The Wide, Wide World of Poker

Back in July of 2008 when I discovered video poker in the casino of a cruise ship I never imagined there was this wonderful world of poker out there. After returning home from the cruise I was watching a Texas holdem tournament on t.v. and decided it looked really interesting so I went online and looked up the rules and started watching more t.v. poker. It just happened that it was around the time that the 2008 WSOP was airing and I found it fascinating to watch. I saw the commercials for Full Tilt and Pokerstars.net and proceeded to download the software on my computer and that was the beginning of the journey that would soon turn to complete obsession with the best card game ever invented.

I had very little clue what I was doing when I played my first games, play money of course, but I loved every minute of it I started with cash games and having no clue about table selection I looked for the tables where the players had the least play money and sat down to play. I was amazed when I would actually win a pot. After a short while I discovered the play money sit-n-goes and that's where I totally fell in love with game. Not knowing what I was doing, I remember thinking it would be easier to play fewer people so I started with the 4 max sit-n-goes. I still remember the first one I won. I was so excited and it seems so funny now thinking back on it.

I started to read everything I could find on holdem and tried to better learn and understand the game. I continued to play for play money for several months then I discovered freerolls and would win $5 here and there just lose it much faster than I won it.

In April of 2009 I won a seat to the Cake (Players Only) $250K guarantee and decided if I was going to play in it I needed to get a feel for playing for real money on the Cake site so I made my first deposit of $60 and started playing some real money games. I played in the $250K and amazingly came in 49th out of 909 runners for a cash of $625, amazing and exciting. I started playing nothing but real money games then and that was all she wrote.

In May of 2009 I discovered PokerVT and asked my husband to give me the subscription for my Mother's Day present, which he agreed to do. This is where I have learned to play so much better poker and I continue to improve everyday. I would recommend a poker training site to anyone interested in playing poker and don't wait as long as I did to join.

Now that I've outlined my poker past, on to the main point of this post the online poker community and what a wonderful community it is, wow is the word to sum it up. No one in a poker player's day to day life really understands our obsession. Our friends and family think we have become compulsive gamblers and worry that we are going to gamble away the farm. To have found so many great people to discuss poker with through the forums, the PokerVT forum specifically, has been a God send. We can discuss hands and concepts and help each other become better players and most importantly we understand each other.

I have made some really great and wonderful friends through the PokerVT forum. They are from all over the world and range in age from around 19 to probably as old as 70. We all share things about poker with each other on the forum and on occasional conversations on Skype. I get together with a few great ladies to go over hand histories and discuss the game and we have all become great friends. It's amazing that some of my best friends I've never met face to face. The best part is that the poker community has no borders and no age or gender requirements we are all doing what we love and we all have the same goal, to improve our games as best we can.

In closing I want to say thank you to all my wonderful poker friends, you make the world's greatest game even better!