A little about my poker part II

Yeah, OK, so I'll try to keep the rest of my poker background short. No one really cares, since I don't play for massive money or anything like that. As I was starting to search around for poker strategy on the web, I came across all the banners for online poker sites, and as well came across links to poker forums. The biggest poker forum is 2+2 (www.twoplustwo.com), and the biggest poker site is Party Poker. I signed up for both of those, and jumped into the online poker world. I won't say I buried myself in it, because there are people who play and post on the forum as much in a week as I do in several months. But in the context of my world, I jumped in full force -- reading through posts between meetings and emails at work, playing after Wife goes to sleep, Theory of Poker replacing some Dark Tower book on my nightstand, etc.

I don't start that many new things in my life anymore because when I do, I know I'm going to have to commit a ton of time up front -- quickly -- to not feel incompetent. Whether it's golf, poker, a new job, investing, even joining a new forum, I am a little obsessive about coming up to speed. But one of the really great things to me is the rapid learning and progress.

I was playing on Party mainly to practice. I started out on their lowest level, so the money was inconsequential to me in a life sense. But having stakes of any kind does change the play a little bit, so even the lowest stakes are a lot better than the play money to practice. It turns out that even the lowest stakes on Party can prepare you for more significant stakes in live play. More on that later. Being (too) competitive, and also because it's how most new players measure progress, I savored the wins and bemoaned the losses, even though the total amount of dollars was never more than what it costs to take the family out to a cheap Mexican dinner and a movie. For me, it was all about the learning.

By the time the next home game rolled around, I had the best of it in Hold'em, except against the one guy that inspired me to start getting better. By the time the game after that one rolled around, I didn't even want to play other games -- quite the switch from wanting to play any game except Hold'em. The cool thing (from a competitive standpoint) was that I think I had an edge in all the stud games we were playing. But I was really into learning Hold'em, and realized that I didn't know all that much about the other games.

Well, that home game kind of died out more than a year ago. I've replaced it with occasional (couple times a month) trips to local card rooms. And the online poker (playing and the forums) have continued. I've moved up from the very bottom of the Party ladder to the upper end of the small stakes, the $5/$10 limit game. I don't play a lot of hands, and will move up with less bankroll than I probably should, but that's counteracted by the facts that I calculate my bankroll through only money earned playing (not bonus and rakeback), plus I'll move down quickly (had to go back to $2/$4 from $3/$6 a couple times) if I hit a mini-downswing.

Limit hold'em is a pretty high-variance game, and it can get frustrating to hit a downswing. I'm getting better about taking them in stride, but they're still no fun. Plus, the rate at which I'm learning is slowing down (I'm sure there's a lot more still to learn, it's just that the pace is slowing down). I've dabbled in Omaha (hi/lo), and am thinking about giving no-limit hold'em a shot. For both, the idea is to find something with a little less variance, and to get the learning cranked up again. I just need to think about how the live availability of those games in the card rooms near me stack up, since I don't play enough to be on top of my game for multiple games. More thoughts on live play and different games later.