After seeing lots of blogs from other people and trying to keep a blog myself once earlier I decided to take a shot at it again. I think it's a great way to keep track of your game and by discussing hands on your blog after a session you force yourself to think about the big hands you played. I say big hands because most of the time those are the interesting ones. For today I will introduce myself, outline how I became introduced with online poker and what I'm planning to do.

My name is Michiel. I'm studying Bio-informatics in Leiden, The Netherlands. July 2005 I was surfing on the internet and came at an online casino named MrBookmaker. Here I started to play some blackjack and roulette for fun. Then I saw they have a poker room as well and you needed to install some software to play with other players all over the world. I only played poker like 3 times in my whole life and those 3 times I played 5 card draw with selfmade rules cause nobody knew how it is played lol. I download and installed the software and started playing with playmoney. I played with play-money some time and played some freerolls. Then I won $250 in one. I started playing NL25 and even NL50 and obvious I went broke. Then I thought to myself he you can really earn some $$ by just playing an online game and it's real fun to play. I deposit some real money and started playing seriously. I bought a couple of books and started reading. I worked my way up playing limit hold'em from $0.05/$0.10 to $5/$10. At $5/$10 I couldn't really win, mostly because I just was to tilty. It was when I had a day where I tilted away around $1200 I thought to myself I need to get this working. I grinded the lower limits for some time and cashed out a couple of times.

In february 2007 I joined Cardrunners and swithed to NL 6-max, I started at NL50. I worked my way up again but had to cash out a couple of times so I never got further than NL200. In july I cashed out again so I could buy some books for school and other stuff and started with $500 at NL25 and worked my way up to NL200. Here´s the graph and PT stats from 08/01/07 till 11/28/07:

I also played some tourney's and SNG's in the three months where I made a nice profit of $939.91. The thing is it takes such a long time to come so far in a tourney and since I'm in Europe most of the good tourneys are late at night so I'm tired when I get deep in a tourney. So I will mainly focus on cash games. I also got $400 in bonus money and some $$ rakeback and at the end of november I had $7000+. I cashed $3000+ out again so I have $4000 left. I go back to NL100 and work my way up again.
I'll use a 30 buy-in rule and drop down hitting 25 buy-ins. There probably will be times when I take a shot earlier if I find a very nice juicy game but will use a 2 buy-in loss stop. So when I'm at NL200 and my BR gets at $12000 I'll play NL400 and when I'm at NL400 and it hits $10000 I'm back at NL200. With the money I cashed out I bought myself some very nice desktop and two 22" monitors (will post some pictures soon when I it's delivered) and got some extra money in the pocket. I will also fix my "office" a little with a good desk etc. I'm not planning on cashing out again and just keep playing till I reach NL400. My goal is to reach NL1000 by summer 2008 (somewhere at the end of July I guess).

Overall I think my game is going well. One thing I like to work on is getting my VP$IP on the button a little higher, this will also get my attempt to steal blinds and pre-flop raise a little higher. I also call a little more on the button, it is always hard for somebody oop. I experimented a little bit already and found that people sometimes check/fold flops or just go broke because the can't play correct post-flop oop and still raise QTs UTG.

One thing I wanted to mention in this post is the very good 2+2 NL Anthology. It's a Word document and I suggest reading it.