clarkatroid is not folding

So its winter 2001 and im on a dialup PC.

The tower was soo big it wouldnt fit under my desk, the monitor was about 60 inches deep, and there was about 600 cables meshed up and running everywhere. Im on pokerstars and looking for stud games as im excited about applying doyles strategies. Unfortunately it was hard to find any stud games going, which it still is, so like most folk i found my route into online poker through sngs and tourneys.

I can remember being amazed at how many people where playing, circa 1500 in low time and up to 3500 in peak hours, paultry compared to todays mighty figures. There is 250 000 playing on stars as i type this, only 8 years later. I think the incredible difference between those 2 statistics best quantifies the magnitude of the boom of poker.

Some observers attribute said boom to Chris Moneymaker and his victory in wsop, but for me, it was the first series of channel 4s late night poker that really helped catapult the industry in the uk. I was in awe of the devilfish, the boatmans' and so on. The media hyped them up to be superstar soul readers that could name name actual holding by simply staring at you." I dont need the cards , i just play the person". What did these guys know that the rest of us didnt? The answer, which only came to light a few years later, was nothing. Jack shit. It was all TV bluster. Smoke, mirrors and ego. But no one knew this at the time, and it made for pioneering and riveting television that propelled poker to the masses.

The Devilfish's of this world turned out to be TV personalities, not really poker players, good back in their day, a day when no one had a bloody clue,  but unable to move with the times, and the internet exposed them as mainly a bunch of donks, via forums and tracking software that accurately detailed winning and losing players. Literally no place for the proganda machine to hide. This information is privy only to industry insiders though, and in the eyes of the general public these guys are still the bomb

Back in the real/cyber world i started out with a 50 bucks deposit and was grinding 1 dollar sngs on stars. I decided it was best to pretend to be a girl, and i wanted to start my new poker journey with a deceptive move right off the bat. No one gave women credit on late night poker.  I chose the screen name of ladyluck22 and picked an avatar of a 22 year old brunette who was attractive but not amazing to the point where people didnt believe.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, but pretty pointless looking back and if i had my time again i think an avatar of my dog and the name "norma" would have served the donkish image i was trying to create much better. I spent the next 3 years pointlessly flirting with other online regs and was constantly constantly getting chatted up

The games where soft back then, there where no training sites, little literature, so everyone was winging it basically and making it up as they went along. I dont want this to turn into a brag post, but for whatever reason i had some success from day 1, and to be honest i have no idea why. I painstakingly moved up stakes over the course of 2 years or so, and settled at $100x9 man non turbo sngs, which i played in my spare time for another couple of years. i didnt like turbo sngs as they forced me to push/fold too soon as i felt my edge was greater the longer the game went on. I really enjoyed playing them, and used the winnings to build my online roll and play micro tourneys.

I never really cashed out, and this is how i built up my online roll, but i also never deposited ever again, which is something im really proud of.  By 2005 i had 30k in my pokerstars roll from mainly sngs




So i used this dosh to fund shots at tourneys.  I was never a top tier player, a bit of a spewtard crotch monkey, but a profitable player nonetheless. The online mtt stars of the day included purr of aces, hamman, thebeat, lord hutty, and teecoy. All revered players back in the day. I was a grinder back then and nothing much has changed. My main strength has always been bankroll mgt, and thats whats kept me in the game while other, probably more talented players have not. I resisted the urge to cashout knowing that variance would catch up with me at some point, as is the nature of the beast, and i needed to be ready for that black day. Being overolled gave me the confidence to play without any fear of going busto, and i believe that enables you to play better.

Playing poker overolled has been one of the most important poker strategy decisions ive ever made. It supplies me with a tilt evading inner calm that only having 300 buyins behind you can achieve

i joined johnny baxs' poker xfactor training site in 2005 and learnt how to play tourneys better, got fed up of my transexual poker identity, so changed my stars screen name to clarkatroid and gradually increased stakes in both mtts and sngs. I had evolved my sng game and and bankroll to the point where i could now buy in to the sunday million every week without having to satellite in every week, which was a big break through. However i only bought into the comp if my bankroll went up $200 on the previous week. My only poker aim at the time was to mince around in sngs midweek,win my entry money to the sunday big one, and freeroll it . I nevered managed to win it but  hit 5th once for a tidy 32k



So, basically its all very dull, boring and steady eddie, and to summize, i didnt learn much prior to 07, i got by by just playing off my instincts. I grinded away for a few years building up an online roll in my spare with no real game plan or idea of what i was going to do with it.

But the defining moment in my poker career came when the luckbox donkament gods handed out what turned out to be a career changing sum of 144k in sept 2006 . (66k in sunday warm up, 50k in ipoker 200k guaranteed and 28k in 100 rebuy, all within 3 days of each other)

This was the moment that everything changed everything for me, it was the beginning of the end for playing sngs and mtts, and the start of a new learning curve.

With hindsight, prior to sept 2006 you could have written what i knew about the game on the back of a stamp. I had spent years monkeying around autopiloting. Playing shove/fold poker whilst always having one eye on the telly

I made a decision to trial 20k of my winnings in an experiment playing cash poker, something that had previously frightened the life out of me. I had to do it now, fresh from my massive wins and if i lost the 20k i could handle it.

The main reasoning at the time was to develop my post flop game, which was very poor. I basically had never really played any flops, turns or rivers with any thought, such is the push/fold animal that is sngs/mtts.

The plan was to quit mtts sngs totally for 3 months, play exclusively cash, then re-enter my old world a master of post flop play and a better all round player.

But that never happened and i never came back at all....................