But WHY Paul?

I'll tell you why, since you asked so nicely.  This blog is being created for multiple reasons, mostly self serving.  Foremost, it will be a living journal of my progress in micro-stakes online hold'em sprinkled with insight and lessons learned.  It is public because I have no problems sharing my  achievements or shame in hopes that others can benefit from my limited experience.

"But that's kinda counterproductive isn't it?  Don't you want other players to suck even worse than you?"

Another good question... erm... questions.  I seriously doubt that will be an issue.  Estimates I've read in various articles are that 95% of poker players are losing.  If I were a betting man, I'd guess that the vast majority of those players won't be looking at this site.  No, if you found it then you are obviously a diligent and inquisitive person with questionable tastes in blog posts.

For starters, a little background on my (ahem) poker career.  Similar story to other American online micro stake players.  Had a good time.  Made a little money.  Black Friday.  Back to less profitable ways of spending my time online.  That's it in a nutshell.  I will elaborate that I was strictly a limit player and was not very studious in the ways of poker.  Until very recently, I was your typical tight and passive player with a chronic limping problem.  To demonstrate the point, until I started again almost a month ago, I did not know what a limper or limping was.  Now I'm throwing poker slang left and right like a boss!  Still suck though.

Now I'm playing NL5 at one of the rare sites that accept folks from the US.  My sample size is still too small to give you an accurate representation of my abilities but let's just say I put $50 in a month ago and I still have $50.  Seems like I'm going nowhere unless you realize that I've already paid over $20 in rake and have actually been down to $30 at one point.  There were missteps I have taken and things I would do differently had I know what I know now.  And if you are a new player and thinking of going to one of those sites, let me give you one piece of advice before selecting your poker site:

Have a sufficient BR (bankroll) to support the limit you will be starting with.  $50 is NOT a sufficient BR for NL5 (.02/.05 no limit).  You will find a multitude of opinions on what size your BR should be.  I've been going with 15 BI (buyins: 100 times the big blind, in this case 5 cents) but I will be moving up to 20.  That is still the low end of what most recommend and not even the minimum of what others suggest.  But 50 bucks is all I was willing to give up at this point.  If I had researched sites better I would have known that I could have gone elsewhere and had a mostly sufficient BR to start NL2 (that's right! 2 cents! your really quick).

So my challenges:  Get gooder at pokering.  Continue to study every aspect of poker.  Play a shitload of hands.  Keep updating this blog.  Play a shitload more hands.

I will go deeper into what I'm doing currently and share my triumphs and failures.  Just wanted to throw this up to stop procrastinating.  Seriously,  I got more than this.  Right now I need to go play some poker!