The History Thus Far

Welcome to The Grind. This blog serves a few purposes. The first of which is to keep me motivated and help me improve my game. I find that talking about hands and sessions is great review and documenting my progress is something that interests me a lot. I think it'll be good for me to catalogue my progress through this blog. If anyone actually reads this and enjoys it, well that's just a bonus. I fully expect no one to ever read even this post I'm making right now.

So, this is the beginning. The start of the journey. I hope it's a long one. To set a baseline for what's happened since I started playing serious (and winning) poker at the start of December, here's some statistics:

Hands Played (NL5): 16,036
Hours Played: 166
Amount Won: $176.75
BB/100: 11.02

VPIP: 15.8%
PFR: 9%
AF: 2.7
ATS: 25%

I play a fairly tight and ABC game, as is probably evident. A lot of people would say my PFR and VPIP should be closer together, but I find that limping suited connectors in decent spots and limping pocket pairs is fairly profitable. A lot of profit at NL5 can be found with playing speculative hands in good spots and simply check/folding if you miss. This of course involves a decent amount of limping, but it's something I've been working to improve on. Loosening up in the CO and Button is another big thing I've been working on. I have avoided it due to ending up in marginal situations on the flop, but it's another thing that is slowly improving.

Beating the NL5 level took me a lot of time and it wasn't easy. A lot of things sort of fell into place and I finally understood the true meaning of value betting. I hope to write some articles that will help others get past that first initial step of simply beating the limits, because it isn't easy for everyone. I've read a few books (all of them twice), read a lot of posts and watched a lot of videos to simply get to the point where I'm beating NL5, but I'm happy to be here.

My bankroll started at $25 on December 4, 2008 at PokerStars and is currently sitting at $198.10. I've been consistently winning since the start of January. The first 3 weeks of December were pretty up and down, but I never busted out. I'm extremely excited to eclipse the $200 mark. I currently play 4-5 tables comfortably, and am slowly increasing that a table at a time. 5 is currently my high limit on tables, as I tend to browse and post in forums a lot while playing. Yet another of many leaks in my game, I'm sure.

Any post I make will come with hand histories as well as links to the forum post on 2 Plus 2 if I make one for that hand. This blog will likely be updated daily or after each major session, so there will be a lot of activity. Hopefully someone can learn from this. If not, I'm sure it will be fun to look back on.