Introduction

Welcome to my blog about poker! I've been following some great blogs from fellow players at Poker Source Online, and have been inspired to create one of my own. I'm hoping my adventures will be an interesting read for you, will teach you a few things about poker, and perhaps will inspire you, if you haven't already, to venture out into the world of poker yourself.

I've only been playing poker regularly for about six months. My first serious game of poker took place on Nov. 26, 2005. This was the day of my friend Eagle2727's home tournament. Before this day and the preparation for it, I had played very little poker, and in fact only vaguely knew how the different poker hands ranked. I was well aware of the Texas Hold'Em craze that was going on, but didn't even know how to play that variation of poker. A few weeks before the tournament, I surfed online and familiarized myself with the basic rules of Texas Hold'Em, and then installed a java version of the game onto my cellphone, which I played often up until the day of the tournament. When tournament day finally arrived, I was pretty excited to see how my new "skills" would fare. Well, needless to say, that night ended with me being the first one knocked out. In my defense, however, it was a bad beat that did me in - I held two pairs after the turn, and my opponent put me all-in with top-pair-medium-kicker and managed to hit one of his five outs on the river (so he only had about a 10% chance to beat me).

Well, I was pretty disappointed at my performance, but that night was definately a turning point for me. I'm a pretty competitive person, and I like to do well at the things I try, so that performance motivated me to learn more about playing Texas Hold'Em. Luckily for me, the consolation prize for being the first one knocked out of the tournament was a Texas Hold'Em for Dummies booklet and pack of cards. Although it is a very basic guide, I read through it and started to learn some of the important concepts necessary to playing poker well. To apply these concepts in practice, however, I needed to play against real people, and I needed to play regularly and fairly often if I ever hoped to improve. That's where online poker comes in, and that is pretty much where the start of my journey through the world of poker begins, about one month after that fateful tournament.

Over the next few weeks, I will be working to fill in some of the details chronicling my journey to the present day, so please check back often and read the Archives as I try to get up-to-date. These blog entries will clarify how I started from zero and ended up presently at about $4300 in cash and prizes, which is about 43% of my target of $10,000 for 2006. My narrative will assume that the reader has at least a basic knowledge of poker. If I use any terms or talk about any concepts which are a little more advanced, then I will try my best to first give a brief explanation of them.