Poker Journal Entry #3:  Starting to Get on the Right Track      The point of this blog is to share with you how I went from decades of having no clue to the beginning stages of being on the right track as a studying poker player.   The point of this blog is NOT to expose other people’s content for free in the process.   I am going to be pretty vague about the things I learned from this particular program so that if it sounds like it would help you, you can go buy it fair and square for yourself.      The program I signed up for was the Raise Your Edge elementary cash game course.   Above is the first bullet list of information I learned from my first day watching and taking notes on the course.   The first thing I had read everywhere to begin formulating a strategy was to find ranges and learn them.   As an educator, I know that the best way to have information stay in your brain is to turn it into something...

  Poker Journal Entry #2:  Misunderstanding Poker Advice from a Pro      This is my second entry in the learning journal that documents my return to poker.   This one came from a video on YouTube as well as me reviewing my first poker session in PT4.   I had no idea what I was looking for yet.   I still thought I was just going to watch or read the one perfect thing that would turn me into a crusher.   I knew I needed more than I had learned the day before.   That was clear because I hadn’t won the day before.   How could my strategy be any good if I lost one session?   Lol @ past me.      Anyone who knows anything about poker should read through this list and see just how far off the mark I was: -           Flops are fine to check OOP (duh!) -           Flop bluff stabs should be small and IP (I didn’t know ...

       Poker Journal Entry #1:  When I still thought I could find the "RULES" This is my first entry in my learning journal that documents my poker learning journey.   I started out by hitting up the classic poker strategy site 2+2.   I went to the micro NL section and started in the pinned posts.   There was one that caught my eye about how to beat the micros.   I didn’t think it would matter too much that it was about 7 years old (duh!)   I read through it and made a bulleted list of my major learnings.      The major learnings for this day were that if I wanted to beat the micros all I had to do was start overfolding rivers.   They listed a bunch of hands and spots that proved their theory and they had a graph that made it look like it was a very successful strategy at these levels.   The list (above) included the following “rules” for beating the lowest stake games: -      ...

Poker Journal Entry #0:  I had to start somewhere How did I begin learning about poker?     I was never a studier in poker or in life really.   I had, of course, heard people talking about hitting the lab and I was way too cocky to admit I had no idea what that meant during my earlier poker days.   I acted like I knew what they were saying, and I pretended like I did it too.   However, pretending did nothing to build my knowledge or to develop my game.        Life humbled me pretty well over the years and when I decided I was going to come back to poker I had developed some helpful new life habits.   First, I won't lie to myself anymore.   At this point in my life, I know the first step in getting better at something is to get specific about why I am not good yet. When it came to poker, I had to admit to myself that I not only hadn’t been learning, but I didn’t even know how to start learning.    ...

  Welcome back to the 3 rd and final chapter in the poker history of the VeganDemon.  Last time we left off with me having moved in with some poker players and all of us discovering a website where we could play poker for BTC.  I had also recently started to take some rare, sober moments to study some videos on how to play heads-up poker.  I had been playing for a long time, but I had never really developed a strategy.  I had always just claimed to be a winner and assumed it was true. When I watched one video by Brian Hastings, I was sure that I had it all figured out.  Looking back, it reminds me of my father with a new issue of golf digest.  He was always sure he had “found the secret” in each new issue only to show up to the course and come home disappointed.  I bought my first BTC and headed out to the online streets to battle it up in the heads-up games.  I got so lucky at the beginning it is crazy to even think about it.  I ha...

       Thanks for coming back and reading more of this poker history of the VeganDemon.  Last time I told you about learning about poker very young, finding Magic The Gathering which led me to start practicing cards with friends, and then discovering Rounders, partying, and poker as a group.  That gave us quite the head start.  We had been playing (underage) on Paradise Poker for almost 5 years when Chris Moneymaker won the WSOP main event and made it so that everyone felt the same about poker as us magic players had felt for a long time.  Why would you want to do something else with your friends other than trying to mercilessly take away all their money by outwitting them?!?! Somewhere in between Rounders and the poker boom of 2003 other sites started popping up and we were always searching for the best bonuses and the softest games.  There also started to be a fairly obvious stratification of skills within our group.  We had one fr...

  Hello everyone I am very excited to begin sharing all of this with anyone who feels like reading it, but I thought the best way to get started out would be to tell you a little about the journey that has lead me here so far.  I have been playing poker since I was 10 years old.  We used to play poker for pencils, which was the currency at my school because of a pencil fighting obsession.   For those of you who are uninitiated to the art of pencil fighting, one person hits the other person’s pencil with their pencil while it is held taught between the other combatant’s hands.  If the pencil survives this strike, the roles are switched and this pattern continues until one person has a broken pencil and the other is the victor.  It might sound stupid, but I assure you it truly was. But in my experience, the stupidity of an endeavor has never caused pre-teen boys to shy away from engaging in it and pencil fighting was no different. As a young man who had ...