I have never had a blog before, but want to take full advantage of my CR membership and hope in the coming weeks this will improve my game. My goal in 2008 is to move steadily up in limits when my bankroll allows. I started at and am currently playing 25NL (6 max) mostly on Stars under the screen name Vexas.

Background: I am 35 years old living in Plano, Texas. I have played poker since I was a kid, played on IRC back in the mid 90s with the rec.gambling crew, and even had a Planet Poker account back before Stars and Party launched. At different times over the last 12 years, I have read most of the major strategy related books on poker (though not many of the newer ones). Due to job and family requirements, I have never been able to focus on my poker game or enjoy sustained success. Much of my play over the last 4 years has had long spans of inactivity due to my "real life" demanding more of my time. There is a hell of a lot of time I have put in to playing and learning the game, but I never put it all together to be as successful as I would like. I plan to have a much more disciplined and focused approach to improving my game in the future.

I have played about 100k hands of Limit 6 max in the past 3 years, working my way up to 10-20. My win rate tanked dramatically at the end of 2006 and frustration with limit and taking some good advice on 2+2, I decided to make the switch to NL a couple of months ago.

After 20k hands of NL25, I have had mixed results. My first 9,000 hands showed a steady and sustained profit of about 10ptbb/100. My last 11,000 have been nearly the opposite with -8ptbb/100.

The easy answer to the swing is I have been impacted by variance, but I believe there is something I subconsciously changed about my play and need to correct. To turn this trend around and improve, I am going through Brystmar's Micro NL Series and plan to be posting some hands, trends and thoughts on this blog and contribute in the forums as well.

Thanks for reading this and my apologies if the first post was a little boring. I want to get the basics out there as a starting point for future posts that will be higher in poker related content.