down at ring games when – and only when – I need to, and my ring play shows me that I still really need a lot of work on my game. But for the beginner who doesn’t have a lot of money to invest, I cannot make any stronger a recommendation than for the low buy-in tournaments when starting off building your game and roll. Now I’m working on how to keep a wife happy while playing poker for 20 hours a week. I’ll keep you posted.