Pre 2008

I want to try and give a brief summary of all my poker playing days for completeness, however as this all happened years ago I only have my memory to go on so some details may be vague or slightly inaccurate, hopefully as I my entries get closer to the present they will become more detailed so bear with me on the older ones :-)

I first started playing poker while studying for my A-levels, our group started out playing other card games for fun but eventually started playing 5 card draw for small stakes. We didn't want to get caught with money on the table so we kept score on a notepad and settled at the end of each week. We had a £5 cap which only resulted in almost every hand getting capped, it was fairly easy to make money at this by simply waiting for big hands and capping the action as someone would always call! 

When I went to university I didn't play much poker at all, other than the odd occasion for 1/2p stakes, the most popular card game was hearts which I seemed to come out on top of more often than not by making a few simple deductions about the way my friends would play and also counting the suits to help determine what was left, this can be crucial in hearts if you want to avoid collecting tricks you need to ensure that you either have a lower ranked card of the leading suit or have none of that suit. There were times when I could almost name the last 2 or 3 remaining cards in some opponents hands just because of the way the round had developed and the predictable nature of their play.

Along with hearts I had also discovered games such as internet chess, dominoes and pool which I would use as an active excuse to avoid studying my boring maths course. I soon discovered an advert for an online poker room on the ongame network and I joined up and starting playing Hold'Em for play money. Back then online MTTs were still in Beta stage so I played ring games and due to the nature of play money it was very easy to win. 

Once I left university I began searching for a job, but in the meantime I was making some small cash playing the freerolls (back then $1,000 freerolls were not uncommon on poker sites) my biggest freeroll win was $75 and I was continuing to play a very tight game that had served me during my A-Level years and this style helped reduce variance and my winnings lasted for a few months. Eventually I got a job and made my first real money deposit and continued with a tight game, this was serving me well for making my roll last and I was making very small profits but I was basically relying on cards, I remember once folding A9o on the cut-off when it had been folded to me and I had 8bb, it turned out that the blinds both had big hands and I would have lost so I felt my move was correct but have since learnt that results based thinking is not the way forward for a serious poker player.

At this point I had never read a poker book/magazine or seen any strategy forum and was essentially in my own vacuum, believing that I had an edge in the game due to my mathematical knowledge. I had an understanding of pot odds through statistic courses so I was not chasing draws in bad spots. It wasn't all good news though as my maths was blinding me to some facts about poker, it was essentially a card game where cards usually don't matter. I was rarely bluffing, I hardly c-bet, I wasn't speculating with suited connectors preflop in good spots and I was folding good hands too often against a single opponent these were big leaks in my game and I often wonder how much I could have won in these early days if I had known then what I know now. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it just shows how valuable experience and the willingness and ability to learn are if you want to be a successful poker player, it’s easy to learn the rules of Hold'Em but there are so many variables to it that there is always something to learn even for the most seasoned professionals.

I realised my game could be improved and so I withdrew a small amount of money and got into a habit of buying some poker magazines and also purchased my first book which was The Theory of Poker by Sklansky, it seemed like an ideal book to start with given my ability to deal with formulae and it helped me solidify my existing knowledge and also introduced new concepts to me such as implied odds which I hadn't really considered before. Thus I started to call in spots where I wouldn't have previously where I felt the implied odds were good, although I was still a tight player this minor change proved to be the first significant improvement in my game and I saw an almost instant impact in early 2008......