Back on Track

Beginning Bankroll: $7.46

First of all, my sincere apologies for the L-O-O-O-N-G delay before this update. My laptop was down for about a month, then I've been very busy since getting the replacement part I needed for the laptop and returning to the road in my truck. Today was my first chance to get back to working my Zip to Chips bankroll which, as you may know, I'm working on growing from nothing to something substantial, a la Chris Ferguson's bankroll experiment. But I did get back to it today, and here's my report.

I've been reading Howard Lederer's chapter on Limit Hold 'Em (LHE) in the book, "The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide, Tournament Edition", and decided I'd try my hand at LHE for a while. So I played a couple of play money sessions on PokerStars to get some practice. I was doing OK in the first session, but was down a bit when I quit to concentrate on a freeroll NLHE (No-Limit Hold 'Em) tourney on Full Tilt. After bowing out of that tourney (mostly card-dead, bad beats, etc.), I returned to another practice LHE session on PokerStars. (PokerStars is where I'm building my experimental bankroll for the time being.) This time I more than doubled up my "buy-in", so I figured I was ready to try the real money tables.

Of course, the 2-cent/4-cent limit isn't what most people would call "real money", but it's all I can afford with my bankroll at its current level. I can't be risking the entire balance on one session, so I bought into a 10-handed table for 80 cents.

The real-money table was nowhere near as loose as the play money tables (go figure!), where some players were calling just about everything. And getting lucky. So it was easier to get a hand through when I caught something. People actually FOLDED some times when I bet with actual coinage on the line! I managed to catch a full house, a set of kings, and had pocket aces hold up among a couple other smaller winning hands, so I called it quits when I was up 86 cents and before the inevitable backslide kicked in.

Yes, I know the conventional wisdom is to keep playing when you're winning, but doubling up my buy-in (or more) and increasing my bankroll's balance by ten percent (or more) in a session is, at this point, quite an acceptable result. As I've noted before, when I get up early in a session, I always seem to hit a rough patch and give back a large chunk--if not all--of my gains. So I'm sticking to a conservative game plan for now and quitting when I'm ahead.

I probably won't play another session tonight, although it's only 6:00 p.m. where I am now--the Dallas, TX area, as it's been a busy day already. I'll need to get up early in the morning to resume my "real" job of over-the-road truck driving, so rest will have to take precedence over rounding. Thanks for checking on my bankroll's progress, and be sure to check back regularly. And use the blog's "Comment" feature to wish me luck or share a bad beat or once-in-a-lifetime-hand story.

Good luck at the tables.

Ending Bankroll: $8.32, up 86 cents.