The Virtual Felt Calls

It’s been a long time since I really put any effort into playing poker online. At some point last year I went through a bad streak that completely and utterly destroyed my online bankroll, and killed any enjoyment I had taken from the game. No matter what I did I was constantly losing to worse hands, or running kings into aces. It was a complete clusterfuck of bad beat stories and bad luck.

So I stepped away from online poker, content to play the odd monthly home game, and venture out to one of our local casinos for their weekly rebuy madhouse.

That was until recently.

About a week ago I started getting the itch to fire up PokerStars and play a couple of single table sit and go’s. The problem was I had no money in my account at all. I decided to do a small deposit of enough to play a couple of low level SNG’s just incase I couldn’t get back into it again. I deposited just over $40 because of the exchange rate, which was enough to play two $16+$1 turbo SNG’s and leave me with a little left over to play any other micro limit SNG.

I won the first SNG I played, giving my bankroll a nice little boost from where it was, and then logged out. I’d battled for every chip in the SNG and had come from quite far behind to win. I had fun, but made the decision that I wasn’t going to play again that day. I needed to ease myself gently back into the world of online poker.

I expected that I would want to play again the next day, but no such feeling appeared. I logged into Stars, and just before I registered in another $16+$1 SNG, I realised that playing when I didn’t really feel like it was partially to blame for my bad streak last year, so I logged out completely and did something else entirely. I think it was probably the best decision I could have made.

The next day I found myself getting excited to play again, so during my lunch break I logged in, registered for another $16+$1 SNG and completely crushed it. When I got to Heads Up play I had over $10K in chips compared to slightly less than my opponents $2K. The HU battle lasted all of three hands before I’d won my second SNG in a row, and moved my bankroll up to just under $150.

It’s all still at a very small scale, but I think that if I stick to my current philosophy of only playing when I really want to, and making sure I don’t play for too long at that point, then I have no doubts I’ll be able to get my bankroll back up to where it was, if not higher, than before my horrific streak last year.

I have a few modest goals to get me back on my way, all of which shouldn’t be difficult, but are necessary steps. They are:

1) Build Stars bankroll back up to $1000
2) Achieve SilverStar VIP Level
3) Cash in the Sunday Million Tournament
4) Qualify for any Season 5 EPT Event

Again, none of these tasks should be too difficult, but I think that if I’m going to get going in the online poker world again, I’m going to have to start small, and build from there.

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