What is and what should never be LZ

Well, let s start from the beginning. I started playing poker like 3 years ago when I saw a Party Poker commercial while watching South Park on the Internet. And instantly I thought this game could be fun. I' m a gamming fan, I have always been, I'm part of the generation that had everything since the ATARI 2600 to the N64 or PS, and I ve always loved to be competitive on sports and any other kind of game.

I started playing for play money just to learn, but at the moment I didn t really had the intention on playing on real money as I thought I wasn t good enough to “gamble”. Then all the WPT phenomenon came and I decided that I ll play the Party Freerolls everyday till I get ITM and start with a little br.

On those Freerolls ($500-$1000) there was an huge field of about 10K-9K players and cash for the first 10.

I finished two or three times between 11th and 15th on those (for no cash tho ), and I started to think that my playing was above average for those tourneys, and my CG and SNG on play money was really good. At that time I was working on a restaurant half-time and decided to give real money a try, and put $50 of my tips on PS coz they had a 50% bonus and I was really anxious to wait for another bigger one .

When I first started to play with real money I saw somewhere on a poker E-book (I think was super-system 2) a little basic document about br management. All I had to do was play $5 SNG 6 handed and go all in with any premium at flop no matter what, and fold anything else. The guy who wrote the article explained that with a br of 50 I had a 1/10 of those, and with that ultra tight aggressive style, the profit was “guaranteed”. He knew (and I did too at that time) that it wasn’t enough to be a good poker player, but he recommended it to the new players who wanted to start on the game.

I wasn't convinced that it was the best way to move on but I understood why a good br-management was relevant and I knew from before while I was playing with play money, that it wasn’t very clever to just put all your money on one “sesh”.

A 1/10 ratio was too high for me and I decided that I wanted to play just the $1.20 45 players SNG. And I remember as it was yesterday, was such a success, I was chipleader of my table on 30 min, and 30 min later I was chipleading the tournament. It was so easy, I just raised with a big variety of hands, any Ax and Kx, small pp, (no suited connectors tho) and fold if anyone reraise/call too much. So I won that first one. My first gain on poker was $14 and I quickly thought this game was too easy and I d eat the world and bluff Johnny Chan on Atlantic City =P. Nothing was farther from reality.

12 tourn later I had no other cash, on the starting point, and wondering: What happened?

To be continued...