Gnothi Seauton

So who am I and why am I doing this blog?

Well, my name is Andrew and I started playing poker over the internet about 2 and a half years ago. At first, it was just £1/£2 limit poker, which I did for fun, and also because I made a profit on it (nothing big). This went fine, till the company I was working for went bust, and I was out of work for six months. Financial reins were tightened, which meant emptying my poker accounts to use the money for food and rent etc, so I didn't play any poker for about six months.

When I started working again, back to the poker I went. This time though, I decided to do it 'properly'. Books were bought, articles were read, forums were digested and contributed to - becoming a good poker player was my new project. There was initial success, steady profits were accumulated. I then discovered tournaments, and took to them like a duck to water. I won the first one I entered, and logged continued success. I even qualified for the Ladbrokes Poker Cruise last year - a $700,000 tournament taking place on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean.

Recently, however, I've been finding it tougher, and have been treading water. Why is this? Three reasons spring to mind.

1) I'm not as good as I think I am - I originally went through a period of good luck, and so my early success wasn't really due to me being really good, but just lucky.

2) Early results were an accurate reflection of my ability - I'm just going through a period of bad luck at the moment.

3) My luck and ability have remained fairly constant - it's just the other players have got better.

I definitely think more players know what they're doing now, certainly at the limit tables - there are fewer fishes on the Cryptologic network. Many players have rocked up in order to claim the free money for the first 5 hours you play every month.

As far as multi-table tournaments (MTTs) go, the higher number of players has increased my variance. When it originally began, the big evening tourney on William Hill used to get about 150 players, and I did well in this (never actually won it, but managed quite a few final tables, including 3rd, 4th and 5th in consecutive nights). Now there's regularly over 550 players, it becomes that much harder to make the final table (though when I do, the rewards will be greater).

So, that brings us to the 'Why?' of this blog - I'm making a permanent record of my ups and downs so I can properly analyse my play. Simply writing this thing will hopefully alert me to problems with my poker. Knowing me, it will probably expand to other things as well, depending on how much effort I put into it.