Last monday, November 13th 2006, marked the one year anniversary of poker-tastic.com and basically the end of my first year in online poker…and what a wild ride it has been.

I started out on fire, had the usual swings every now and then and I can’t even count the number of hands I’ve played, the hours I’ve spent playing the game, thinking about it, talking about and writing about it. Well, so far so good, it’s been worth every cent invested and every hour spent!

Ups:

1. “Meeting” all the (poker) broggers who enjoy the game as much as I do.

2. Playing with all the broggers in numerous events (WWdN, DADI, Mook, etc)

3. Learning a lot

Downs:

1. Playing against donkeys day in day out.

2. Treading water

I’d like to take a minute and have a closer look at my results for the first year:

Counting all money deposited vs all money withdrawn (yup, I actually withdraw money from time to time) I’m a losing player for the first year. How much did I lose? The grand total of 29 dollars. *lol* So nothing to worry about. Most of this can be credited to a handful of “facts”:

1. It’s tough to stay ahead of the rake at the levels I started out (and still play for the most part, 5-10$ SnGs, 25NL, …). If you add the call-happy donks and variance, it’s really tough.

(2. I “donated” quite a bit of money to brogger community by playing in a lot of brogger tourneys. To be honest I had no business in some of them – early on when my “roll” consisted of 50 bucks at Stars (buyins usually at 10+1) and I had little to none experience in NL Hold’em. But ‘s all good, I marked that down as an investment/amusement charge and in retrospect it was well worth it!)
But I’m not here to make excuses, especially as the combined grandtotal makes me a winner for the first year. Combined grandtotal? Yup, add everything that was earned with online-poker and substract everything that was bought for poker (books, buyins, etc). As I did some bonus whoring (PokerSavvy, PokerSourceOnline) along the way and due to the fact that I earn some bucks with (text/review) ads on here, I’m up…and I hope that’ll stay that way in the future.As for the future: One thing’s for sure…I’m really looking forward to the next year in online poker 🙂

If I’ll step up (money wise) or not, is yet to be decided as I don’t see online-poker as my “second income” (yet). So, I guess you can look forward to yet another year of low-limit-donkery, enjoy! 🙂