how bad were you before you got good?

[SavagePenguin]

My first game was a $100 buy-in tournament. I went busto on hand #5 when I called a shove on the flop with my A/K when I failed to connect to the flop. He had pocket 8's FTW.

I deposited $12.50 on Pokerstarts, brought it up to nearly $60 over the weekend, then lost it all.
Then I deposited the remaining $12.50 on my gift card and it took a few weeks to lose (a gradual loss in the penny games).

Then I read poker books, bought PokerTracker (to keep me honest), deposited $50, and played smart poker in September and had turned it into $1,000 by January.

It's all about arming yourself with knowledge and having proper discipline.
really, having PokerTracker putting every losing session in red on my permanent record was the biggest motivator. I quit making those "well it only costs me ten cents to call" plays, that really add up over time.

 

[bolda3]

Play the lowest cash games, tourneys and sngs available on cake poker. If you are losing you will obviously lose your money slower but also the lower stakes tend to have more novice players. I used to play on jetset poker, but they went out of business. I deposited $25 about 12 times throughout my career there and always lost it all. I was playing the $5.50 tournaments and now I realize that those tournaments were way too expensive for my bankroll. I now look back at some of my plays such as shoving with K10os utg with a decent stack and I realize that I had many leaks in my game. To work on my game I moved over to full tilt and pokerstars and started with a bankroll of $0 on both sites, and using discipline and bankroll management won money in various freerolls and worked it up to a bankroll. When I turned a $.93 cash into $22 in 1 sng ($.9 sat to 22 on FTP), I realized my game had significantly improved. I went on to turn $0 into a little less than $2,000 through discipline and proper bankroll management. Also, if you win your money through a freeroll and then lose it, you really haven't lost any of your own money.