Introduction

[maple47]

Hi,

I'm new around here. Have been playing real money poker for about a week now. NL Texas Holdem exclusively.

My goal is to find out if I am a winning or losing player by playing at relatively low buy-in tables. I played 6-person $25 NL tables at Empire for about a week, and so far I'm a marginally winning player. (Yay!)

Last saturday I entered my first MTT tournament. It was a regular $5/1 buy-in NL tournament. I was staring at the registration screen for a while, thinking that it was silly to enter a tournament where the house "raked" almost 20% of the buy-in, and that I would very likely never see my 6$ again. Since I had already won $20 earlier the same day, and I wanted to find out how the tournament worked, I figured $6 was a small price to pay.

A total of 30 people signed up, giving a total prize pool of $150, with the first prize being $60. As the tournament began, I was thinking to myself that 10:1 on the buy-in for winning against 29 others were poor "pot odds", particularly for someone like me who have never played in a tournament before, never played for real money at a 10 man table, never had to significantly adjust my play according to the number of players at the table, and never played heads up. Oh well.

About 3 hours and a ton of adrenaline later, I'm heads up with about 20k in my stack vs. the remaining ~10k in his stack. Being short stacked, he is forced to (semi)bluff regularly, and I call his all-in the first time I have a hand. And.. I win. My first tournament ever!

I know the prize was paltry, there were "only" 30 players in the tournament, the other players were probably not the best, I know I should not conclude that I'm a poker god, etc., but still, it felt great to win my first tournament ever, after only playing for a week.

I played a few more tournaments on sunday, and overall did very well, getting knocked out on hands that I was a favourite to win (pre-flop AA all-in got cracked by trip queens with two of the queens on the table in one case - other was a 3-way all-in where I had a lower pair dominated with my higher pair, and a slight favour over two overcards, would have made me chip leader with a nice margin to the runner-up).

I think that there is more money to be had by fishing at normal tables, but I really like the tournament style.

Anyway, I picked up a lot of good stuff from FTR, and I'm going to keep an eye on the forum here, so just wanted to say hi and thanks for helping me get started.

/maple47

[Irisheyes]

Congratzon yourwin. Keep up the good work and welcome to the boards.

[UG]

Congratzon yourwin. Keep up the good work and welcome to the boards.

[aokrongly]

Welcome Maple,
It sounds like you've put some work into your game. What books have you read. what are your basic beliefs about how to play poker?

btw, you may or may not find full NL tables more profitable. Short tables aren't "safer" in my opinion. They're more agressive. But you should experiment. Some people play better short handed, others play better at a full table. The fact that you made 1st in the MTT is pretty promising for your play. And the fact that you're here is very promising for your future.

Welcome.