Be Excellent To Each Other

So, inspired by another thread, i'm planning to give online poker a go.
I know how to play poker, but i've never played online for real cash monies, where is the best place to do that these days? PokerStars?

My plan is to put £100 in and see what happens

I'll keep a record of my wins and losses, tactics, fun times, etc... here for all to see, if anyone is intersted

Should be interesting, as long as it doesn't end up in three months time with you living in your car down by the river, surviving on handouts from soup kitchens, having blown all your money.

Could be worse, he might end up surviving on blowjobs having spent all of his soup money.

I'm sure that won't happen. From reading and hearing most people's accounts of playing poker it seems that most people win most of the time. It's a pretty sweet deal.

I'm just doing this for a bit of fun, and once the £100 is gone, then that's it
I fully expect to lose it all My one dip into hourly spread betting had me 100% up and 100% down in the space of one lunchtime, I haven't been back since!

I've still got $60 in my Party Poker account from my initial $30 deposit from when we did the Beex Games. They petered out, but then I had a month or so around Eastertime last year when I ploughed my whole weekends into it. I found that I could hit the 10% payout bands 50% of the time on the smaller stakes tourneys, if I was just patient and played the Myp game, and so although I was making money, I got bored. However, moving up to the $10 tourney entry fee bands required a change in tactics.

Once, after sharing some whiskey and a cigarette with a travelling professional card player on a train, I received the following advice, which I shall now share with you. It would appear that to be a successful gambler, you must know the following things.

1.) When to hold them.
2.) When to fold them.
3.) When to walk away.
4.) When to run.

However, the aforementioned gambler was not forthcoming on the details on how to actually identify the above situations, making his advice largely useless.

You also must never count your winnings while your sitting at the table. There is some time set aside for counting after the dealing is done.

Didn't Comical used to play poker for his main source of income?

[edit]I think I'm thinking of Cadmium Lemon.

Since Pokerstars is the only one of the big two that remains functional after Full Tilt got in a pickle, that's the only place to play IMO. I keep forgetting I have money on there, should either play or withdraw it really...

What games do you have in mind to play? With regard to keeping records, there's an option on Pokerstars to get hand histories automatically e-mailed to you which is useful if you actually want to think back on what you did afterwards.

I like that as an idea, but no. My most recent poker victory was last October when I won a tenner in a £1 stake game. Oooooh yeah.

Nah, I was thinking of Cadmium. I always got you two confused.

Yeah, I think so - he had a blog as well somewhere. It was quite an interesting read. I seem to remember him being quite clever about tournaments and so on - entering every free-to-enter promo tournament and working out how best to qualify for the big money ones. He certainly had more of a plan then "play poker and win money!"

What more is there to it than trying to win money though? That's the only way to measure proficiency, long-term.

Texas Hold 'em is my game of choice and the one I enjoy most and know the best how to play, but I might have a little go with some Omaha games.

It looks like I should have some spare time next week, so i'll kick it off then I expect
The hand histories thing will be very useful, i'll post up synopses on here and you can all tell me where I went wrong

I hope you have a really thick skin.

I meant more, do you mean to play cash games, or tournament, and if the latter then small single table ones or big multi-table ones?

Ah, cash games to start with mainly, I'll possibly enter a few free to play tournaments if any turn up.

Ah ok, in that case my advice and analysis won't be of much use because I'm barely a winning player in that format

FWIW, standard bankroll management wisdom says you should play at stakes that mean you have 20 full buy-ins; so in your case that would be £0.05 big blinds. That is aimed at people looking to build a sizeable bankroll from a single deposit though, so may be overly cautious in your case if you are willing to just have fun and if you go bust then so what. Be warned that the standard of play does increase quite rapidly though, even at what may initially sound like piffling little stakes. For example, even the $0.10/$0.25 tables will have a lot of savvy regulars who will take large greedy bites out of you.

I'm sure I'll be back tomorrow with more unsolicited advice

Any pokelsters who used Full Tilt look likes yowm getting yow's money back. http://twitdoc.com/upload/kevmath/final ... uly-31.pdf

This is the first poker thread I found so I'll just comment here-my friends brother is currently 63rd of 163 remaining players in the WSOP! I thought that was pretty cool!

I miss be ex poker.