Hi All

Right, this year, probably along with thousands of others, is the year that I'm going to start putting some serious time & effort into Poker and I plan on using this blog to track my progress along the way.
I’m even a bit late getting this going which is not a good start but have been busy trying to arrange a 3 week tour in South America.
Here goes anyway…


My Bio:

Basically I’m a 30 year old male located on the east coast of Ireland. I have a regular job with a 1 hour commute each direction. I should say that it is 1 hour on a good day and in general the commute drives me nuts. I’ve started making use of this commute time in the last few months by listening to poker podcasts and will go into these in more detail in later posts. I have a wife, a kid & a mortgage.
Other interests include soccer, running & this year I’ve taken up learning how to swim as well. Healthy body means a healthy mind supposedly!
I have an engineering degree so would like to think I’m not a complete donk and number crunching generally comes relatively easy to me.


So lets set out my stall


The reasons I want to do this & improve my game are in order of priority (I think!):
I love playing poker and want to get better.
Make use of my spare time playing more poker rather than watching TV, PS3 etc.
Hopefully generate some extra cash to supplement my lifestyle.
Would love to qualify for a big tournament, or even better to run deep with the nirvana being to win the thing.
Pipe dream is to be able to make a living from poker so my wife can become a stay at home mum.

I hope to not bore you to death over the weeks and months and maybe even years ahead and I plan on updating this blog every week with some interesting hands that had happened to me along with any other things I’ve seen, heard hell even smelt along the way.
Maybe I’m dreaming and nobody is ever gonna read this dam thing except for me.
But hopefully someone will find it interesting or at least maybe find them a good reference for the future.
And maybe, just maybe I’ll even get some feedback on my hands or blog in general.

Currently I am playing on Bwin which is a Euro Site, based in Germany I think.
I’m not overly impressed with it to be honest and the MTT selection leaves a lot to be desired.
Plus from what I’ve seen over time every single one of the super satellites to their big live events are a form of turbo.
And I hate turbos.
The reason I’m there is basically because pokerroom.com was the first site I ever deposited on and it was migrated to bwin a couple of moons ago.
It serves my needs for the moment as I’m mainly playing $10 SNGs or $5 MTTs which they have and I find the standard ok, tending towards soft.
But I still don’t beat the games as regularly as I (think I) should!


BR management

I hope to stick to a pretty strict BR management regime. Maybe if I win a big prize I’ll take 1 or 2 shots at a bigger tourney as a kind of mental reward but in general I’ll stick to the rules below.

The most I’ll spend on a SNG is 5% and on an MTT is 2%
When/If I’m playing cash the buy-in will be for 2% of my roll.


BR landmarks:


During my poker journey I hope to hit certain landmarks along the way and reward my self with some of the following -
A wishlist if you will.

- Sign up to a training site, when/if I achieve this goal I’ll write a blog on the different ones around.
- Buy hold’em manager or equivalent HUD(heads up display) software.
- New Grind station with 2 monitors.
- Short trip to Vegas taking in some tourneys.
- Longer trip to Vegas and maybe some WSOP events Baby!


Goals

- Qualify for the Irish Open
- If unsuccessful with Irish Open then qualify for a package to a live event, preferably outside of Ireland & somewhere warm.
- Qualify for a UKIPT live Main Event(M.E)
- Start playing more cash games
- Join a training site
- learn how to multi table, although this is not as important to me as learning to play well.

I know I have some serious leaks in my game that I want to try and improve upon,
These are some of the ones I know about off the bat.
1 – I’m way too Nitty, for those of you who don’t know what nitty means, basically I’m too tight, play ABC poker and only raise with the best of it. I want to start playing more pots, but in doing this I need to realise when I’m beat. Often in a MTT I might not play a hand for 30 minutes and then when I do I go broke on it. Being nitty isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I wanna play to win not to min cash.
I believe I need to open up my range a bit more in late position and try a few more bluffs, steals etc.
2 – Concentration is a problem for me and is definitely something I can improve upon. I try to take notes when I’m playing on what players betting ranges are, what they raise with pre flop, what they call with, what they continuation bet with and so forth. But my concentration can sometimes falter. I’m guessing multi-tabling might help here but theres a balance there between what I can then observe at the tables.

So there you go.
Lets see how this thing rolls.
It’s for my benefit as much as anything so lets see how it develops over the next while.

GL at the tables
JC