The Challenge

Like many of the new crowd, I first started playing poker in 2003 after catching a few of the WPT highlight shows on TV. All small stakes stuff of course, the £2 + £0.25 No Limit Hold’Em multi-table tournaments hosted on William Hill were my game of choice back then, cheap enough for learning and with fields often exceeding 300 entrants the prize pots weren’t too shabby either, certainly enough to keep tempting a 19 year old student back to the tables time and time again.

After about 6 months I started to do pretty well, made it to the final table frequently, occasionally found myself in the top 3, so I took my tournament winnings and dived into the £0.50/£1 NLHE cash rooms, and more often than not, lost my £20 buy in within an hour. It took me another 6 months before I could hold my own and occasionally beat this small stakes game so I did what any stupid, arrogant 20 year old would do, I moved up to a bigger game and bigger tournaments. It made sense at the time of course, bigger risks meant bigger rewards and I wanted bigger rewards. It didn’t go according to plan and before I knew it I was playing an awful lot of poker, neglecting my studies and losing what little money I had to live on. So after a particularly bad beat in March 2004, costing me a £500 pot (a fortune for a student) I decided it was time to step back from poker, mainly because I couldn’t afford to buy food never mind tournament fees. It was with this dilemma that I reluctantly went cap in hand to the folks.

They did not take it well.

Following the most uncomfortable conversation I’ve ever had, and the subsequent, equally uncomfortable inspection of my bank statements, I returned to University, well chastened but relatively solvent.

My poker ‘career’, however, was over, as well as being part of the aforementioned parental relief agreement, I no longer wanted to play, in the end it had cost me more than a few hundred £s, it had taken a significant portion of my self respect along with it.

Ok, enough of this ‘poker nearly sent me broke’ sermon and onto the reason why I spent 5 minutes setting up this blog.

I’m playing poker again.

Yes, time does indeed heal all wounds, but this time I’m doing it differently. Never again will I risk having to ask for a handout in order to feed myself, so I decided to stick to the Freeroll tournaments that most online poker rooms seem to host these days. Freerolls have come a long way since I left poker two and a half years ago. Back then the only Freeroll I can remember was a weekly one on Party Poker which had an impossibly large field for an incredibly small prize pool. The fields are still pretty huge, 12,000 being the largest I have seen so far, and the prize pools vary from $5 to $1500 and they are a lot more common that they were 2 years ago.

I’ve been playing again for a couple of weeks with very little success, but I’ve been enjoying it, which is arguably the most important thing. Along with my recaptured enthusiasm for playing poker, I have begun to read about the game again, and my God how it has grown. It was during my browsing of all these new poker websites that I found a reference to a challenge Chris ‘Jesus’ Ferguson set himself. The basic premise was to start with a bankroll of $0.00 and by starting with Freerolls, build up a bankroll of $10,000. You can read about Chris’ challenge here.

Basically I am going to recreate this challenge to see if it can be done by a mere mortal like myself and I will be documenting it here, for, at the very least, my own amusement in a years time if I am still playing the 0130hr $500 Freeroll on Bet365, but if anyone stumbles on this blog by accident and wants to offer their support or to throw abuse at me, then great.

I am going to use the same basic rules of Bankroll management that Chris Ferguson laid down in his challenge with a couple of alterations, namely

• Maximum buy in for a Cash Game or Sit & Go Tournament is 5% of total bankroll (is bankroll <$75, maximum buy in is $3.75)
• Maximum buy in for a multi-table tournament is 2% of total bankroll (if bankroll <$75, maximum buy in is $1.50)
• If, during a cash game the money on the table accounts for more than 10% of total bankroll, I must leave the game before the blinds reach me.
• Use of sign-up bonuses as part of bankroll is forbidden

It took Chris Ferguson 16 months to complete this challenge, so I am not expecting this to be quick or easy, indeed I may never build-up a bankroll of $100, never mind $10,000, however I find that it always helps to have a goal to reach for, no matter how lofty that goal happens to be.

Wish me luck!