I play poker online at full tilt. I mostly play fake poker for play money.
I have around 500,000 play dollars to gamble with, and I buy in to sit n gos for 10,000.
Managing a bank roll means that you can spend up to 5% of your bank roll on a single table. However, full tilt only offers sit n gos for 10,000 or then you can jump up to 100,000 buy in.
It’s a huge leap, and currently it is slow work improving with 10K sit n go tables, with slow prizes. I’d need a million or two before justifying the larger game. And this will take months and months to achieve – if at all!
So when I get 550K I take a gamble and play a 100K game. If I lose, I’m down to 450K and its easy to get back to my 500K benchmark. If I win… I have some room to maneuvre. I came second one time recently when doing this, but lost the next few games to bring me back where I started.

The best I’ve had this bank roll was actually 2 million, about a year or two ago. Foolishly, it seems, I spent 1 million of that trying to convert play money to real money. I missed out both times. The game was a buy in of 500,000 play money, and the reward is the top $40 get a few US dollars. I tried buying in when the numbers seemed low, but there was always last minute spikes of a few hundred players. It seemed to make just enough of a difference.

As my first blog outlines, I once tried my luck with real cash, but US$5 didn’t go far. It left me with 40 cents that I couldn’t find anywhere to spend.

It was my birthday recently. A friend whom I relay poker hands to made a deposit into my account for US$15.
Excitedly, I stepped back into the realm of gambling for cash.
I was a little dismayed at first, as I lost (usually on the bubble) my early games. I was down to about $7 before I started to win!
Getting it back to $15 felt good, but getting it to $30 felt better. I actually played a couple larger $1 games and made the cash, winning one for $17. I played a $2 shoot out and came second there.
The highest my bank roll has seen so far is $35, which almost justifies playing regular $2 games.
So I tried a couple. And lost. Still at around $29 dollars, I tried a couple very large $1 games, with $1600 up for first place. The top 1080 players make their cash back or more.
Yep, got knocked out each time.
I’ve dropped down to the $1 games again, because I’m back down to $21.31.
I’m still ahead based on the original deposit, but I’ve just lost $14 straight.

It’s kinda depressing.

I’m having trouble navigating players who just get lucky more often than I do. These games tend to be “all in” affairs, where if you wanna take a stab you have to be prepared to go all in.
Playing poker like that is much like a lottery. Well, a lottery where only 9 players can enter, and someone wins it all each and every time.
So it’s slightly better odds than a lottery, but the problem is if you lose (as you often will) you’re felted.

I guess I’m not bad at dodging bullets, seeing as I’ve actually done OK, but it will be nice if I can ever get out of these low entry no limit games.