I flopped the nuts!

Dell’s trying to get rid of these 2100FP’s, man.  There’s a bunch of coupons you can stack on top of each other to get them for $381, shipped, as long as you don’t live in a communist state that charges sales tax on Dell stuff.  (Like I do.)

I pulled $400 out of online poker to do it.  Well worth it, I think, and if it all goes to crap tomorrow, then at least I got a sweet monitor out of the deal.  I was actually tapping on the door of moving up to $2/$4 limit, but didn’t feel comfortable, so staying at $1/$2 for a while will be good for me.
For those not aware, the 2100FP is the monitor for the poker kids that hang out on 2+2 forums.  It’s a 1600×1200 display, so for as long as there are 800×600 poker clients, you’ll be able to fit four of whatever tables you like with no overlap.  (I four-tabled at 1280×1024, and actually found overlap sort of useful, since screens pop up anyway when they need attention, but your results may very.  I know many good poker players who couldn’t or wouldn’t multi-table in a million years.)

February: wasn’t bad. Turned $400 into almost $800, with 23 good days and 5 bad days. I started a new account at UltimateBet for rakeback (my first rakeback account). Their bonuses have been good.
March: Took it almost to $1000, but that’s only a gain of $200, which is kind of slow growth. UltimateBet’s bonuses are insane: they’ve been offering crazy reloads non-stop.

I realized at the beginning of March that I had two weeks to burn off my FTP initial deposit bonus. They pay off you bonus in 10% chunks, but at a very slow rate, and I think most players give up before their four months is up. I burned it off playing .05/.10 NL, mostly because I have a better winrate there than .10/.25 NL, and because they rake double at the .05/.10 level. (Nasty.) I actually lost $80 to recoup my last $20. That happens.

Leaving FTP for UB, I was still thinking about maxmizing the rake to get the bonuses burned off. At the same time, I was getting a little burned out on .05/.10 NL after four-tabling it for a week straight. So I took up limit. UB has kill games, which seem to me to be one more way to play poker bingo, but I don’t know enough about that game to really say. Maybe it’s a nuanced and subtle way to play poker bingo.

I reread Small Stakes Hold’em, and seriously used the starting hand chart in the middle. My first couple of hours were unreal: with three tables open, it seems like there’s very little variance, and my win rate seems pretty generous. I’ll have more to say at the end of April, but at the end of March, it was my new favorite.

Getting better at limit meant I could play more solidly at Canterbury, and I did, picking up $60 in about 90 minutes out there on a Friday afternoon. That’s another story, but I think live $2/$4 might be enough to live on professionally if I ever had to do it.

I am getting real bad about updating here, so I have a new system (yay!) and I’ll try to keep in touch better. Thanks for reading, whoever you are.

It was April 6th, 2005 when I first stuffed money into Neteller and hoped for the best. Once that $50 cleared, I deposited it to Planet Poker (I didn’t know any better at the time) and played a little bit of everything. Of course, people were playing limit and no-limit hold ‘em, and I really didn’t know that much about the game. (I would eventually print off a sheet that reminded me: flushes beat straights.)

Exactly a year later, with about $300 invested in poker books, online “school” and software tools, I’m ahead almost a thousand dollars. (I frequently think about what I should do with this money, but I know, of course, that I want to keep playing.)

One could check the date of the first entry on this site to see when exactly I realized that there was an awesome poker blogging community (I should have known: there’s a good-sized Jonathan Taylor Thomas blogging community), and I’ve only sat at a table with them once, but they’ve been consistently encouraging and enlightening. Good friends, I suppose, if I had ever had any meaningful human interaction with them.

Getting turned on to PokerStars and Party Poker two weeks after I switch from Planet (ick) to Empire (eh) was a big favor, one I haven’t thanked anyone for. Winning a tournament at a friends house in my third month playing was huge. Busting through “profitable” in month 6 was great. I’m proud of starting over then, and pulling out my initial stake in month 9. This past month has been about learning new things and pushing the edges: I love this hobby, and I get to do it basically for free, as long as I want.

After reading The Grind last week, I decided that an appropriate poker birthday present would be a subscription to CardRunners. I’m loving it so far. (If you want to sign up under me, my name is dnordquist.) If they’re serious about putting new content on almost every day, it could be exactly what I’ve been looking for: a very current guide to the way that internet players play on the internet, in cash games and tournaments. (They don’t cover limit there very much, but they don’t cover Omaha or backgammon, either.)