By Swami54 on August 17th, 2007 (more posts by author)

I started playing poker 2 years ago. The Moneymaker craze was in full effect and many of my friends were hosting tournaments which I never attended. I had never been a gambler and had no idea how to play poker. One night my friends asked me to come over later after a tourney to hang out. When I arrived they had just finished their first tourney and were going to start a new one. They talked me into playing since it was only $10. Small blind, big blind, button…these words were all foreign to me. I had to have a sheet in front of me to tell me what hands beat other hands. I ended up taking second which wet my appetite. A couple of weeks later my sister’s boyfriend was having people over to play so I joined them. There were 8-9 guys who had known each other forever so while they hashed over old stories I sat and paid attention taking 2nd in both of the tournies that night. I was hooked.

I put $100 into Pokerstars later that week and started playing mainly sngs. I would go up and down without really making any money. Then I somehow came across bonuswhores.com in the summer. The site lists all of the bonuses that could be acquired by playing poker. It was extremely easy. I was signed up with 10-15 different sites and would jump around to where the bonuses were. I also started diving into any poker book that I could find. I bought a couple and hit just about every library in my vicinity for the rest. As my poker knowledge grew, I was able to play a very TAG style on 5-6 tables of .25/.50 without barely paying attention and gain a little profit while playing and from the bonus. It was ridiculously easy to grind out a profit this way.

I would dabble in a tournament here and there but never anything expensive. I only entered the extremely small buyins on Stars. In fact as I write this I realize to this day I haven’t played many big tournies on Stars. If you looked at my database you would laugh because it’s filled with mostly $4 180 sngs. I enter those while I’m playing cash games and barely even pay attention to what’s going on. Interesting…I probably need to do something about that…enough of the sidetrack.

The biggest change in my game came when I read Harrington on Hold Em. I played his style to a T. Early in 2006 I won a seat to the 500K guaranteed on Totalbet. It was the biggest buyin tourney I had entered and I ended up finishing 12th. Even though I had won some decent money I was still whoring around entering a tourney here and there, making the money but never a final table. A few months later I won a seat to a WPT satellite where the top 2 people won a $12,000 package to Paris. I was second in chips with 5 left, raised UTG and folded AQo to a push like a weak nit. The blinds were high and I made a play I would never make today but I still won 1K. It still haunts me 

Bonuswhoring built my bankroll but definitely hurt my game. It was so easy that I didn’t have the balls to venture any further. The decline in bonuses was the best thing for my game. I started to move up in limits and ventured into 6 max. Although I was still reading books and 2+2 posts while whoring I increased my reading posts mode drastically in the fall of 06. I read every day and looked at many hand histories that were posted by generous members. Since then my game has changed a ton (definitely not the extreme tight ass I used to be) and has led to some of the scores I mentioned in my first post. I’m a teacher so I’ve had some time to dedicate to poker this summer. This post is getting long so I’ll talk about my goals next time.