Here we Go!

Ok with the explosion of Poker and online Poker in the past ten years there are certainly many who with much reason would say that the topic has been dealt with exhaustivly in blogs, books, tv, chatrooms, watercooler....
However, legislation signed into law in 2006 by President Bush called the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). According to the UIGEA, "unlawful internet gambling" means to place, receive, or otherwise knowingly transmit a bet or wager by means of the internet where such bet is unlawful under any law in the State in which the bet is initiated, received, or otherwise made. Thus, the UIGEA prohibits online gambling sites from performing transactions with American financial institutions. As a result of this law, internet poker became more complicated and difficult for many US residents. Most of this difficulty revolves around deposits to the site from US financial institutions, most of which will not process such requests.

There are, however; a number of workarounds for this. One of the simplest and certainly the cheapest is to play on any of the plethora of sites that offer frequent(usually once per hour) free tournaments for admittedly small cash prizes. While playing two or more 5 hour tournamens for cash prizes that start at as little as 60 cents may seem to possess little appeal, let be honest about a few things:
1) you get what you pay for.(in this case what you dont pay for)
2) even low stakes poker is still poker
3) you probably watch that much terrible tv in an average week

Recently while watching Poker after Dark(M-F 2:05am-03:05am NBC), I came across yet another reason to play these games. Chris Ferguson was talking about playing free online games with the goal of building up to a $10,000 stake. He had just finished this feat within his goal time of one year and Huck Seed was looking for side bets on whether he could do so also.

Now I am clearly no Chris Ferguson or Huck Seed for that matter but this seemed like an interesting goal to set. So I am establishing this blog to track my trek from zero to $10,000. I play on PokerStars under the screen Flatleever. I started this Sunday, winning $1.00 in a weekly second round free tourney by placing in the top 500 finisher out of 5000 or so entrants. Since then I have built my total to just over $3.00 by playing 2cents 4 cents cash games. I will begin posting my stats and tracking my sessions. Can I get to $10,000? We will see but probably not for a long long time.

Stats for 05/14/08 7pm session

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 60 hands and saw flop:
- 6 out of 8 times while in big blind (75%)
- 4 out of 7 times while in small blind (57%)
- 13 out of 45 times in other positions (28%)
- a total of 23 out of 60 (38%)
Pots won at showdown - 5 of 8 (62%)
Pots won without showdown - 2

Wish me luck and make sure to say Hi! if you see me playing.

Out here.