From $500 to $500,000 in 5 months…my new goal
I’ve decided to take poker seriously again. I seem to have little choice, as to not do so would basically mean losing my house in less than a year. To make playing poker fun again (it’s been a grind for 2 years now), I’ve set myself a very high, but I believe, attainable goal. My aim is to turn $500 into $500,000 in 5 months. It sounds catchy, doesn’t it? My inspiration for this idea was Chris Ferguson’s similar journey on Full Tilt Poker where he started with $0, and turned it into $10,000 in approximately a years time. Of course, $10,000 would do little to help me, so I must aim a bit higher. Like Chris Ferguson, I have set some ground rules that I must adhere to while attempting this conquest. Unlike Mr. Ferguson, my rules are a bit more, is gambly a word?
1. I will jump limits whenever my bankroll is big enough to cover 10 buy ins at the new level. I.e. to move from 1-2 nl to 2-4 nl, I’d have to have $4,000 in my account. I have 1 exception to this rule, which is that I may start by playing .50-1nl, regardless of the fact that I only have 5 buy ins worth of cash. I just cannot see myself taking things seriously at stakes smaller than .50-1. Since I always multi-table (usually playing 4 tables at once), 10 buy ins is not a lot, but I believe it’s enough so long as I strictly adhere to rule 2 as well.
2. If at any point, my bankroll drops below 7.5 buy ins, I must drop levels until I meet the criteria set in rule 1 again. I.e. if I’m playing 1-2 nl and have $2000 in my account, but then take a few bad beats (or play horrendously) and drop below $1500 I must move down and once again play at .50-1 until my account reaches 2k again.
3. I may play any tournament so long as the buy in is less than 10% of my total bankroll.
4. I must read a new poker book each week. When I first started playing 5 years ago, I read virtually every book out there, and it improved my game a ton. In the last few years, I’ve bought new poker books, but I haven’t read them.
5. After each session, I must use Poker Tracker to review all the major hands played, specially those I lost, in an attempt to find and plug any leaks my game may have. I also think this rule will help me stay focused throughout the process.
All in all, I expect this to be a grueling 5 months. I will do my best to play no less than 40 hours/week, preferably more. If I’m as good as I think I am, reaching the goal will be more about logging quality hours at the tables than anything else. If I always 4 table, and can maintain a 5 bb/100 hands win rate at the lower stake tables, and a 2 bb/100 hands wine rate at the higher tables, I should be able to achieve my goal in the time specified. Finding games at levels above 25-50nl might be tricky, once I get to that point. But I’ll deal with that when the time comes
My book for week 1 will be an easy one, Daniel Negreanu’s Hold’em Wisdom For All Players. It looks to be basically a beginner’s book, with a leanings towards playing well in no limit tournaments, as opposed to cash games. I imagine most of the information will be old news to me, but I am also willing to bet that I’ll find at least 1 or 2 nuggets of valuable and new ideas that I can use to better my game.
I’ll write another entry in a week updating everyone on my progress.
I’ll be starting off at Poker Stars, under the name Juice It Up, so if you happen to have an account there, search for me, and wish me luck. This is going to be fun.
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Hey buddy,
enjoyed your blog….sounds like a tough yet enviable task especially if you make it to where you want to go. I’ve been taking lessons and they’ve been helping a lot. What do you think of people 8 tabling and 24 tabling ? Is this foolish? I know one other player and he feels it’s crazy. Anyhow I’ll definately be following your progress, and wishing you luck.
kevin
Thanks for the well wishes. I appreciate it.
I don’t think 8 tabling, or even 24 tabling is necessarily foolish. It’s all about maximizing your profit. For me personally, I’ve found that if I play more than 4 tables at once, my hourly win rate will drop. Yet my win rate doesn’t go up enough to justify playing at less than 4 tables at once. For others, 4 may be too many, or 4 may not be enough. Obviously if you play 24 tables, you’re going to have to play a very abc style of poker, and limit your hands to those that are easiest to play. I’m guessing that most players who play that many tables will usually limit themselves to playing pocket pairs, and possibly ak/aq, as those hands all play out rather straight forward.
500 into 10k in 1 week? thats not too bad man…
i mean, dont get me wrong, its impressive … but im curious … id like to see some hand histories from these sessions that u posted from your PT database. im curious cuz, from your stats you play so passive and seem to call too much, i dont get how u can turn that kind of ROI w/out being much more aggressive.
I doubt that I can maintain that high of an ROI. In fact, week 2 was not good at all. Mostly I suffered from tilt. I’ll be posting about that later today probably. In any case, I almost always play more passive than most successful players. I can do so, and make it profitable, by making good decisions. If I were coaching a beginning player, I would not tell them to try my style, as it relies on getting in tough situation after tough situation and figuring my way through each hand very carefully. For a beginning player, I’d have them try and avoid as many hard decisions as possible, by always raising big, reraising bigger, playing few hands, ect…
As for the hand histories, I’ll try and post some tonight as well. If you’d like, I can send you the whole batch of hands from week 1 and you can look through them yourself.
lol i dont need the whole batch, i was just curious to see how exactly it worked that u play so passive yet can have high swings.
i’ve taken 400$ and turned it into 12k in under 24 hours before, so i know what it takes to do this.
i guess if your approach of forcing yourself into tough spots works for you thats great. personally, i prefer to be the one putting my opponent in difficult spots, and forcing him to make very difficult decisions for his entire stack. that’s just my approach anyways.