This is the first entry in my poker journal. The purpose of this journal is to record my experiences playing poker live as well as online. I am really not writing this for anyone to read but more for my own education. Hopefully by reviewing past experiences/plays, I will be able to learn from my mistakes and improve my poker game. For approximately 1 year, I have been studying and playing the game of poker. I got into poker when I first saw the World Series of Poker with Austen. I was amazed by the amount of thought that was put into each and every hand by the professionals. After watching the entire Series Main Event, we both were very interested in learning the game. So we gathered up a group of friends that included my brother and some of his friends and we started playing. At first, we played straight up No Limit Texas Hold 'Em tournaments -- Winner Take All. There were a couple of reasons we started playing this way. First, this way no one would lose more than their initial buy-in. Secondly, it prevented people from winning big and then leaving. We played this way for a while but finally determed it would be a better idea if we played regular cash games. As the days went by, my gameplay improved greatly. It seemed like me and Austen were progressing so much but everyone else didn't really care. We began to continuously either break even or come out ahead every game we played. Eventually the game became a regular Sunday night occurence. After Austen moved away, I continued to progress and take money away from every Sunday night game. Then I started depositing money into Party Poker for some online play. This didn't work out to well at the beginning and I lost a lot of money. I had never played with such poor players. After a few months of experimenting with it, however, I began to become slightly profitable. Now it has reached the point where I pretty much break even or am slightly profitable. I use online play as more of a learning tool than for profit. I do not have enough time in the day that I would need to make my online play any more profitable. So now I am here, playing multiple times a week at Brandon's and at Towson University and continuing to learn every game. I have played in 4 or 5 live tournaments, placing in the money in 1 of them. However, they have not been major tournaments and only one was setup well. My plan from this day forward is to improve my tournament game by playing in local live events as much as I possibly can. I also hope to host a few events myself along with the help of my friend Jerry who put on the one tournament that was setup well. Also, I plan on funding my tournament bankroll by playing at least once a week at Towson and/or Brandon's Sunday game.

Source: pat o's poker