Hello all,
I just became a Cardrunner's member. I have played poker for about three years. I learned the game online in college by fooling around with sitngo's and everything else all the wannabe poker players do. Then I quit college and moved back home. Not because of poker, I just hated school and never went to class. I then started playing live poker on a riverboat on the Ohio River. In the course of the last two years I have went from playing 1-3 NL at Argosy Casino, to playing 10-20 NL at the Bellagio. And then being totally broke two months later. Due to my lack of thought about life in general and bankroll management. I have been broke about five times within the last two years and I am still destined to make something of myself in the poker world. I was once again broke for the holidays this year! What a career! Although I have not had success like I wanted. I have still not had a real job since December 2004. So I can't complain too much. Luckily for me, I have great friends and family. And even though they have no clue about poker, they still will be there to help me when I am down. But I do fear that if I do not figure out this poker gig soon. I will be forced to quit for awhile because I am tired of having to go to people for help. But anyway, enough of the sad shit.

Guess what, I do have ONE friend that plays poker. I taught him a lot but the one huge thing he has stressed to me and tried to teach me was the value of money. Which I am still not sure I understand. He agreed to ship me $250 at beginning of the year on Fulltilt. The only stipulation was that I had to use good bankroll management this time and not fuck it up. Being how it wasn't my money. I took this as a prime opportunity to finally do what I knew i should have been doing the whole time. Even though I would be comfortable throwing around $1,000 every hand. I will, out of respect to my friend,and myself, not play outside my bankroll.

I started playing .10/.25 6-Max. Obviously 10 buy ins is not an ideal bankroll for .10/.25 NL. But come on, there is no way in hell I could ever play lower then that! My initial goal was to start out with 10 buy ins and not move up until I have 50 buy ins for the next level. But after grinding for the last month and doing a little research on proper bankroll management. I have came to the conclusion that 50 buy ins might be a little too conservative. So I have thus changed my bankroll requirements to 30 Buy ins to move to .25/.50 NL. I will then continue until I have 40 Buy ins for .50/1 NL. And from there I will stick to around 40 buy in bankroll with the occasional shot at 30-35 Buy ins. The reason I took the amount of buy ins down is because I do not ever want to feel burnt out and I always want to feel like I am progressing. I also am not scared to move down for a couple days or a week if I need to. But I am also open to changing these requirements in the future.

But anyway, here is how my first month went. I started playing 4 tables and then started adding more the more my bankroll grew. By the end of the month I was playing 10 tables of .10/.25 (Six Max)at a time by using the stacking method of aligning the tables. This is my graph for January '09.



I also made about $150 in tournies and about $250 in rakeback also. The free cardrunners account for 4500 ftp's was also a nice bonus. =)

The end of the month downswing is because i started playing .25/.50 when i got to $1500 BR. .25/.50 NL has been giving me a little bit of trouble. I am never willing to give people credit for some reason and I always put in my money in very marginal spots trying to outplay people. I have had a couple decent sessions where I sat back and waited for good hands. But then the next day did the same garbarge I was doing before. I think I also need to cut down the amount of tables I am playing for now until I get alittle more confident at this level. Hopefully I can figure this level out. begining of february hasn't been to nice to me.

jerome22