God, I love this game. I have been playing tons of poker in April and a bit in May and things have been going great. I had 2 weeks off work in April so I thought it was a good time to continue my quest to attack the $3 sngs at Full Tilt Poker. I continued my hot run and ran my bankroll up to $600, which was when I had promised myself to try out the $6 level. I decided to hold off a little longer because things were going to well, I played another day of tourneys and ended up with $700. I decided to set $100 apart in my mind for trying out the $6 level. Things didn't go so well there, I played 10 of them and played almost even. Played another 5 and decided it was not the time for $6 yet.

As I was pondering the challenge of the new level, the possibility came to mind that I might go on full blown tilt and blow the whole bankroll away with $6 and $12 games if things went a bit awry. Better spend what I have now, so they can't take that away from me anymore ! I surfed the net for HDTV prices and saw a few models within my price range, but actually saw a few nicer models which were outside of my CURRENT budget... Hmm ... time for some more online poker :)

I got up early that day and figured I could play for 8 hours and still make it to the stores ... I won another $200 and withdrew the money to my Neteller, where converted to euros it was added to some money still in there making it a total of €800. Of course, ordering online was not an option, I wanted a new TV and I wanted it NOW !! I rushed to the city center and found a beautiful 40 inch Samsung full HD exactly within my budget.

We're really enjoying the new TV and with only $50 left in my poker account I have started playing again, and ran the bankroll up to $125 now.I'm not playing as much anymore though since my vacation is over and we watch a lot of movies now :)

Idealy, of course, I want to make a lot of money. Most of you have probably heard about the great story how Chris Jezus Ferguson made a bankroll from $0 grow to $10.000. He wanted to prove that it was very possible to do with proper bankroll management. Mind you, Chris is one of the best poker players in the world and even for him it was no simple feat. I believe it took him a couple of months to get the first $100 bankroll.

Anyway, I'm not starting from $0, I've started this bankroll from a Free Poker Bankroll and have played many random games on it. I built it up to $400, cashed out $250, built it back up to $300 and then i had a rush of games where I lost. The problem was I was playing different stakes games (even at the same time sometimes) and that just got everything messed up. I was down to a little less than $150 when I decided it was time for serious bankroll management !

My Rules for Bankroll Management :

Play no MTT for more than %2 of your bankroll

Play no TURBO MTT for more than %1 of your bankroll

Play no cash games because you suck at those

Play no single table SNGs because you suck at those too

The plan of attack :

Play exclusively 90 man TURBOs on Full Tilt Poker using my bankroll management rules.

Play $3 games until you reach $600, then move up

When playing $6 and bankroll goes below $300, move down

When playing $6 and bankroll reaches $1200, move up

Repeat until rich.

So I'm now playing $3 and the bankroll is at $430. Well on track. Today I played a bunch of them again (I think around 10) and final tabled 3 of them, including a first and second place ! My current bankroll is now $430 and I have a lot of time in my vacation to play, so stay tuned here for more posts on my quest to make the first $10k with online poker.

Too bad it is 1:28 AM now and those 90 man games take exactly 2 hours to play out. If I play one now, I would be sleeping at the final table :)

Even though I may have said similar things in the past about my poker game, now it's real. And with that I mean now I have proven it. And let me start by saying it is only over a relatively small sample size, but I do think I have proven my tactics work if I just put in enough volume.

So, here's what I did. From the first of April I have only played 1 type of sit and go, so it's very easy to check my stats on Official Poker Rankings. I have stuck to playing only the '$3.30 Turbo + Knockout with 90 players on Full Tilt Poker. Here's what's showing for April 2009 so far :

89 games played

13 times in the money (15%)

Profit $160

ROI 64%

Now anyone into poker statistics will say to you that first of all 89 games is not enough of a sample size to mean much and second of all an ROI of 64% is ridiculously high ! But I think it does prove a point. If you just play lots and lots of these tourneys, the edge that you have on the field becomes apparant.

Now I had played lots of poker before and done ok so far, meaning I did have a positive ROI on several sites; but I had been playing so little volume and so many different games it was hard to find out exactly how well I was doing. I'm going to stick with these $3 sngs until I reach a $600 bankroll and then try the $6 ones. I will keep track of my progress here so stay tuned !!

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