Breaking the bank - bankroll red alert!
Welcome all readers to my second Poker blog post,
In future posts I will be writing a combination of my thoughts about my own game, ways to improve as well as situations that come up I found interesting or any big wins that I may have had. Currently my goal is to rebuild my bankroll from a very small amount, playing at low level cash game stakes, and I will tell you the reason why in the short article below.
'After an unusually decidedly poor day on the online card tables yesterday at Bwin, what I’ve realised, and in fact have known for a long time is that no matter how well or badly I play poker, I have one big leak in my ‘overall’ betting strategy that has really been putting a major major dent in my bankroll; football bets.
Football betting is something which confounds the whole lot, including my game play confidence when I lose and worse still puts my whole bankroll at risk. It is this hole in the sink that ultimately cripples my results in poker and leads to an unnecessary downward spiral in my success, but at the very least I've realised it. I actually calculated from the history records on Bwin (the Poker site that I play on) that I did in fact make a healthy profit of £147 in July at micro stakes levels poker playing 5c/10c – 10c/25c stakes beginning with a £50 stake, so I will put yesterday’s poor running down to a minor blip.
Unfortunately I never saw that profit because I wasted it all on the football betting! I’ve really been doing my best to put the brakes on with this, but there is a compulsive nature to me that I have found surprisingly hard to control up till now. It has meant I keep getting tempted to put a bet on no matter what and despite only losing out narrowly almost every time, too many losses occur for my definite liking on these type of bets regardless. My new plan is that if I stay disciplined on the card tables playing No Limit Texas Hold’em and sometimes Omaha (for the time being) my bankroll will gradually and slowly rebuild to a respectable size.
Overall, combine this with continued learning by reading excellent poker books like David Sklansky and Ed Millar’s No Limit Hold’em Theory and Practice … it is hoped I will finally be able to see a decent profit from my poker game play. So the conclusion is, no more football bets. Leave that kind of betting to the non-poker players. Either that or I’ll always be going broke. Will the penny finally drop? I’ll let you know in one month!'
Good luck at the tables all. Thank you for reading.
Next up: • Hitting quads in a tournament and hitting the nut flush in a cash game, how it went down and how I played it - low stakes cash game style. I'll be interested to know your thoughts as well.
