My first blog ever. July 2010

Hello poker world. I'm not really sure what's inspiring me to do my first blog. I guess to help me be improve my game, or even better, maybe help someone else's game somehow. It's a little long so I won't take offense if you skip most of this.

I guess I should say a little about myself and how I got into poker. My first introduction to poker was at a young age, I lived near a golf course and we'd always see the guys at the clubhouse playing any type of card game imaginable. Also, my dad owned some computer game... I can't remember the name, but you'd go to Binion's horseshoe and you had to build up $10k to get a main event buy-in, and then try to take it down (which wasn't impossible like today, you'd only play against a few hundred people). So I guess poker peaked my interest early.

So fast forward until I was 21. I could finally go to the casino or play online poker. I really enjoyed it. Sometimes I would win, sometimes lose. Probably slightly breakeven/loser. Just basically playing for entertainment, but always hoping I'd come out a winner. This was also the time my brother started playing online poker professionally.

Fast forward 5 more years. My brother is making a killing playing online, and I'm still playing recreationally and breaking even. I can't seem to wrap my head around why he's doing so well and I'm breaking even. It probably has something to do with the fact that he's read hundreds of poker books, and is always watching poker videos in his down time. He's constantly trying to improve his game, while I was just thinking I was good enough. I realized it's takes a lot of hard work. So I ask him to teach me the game.

I would play for 30 min and he would sweat me, and then he'd play for 30 and I'd sweat him. This way I was able to see how to play proper poker, and also how to play against certain opponents. So finally I start to get a nice learning curve. With my brother's help, and some hard work grinding, I eventually started making enough where I could quit my job. Poker has now been my job almost a year now and my first year has been quite the ride. Things went very well at first, November and December of last year I made a killing. But I also went through some very rough times in April-May of this year. So after that rock bottom, I just stuck with the grind, and strived to keep improving by watching vids and reading books.

Anyway, just finished up a nice month in July. Finished 2nd of 2091 in a $26 deep stack KO tourney on tilt, a nice $5.5k, and also a made a little grinding out the 45-man SnG's. Looking forward to a good August... that's about it, good luck at the tables.

-goat