First Post

This is hopefully the first of many entries on my new poker/life blog.

A bit about me/poker history.

I'm a mid/late 30's male with a wife and 2 kids (6 and 4). I have a full time job that I work from home. This allows me to play poker when I work (but work takes priority over poker during "work" hours). I started playing online poker about 3 years ago (started recording high level results 32 months ago). I've gotten in a ton of hands but until 2007 I was a small loser. Below are my career totals by year:
2005: -7.85 (started in April)
2006: -221.52
2007: 4496

I first deposited on Party Poker with like 50 bucks and played 25NL. That obviously didn't last long. At the time I barely even understood hand rankings. I really enjoyed the game though and bought Phil Helmuth's book, "Play Like the Pros" (yeah, i know). Since that focused on the limit game, I switched to that for quite awhile. The book did help me get a fundamental understanding of being solid pre-flop and playing only good starting hands.

After playing at a number of places and bonus whoring (granted, not optimally as I was buying in for 100 bucks here/there vs. buying in for the matched bonus amount), I was feeling ok about my game and had read several more books and was able to very slowly move up in stakes until I was playing 1/2. I then had 3 consecutive months of losing a ton at 1/2 and .5/1 that I decided screw this, I'm playing NL (if for anything other than a change).

Once I started playing NL, I haven't gone back (well, I occasionally play limit here and there). I was fairly successful early on but staying at a very low limit (.05/.10, .10/.25 NL and PL). Did really well at Pokerstars PL tables for awhile but then went on a two month downswing. Decided to switch it up and move to another site (Full Tilt). By this time, I had starting reading forums and learned of rakeback (oh the amounts of money I had missed the first 2 1/2 years of poker playing - feel dumb for not doing it earlier). This is also when I started my little experiment with 6-max tables. I initially started playing .25 NL/PL @ Full Tilt but the tables seemed much tighter than what I was used to. I noticed that the six-max tables looked very juicy, sat down at a 50 PL 6-max table and thus started my 6-max experiment. The first month when super - I won over $1600 (including deposit bonuses) and started thinking I was a world-beater. I think I won over 10 buy-ins at 50PL that month. The next few months reality hit and I lost all of those buy-in's and then some (actually ended up ahead for this period of time thanks to rakeback).

I was perusing the full ring forums on 2plus2 and thought, you know, I bet I would do better at full ring. So, in the 2nd week of October I tried some 25NL and 50NL FR and have been running good since. Given my history, after being successful for a few months I follow that up with some losses (getting cocky, me thinks). That said, I don't think I'll have sever swings. Mostly because I play a super-nitty-conservative style (9/5/1.8) which while not optimal, is definitely more suited for FR than 6-max.

So right now, I'm grinding away at 50NL/100NL playing about 6-8 tables at a time (unless I'm at work, in which case I'll play a couple of 50N tables)

October Results:
34,291 Hands
+ 871.08 (including rakeback)

November Results Thus Far:
23779 Hands
+ 636.40


November Results so far: