The first month was a wild ride. I did around $300 in deposits last month. A little less than half was some birthday money. I started off with the lowest stakes Bovada offers because online poker is a nasty beast. These people will sit for 12 hours or more grinding every stake and tournament. I suggest taking it slow because online poker is extremely fast-paced online and nothing compared to live poker. You have at most 30 seconds to make a decision. You can easily see several hundred hands per hour which would take you all day even days to see at live stakes.
$5 No-Limit which would be .02/.05 stakes was one of the most played tables I would sit at when I first joined. These stakes are plagued by inexperienced players who will all in every single hand if you catch a bad table. It is not always bad; in one of my sessions, a guy was constantly going all in on the bottom pair of hands. In a span of 15 minutes, I took my $5 buy-in and ran it up to $60. I have also lost a lot calling these bad players. So, in the end, the poker universe always evens itself out and keeps you humble. My girlfriend got really into playing after watching me play for a couple of days.
After a couple of hours of playing cash games with my girlfriend, we found out we are not very good cash game players. What was the next logical step? did we give up? Hell no; we switched to "Tourneys" where we quickly found out that are erratic and aggressive betting style (when we had the best hand of course) was best suited for this play style of poker. I started watching more Tournament style poker games like WSOP and WPT televised events. Our win rate immediately went up and we started breaking even finally. We started off with 200-300 people buy-in events so at the minimum you would have to play for 4-5 hours before registration to cut off and enough people to be eliminated to get paid. We did this for a while until we worked up our skills to join 6-9 people tourneys. We specifically only played the $3 buy-in and it would usually be a Triple Up game. In triple up as soon as it gets to 3 people you immediately get 3x your buy-in and place 1st.
We would sit down on my days off in the evening and play for a good 6-10 hours watching dumb tv shows and playing hands all night. It is a great game to sit down and play with your partner. Even just doing a $50 deposit if you play it smart you could spend days playing that with your spouse/partner and for $50 (or less, I think the minimum deposit is $15) that is not bad at all, even if you blow it in a few hours that is still quality time spent with a loved one trying out a new hobby. I have even had friends show up while I was in games and they would sit down and I would start explaining how it works and would even let them play for a while if it wasn't a serious match I was in. Not many though because most of my friends are very into poker and we have been playing cash games together since we were teens. Nonetheless, it is still fun teaching someone poker and seeing their playstyle develop once they start to get the game.
This is not going to be a long post, just updating everyone on my online poker journey. I will post my sign-up link so you can get an extra sign-up bonus. You can read my previous post; I put a full disclosure on my link. Not in this to make money on sign-ups, I take poker very seriously even though I am just a low-stakes player. On good days I make way more than my hourly rate which is honestly amazing because I make a good living. I won't let it get to my head. I did that once and went to higher stakes and I could not compete with that skill level and the monetary loss. I would watch people lose thousands and load up again and again. Something I can not stomach or afford to lose so I stay in my lane like all the other low-stakes grinders. There are thousands of us!!!!!!!
Below I will post some pictures of the wins I have had. My best streak was placing and getting paid in 8 tournaments back to back. I have not come close to beating that and I don't think I ever will, too bad it was low stakes and not high stakes. I am feeling good about my poker journey so hopefully in my next update I will have moved up higher with bigger wins. These are not all of my wins just a couple of screenshots that I have taken here and there.
