Friday, June 17, 2011

Chapter #4—Making money

Unfortunately, my online challenge is not going that well. After an initial heater, running my .59 up to 2.60 or so, I have seen nothing work out for me in the past 2 days as most pots are 4-7 handed, even when raised and that means big swings in variance. When you only have between 50-75 BBs are you miss 5-7 big pots, then you can see where the difficulty in building a BR may be. Oh well, like Mandy Patinkin said in the Princess Bride, "Vizzini told me to go back to the beginning..."
In February of 2006 I left my job as a District Manager at a well known retail chain that rhymes with Cock mustard, and moved on to another retail Titanic that has been in the news as of late for the epic failure of their business acumen. I was starting to post a bit in the 2+2 forums (I will have to save that initial experience for a later date), and I began playing some live poker every now and then at some local casinos when I got the chance. I had learned that many players were basically depositing money on different poker sites and playing a concentrated amount of hands to clear bonuses which they would then cash out and move to another site and repeat. Now that I had a healthy bank roll that was approaching $3,000 I moved some on to Full Tilt and began grinding away at the $2-$4 tables there in order to clear my bonus. Around the same time, I heard about a live SNG satellite that could lead you into the 2006 WSOP main event, which of course, was what I had wanted a chance at since seeing Chris Moneymaker on ESPN. It was $40 and 1st place got an entry into a Super Satellite which had over 300 entries. Once again, this was a long shot, but what the hell. I played tighter than a nun’s pussy and ended up finishing in 2nd place which was nice at the time, but what I failed to realize was that I had cut myself off at the knees when it got 4 handed by maintaining a very tight starting hand range. There’s always next year.
Things in the poker world were going well for me and I had built my roll up to $3,500 by June with a little help from the FTP bonus. One thing I learned early was that variance, she’s a bitch goddess. She giveth with one hand and taketh with the other. I went on a breakeven stretch which, from what I recall was rather arduous. At the time, it seemed to go on forever, but in reality, it was a little over 2 months. I don’t have a lot of detailed records, but I can only assume that I was playing around 2,500 hand per month and so 5,000 hands of B/E poker is not all that uncommon nor bad. As the fall of 2006 rolled around I didn’t have as much time to be playing due to my job and my wife and I were planning a nice 2 week vacation to Europe. We were looking at the different cities that we both would like to see and it quickly dawned on us that this was going to be an expensive and possibly stressful trip. I quickly blurted out, “Why don’t we just go to Vegas for a week by ourselves?”
She looked at me as if I had just found the meaning to life. 10 minutes later we’re booked for a week at Mandalay Bay. We had a great view overlooking the strip, had a wonderful dinner at Aureole on my Birthday, and had a great time together going out to bar after bar after bar. What made the trip even better was that I, once again, hooked in to my live play “boom switch” and won over $700 on the pokerz which paid for 2 very nice dinners. Things couldn’t have been going better in poker…
UIGEA…
In late September, the Safe Port Act was passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law on October 13th, 2006, by President Bush. I was rather worried about the future of online poker when this was passed and very concerned about my money. It suddenly got rather difficult to feel secure that your money was at your disposal. Paradise Poker left the US market, as did Party Poker. I decided to take most of my money off of the sites and leave a little on FTP just in case. It wouldn’t be until a year later that I would once again take a stab at online poker. The good news was that right after Christmas time, the moment that I had been waiting for was afoot.

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