Poker Staking (My Story)

Hello and welcome to my blog about online poker staking. I am new to poker staking. I recently got interested in staking after realizing it was -$EV (Expected value) to play poker on one site and a bank roll just sitting idly doing nothing on another site. So I decided to let others grow my money while I play elsewhere.

After doing a little research on staking I soon realized I was not using about 95% of my bank roll at any given time on any site. I realized it would be better to invest about 80-90% of my bank roll and play with the rest, considering I don't get enough time to grind anyway. Before I go any further, let me tell you a bit about my poker experiences to date.

Now just to warn you, I am by no means pro caliber. I have played primarily small stakes on several sites such as party poker, poker stars, full tilt and PKR. My passion for poker is the fault of my girl friend. I hope she does not read this. I believe it was Christmas 2005 when she bought me poker chips. I will be honest with you, I had almost no interest in poker up to that point. My view at that time was that poker was mostly a game of luck. I was still excited to get those chips. I was looking forward to having a weekly game as a social gathering. One thing got in the way and that is my natural competitive nature. The first home game we played was limit texas holdem. My mom destroyed all of us. Her calling station abilities were next to none. She never bet and called when she had a bad hand or a monster hand. There was just no reading here...grrr. After that night I was hooked.

I started playing poker on yahoo while looking up information on strategy. Soon there after I signed up at party poker. The free rolls were pretty good back then. I won some play money tourneys and thought I was the next Doyle Brunson. I eventually won $20 on a free roll. I came up with a brilliant idea like most new players. I played a cash game with my $20 roll. I believe I got up to about $30 when I picked up AK. I'm UTG and raise 3x BB. I get one caller. Flop was AK4 rainbow. I could hardly contain myself. I'm thinking "I'm going to destroy this donk". Of course I slow play this like the pro I was. The donk foolishly decides to bet into me. So I smooth call knowing I'm going to take all his chips. The turn card was pretty much a blank. I check again knowing the donk was going to bet again. Of course he bets and I shove all-in. The donk quickly calls and I fist pump so fast only to stop half way to see he has pocket 4s. River was a blank. I had him covered which left me with about a $1.20.

I resumed playing freerolls in an effort to get a roll started. I did this for weeks to no avail. I had forgotten about the 1.20 left in my account. One night I stumbled across the 1.20 and signed up for a $1 tourny. I managed to get 2nd place giving me $72. At this point I was a bit more knowlegable about the game and bankroll management. I started playing mostly single table sit and goes with a few cash games mixed in. I went on a heater and my bank roll reached about $800 at one point. I felt invincible. Its funny how poker does that to every player once they first start playing. If you have any amount of poker experience, you know what is coming next. The big down swing!!! I was following decent bankroll guide lines. Playing $10 games with a $700 roll and decreasing stake buy ins as my roll got smaller. Nothing I did made a difference. The beats just kept happening over and over. When my roll was about $300 I finally had enough of party poker. I decided to try Poker Stars. Everything went well for a while. I got my roll back up to about 6-700. Of course the inevitable down swing happened again.

Eventually I decided to try out full tilt. I immediately liked the structure. I deposited $50 and played mostly $1 45 man tournaments and a mix of larger MTTs. I did well immediately. When I reached about $200 I started playing $5 45 mans. My roll started to take off. While playing $10 45 mans I won a $10 MTT for $610. I finally cracked a 1K bankroll. With a mix of $26 45 mans and winning tokens for $75 45 mans I eventually got my roll up to about $3300. I then went through a break even stretch and decided to take break. I took out most of my roll leaving about $250 on full tilt. I built that back up over $600 playing mostly heads up sit and goes. I eventually put more money on pokerstars which brings me to the present.

During all this I got more serious about the game. I began to study more and improve my game. Heads up was a game I was becoming more interested in. I found a site called holdemforaliving run by trujm. I was impressed by his articles and stats. He has a %14 ROI over 10k+ games. That is insane and very rare to find in husngs. I did get a little coaching from him. He helped me find leaks in my game I did not realize I had. It was through his site I found rakethestake which is of course a staking site. It is a very young staking site. I honestly was not aware of any staking site. It seems like a excellent site. I'm definitely going to be hanging around there in the hopes of helping them grow and finding some good investments there. Shortly after I found another staking site called parttimepoker. This site seems to be the monster of all staking sites. Stakes are happening there by the minute. Anyway this post is longer than I intended. I will end it here for now. Next post will be about my plan and goals as a staker. Later.