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Hi, my name is Tarrant Carter and I am a poker player. I've been playing poker seriously for about 3 years. Most of my experience is live poker, but recently I've dedicated myself to beating online 6max.
I am a pretty solid live winner. I have lived off my poker income for the last 3 years of college. The only problem is that I have done the minimum to get by. I will admit that I have abused the game of poker. Some months I only put in single digit hours. I never put in the hours to build a big enough bankroll to play higher than 2/5 NL, but neither did I want to. I was content with my humble wage and enjoyed the relative freedom poker gave me.
But I just got lazier and lazier. I stopped growing in my knowledge of the game because the live donks are so bad you can auto pilot a decent hourly. But perhaps the biggest casualty of my laziness was my bankroll. Originally when I quit my job 3 years ago I started with 20 BIs (4k at 1/2 live) which I realize now was way too small. Since I was beating the game so easily my bankroll became smaller and smaller because in my head I could beat these donks with just a couple BIs. Inevitably this lead to my downfall.
This isn't to say I didn't play online. I dabbled a little bit. First, with small buy in tourneys and then with cash. At first I played full ring cash since I came from a full ring live background. I broke even mostly and got the idea in my head that I wanted to mass table as many as possible to reduce variance(I didn't realize that a 1 or 2 BB/100 win rate is very high variance). So playing on full tilt I 16 tabled FR breaking even and making money off rakeback for a couple of months. After that experiment in the spring of 2008 I went back to live cash.
But I gave online another chance in spring 2009 mostly because of boredom with live play. I watched a few CR 6max vids and started to 4 table 50 NL. I got impatient with the variance and was intrigued by the idea of 16 tabling for rakeback. The problem was my mechanical 16 tabling game could not get me a positive win rate so rakeback barely kept me a break even player. So I went back to playing live cash severely under rolled and finally cost my whole bankroll.
Fast forward to this past fall 2009 and I am no longer content with the state of my poker game. I have started watching a lot more CR vids and posting in the forums. Looking forward to starting up a study group and learning from like-minded players. But mostly I am looking forward to putting in more volume this year and becoming a solid winning player.
Sorry if this post seems long and rambling but the purpose for writing this blog is more for my own personal accountability than it is to get people to read it. I want to track by thought process as I develop as a player and I think a blog is a great way to do that. However, constructive feedback always welcome. This isn't just a solo journey any help along the way is much appreciated.
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