Hello, my name is Markus but most people simply call me Max. I am 34 years old and started playing poker about 2 and a half years ago.
Before playing my first hand I used to watch poker on TV casually. At first I was merely intrigued by the amount of money being at stake and changing owners so quickly. After a few broadcasts I watched more intensely and managed to reach some awareness of the rules of the game and the rank of hands as well as some general idea of odds and probabilities of poker. The game became more and more fascinating but I was yet to touch the cards and play a hand.
I owe it to a good friend of mine that I would eventually play my first hand in a real card casino because he persuaded me to participate in a NL Texas Hold’Em Tournament simply because we didn’t have anything else planned that evening.
So after paying my €20 I found myself sitting at a poker table and quickly realised that it is so much more complicated to draw the right conclusions and make the right calls when you have no clue of your opponents’ hands. So I decided to try and avoid simply handing my chips in nice portions to clearly superior players who outplayed me with ease on the flop on a regular basis and instead make big bets and raises with good pocket cards and subsequently go all-in if the flop didn’t look dangerous or I hit it. At the time I had no idea that this was the basic idea of a short stack strategy.
To cut the chase, at the break I had taken six players from the table and found myself in the top five at the chipcount – and ended the game 4 positions away from the money ranks due to absolutely no experience in the game of poker. On my way home I kept thinking about how I could have won over €100 if I had simply survived four more players and if able to survive the remaining other 14 I would have won the tournament and taken home more than €2,000. And in the end it seemed quite simple getting into the top 20 (more than 130 players were thrown out before me). The game proved to be a fun experience and along the way you could earn quite a lot of money – no question, I will go on playing for sure!
So I decided to play tournaments in card casinos about twice a week and after some time I also started playing online. Sit&Go, Cash Games NL €0,50/€1, Tournaments, you name it. And I was able to cash in with some small successes like winning a Sit&Go.
After a bit more than half a year of regular poker I knew two things for a fact: I love the game and I am €2,200 in the red. 🙂
So now I had reached a point where the game started hurting me financially, I had lost more than a month’s pay check in half a year. I knew it couldn’t go on like this especially seeing as the losses became bigger each week. Looking back I can claim to have made about every single mistake that a poker player can commit. I am not proud of it but neither am I ashamed – I simply didn’t know better at the time.
Today however I do know better. I obey to rules that partly originate from professional poker players and partly from my own slightly painful experience. With another deposit of €70 and lots of discipline and patience and discipline and patience and … I managed to win back the original loss of €2,200 after approximately a year. It was a slow way back marked by small but more or less steady winnings. There were the occasional bad streaks that sometimes seemed to last for an eternity but all in all I could see a trend for the better and never lost heart. The game still is tremendous fun and finally I can also enjoy looking at my bank account again. And that is – in a nutshell – the main essence of poker for me: having fun and winning!
And now I would like to help you, dear visitor of Max Poker Bonus, who maybe just made the first deposit, avoid such a bad start into the game of poker and give you some guidance and tips in my upcoming blog entries. I want you to be able to learn from my mistakes instead of making them yourself as this might prove to be expensive. Poker should be fun from the first hand you play!