The Bankroll Reloaded…

So I decided that online poker was pretty rigged (I took a lot of sick beats) and decided to stick with live grinding and never play online again. I continued to clean up the games around my town, often playing cash games or sngs with friends or the guys a little older than me who were pretty much straight up poker acquaintances. We never hung out or did anything else together than play cards whereas my friends I actually spend time with them having fun without trying to take each other’s money all the time. I think I had grinded my roll up to something like $1200ish by the beginning of grade 12 (September 2005), making back what I had last online and then some and was feeling really confident in my game.

I had been messing around with play money games on pokerstars, mostly playing the largest SNGs they had running at the time and gathered around 1mm play chips. I was talking to a guy in the chat (since I’m often pretty friendly when I play especially live I enjoy talking, but even nowadays online if you strike up a conversation at a table of mine I usually try to talk if I’m not too busy. Online I’ll talk during a hand cuz it really doesn’t make a huge difference but live I tend to shut up if im in a pot since I’m worried about tells n shit like that.) and this guy I was speaking to told me that if I wanted to trade 1mm play chips he knows a guy who will pay $15 USD for it. So I emailed the guy with the USD and he said that he will send the money but I have to send the play chips first so this was sketchy as hell but I decided that it was only play money so what the fuck why not. I shipped my 1MM play chips which was pretty much all I had and sweated it out waiting for him to ship the real money.

5 minutes passed and I still hadn’t received the money and was starting to freak out a bit and messaged him about it again. He told me that he sent it and it takes time sometimes so just wait. Another few minutes later I ended up receiving the transfer into my account and once again had the means to play online although with a ridiculously small roll. I ended up playing some 2c/5c cash games or something like that and dropped $4 and was left with like $11 and decided to go play some sngs through which I had built my roll with playmoneywise. I also had a lot of experience playing sngs with my buddies so I played a holdem sng 5.50 and proceeded to lose that I think busting out without cashing, leaving me with only one sng left before I would declare that online poker is most definitely the most rigged game evarrrrr

I played an Omaha hi/lo game which I had a basic knowledge of how to play due to reading phil hellmuth’s book which I mentioned in an earlier post. This actually gave me a huge edge on my opponents compounded with my aggression as most players when it got down to 4 or 5 handed near the money tended to turtle up but its so hard to scoop pots in om8 anyway that this was a big mistake as they most definitely weren’t defending enough. With the blinds getting big, taking them down 4 handed seriously can bulk up your stack. I was lucky enough to win the sng so now I had a 22.50 roll and decided to continue rolling with the om8 sngs. I decided to play another one right away and WON it again! Now my roll was up to like 40 bucks online and my basic knowledge / aggression mixed with the poor play at the lowest buyin for om8 games helped me start crushing these games. I continued playing these games until I had made my total bankroll up to something like $2400 around June 2005 or so. By now I was known as a big poker player in my school since I was generally winning the most out of anyone in my grade and playing during lunch or after school quite a bit. My at the time girlfriend even told me that I should not waste my time playing poker so much and one day I would realize that… Yeah right!

That summer I tried to get into online cash games again and would see if I had the skills I needed yet to beat players on the virtual felt, but more on this next time.
TO be continued…