My First Update!

As I said previously, I have been playing almost all of my poker these days online at Ultimate Bet. I started in April after many months of wanting to give it a try. I finally put $150 in Firepay and deposited $50 immediately into my UB account. I set goals for myself, firstly making sure that I don't go broke, but secondly, I wanted to get to $200 so that I could withdraw my original "stake" and play with "other peoples money". I had been scanning the Cardplayer.com forum and contributing regularly for about 8 months, learning the in's and outs of online poker. This forum is full of very nice people and there is a wealth of information there for all forms of poker, but mostly NL Hold'em, my game of choice. Well, I had some very early success and by June I had that $200! In May I won Krampy's Forum tourney so that helped. It was a $70 win, which was the biggest payout so far I think! Actually, before that tourney, I had been doing very well getting my stake up to about $140. I then had a pretty bad run and got cold decked for the remainder of the month until Krampy's. I actually had to dip into my initial deposit of $50 to buy-in to the event. It was only $5.50, but it was the first time since my first sit-n-go on the site that I had to do this. I was very pleased with my play that night, and felt like I got lucky in a few spots, but played well enough to beat two excellent players from the forum at the end in fengshuiuser and snadly. For the most part, I had been playing sit-n-go tournaments exclusively, with occasional cash games. I really like the set up with UB, how you get 1500 in chips and you can choose how fast you want the blinds to go up. I always go with the 10 min. blinds, as I hate to be rushed into the pot with marginal hands just because I HAVE to. Well, July was the worst month for me. I was down about $120, and it was my first losing month. I really believe that it was just poker. I had the best hand when all the $$ went into the pot, but took some horrific bad-beats. I'm talking runner/runner quads type stuff. I took a couple days off, and tried to right my mind. I came back with a new philosophy. I was going to move to playing cash games exlusively in August. Well that has been the best thing i've done so far. I have been moving between the .05/.10 ($10 NL) game and the .10/.25 ($25 NL) game, depending on how I am feeling and the mood that I am in when deciding which to play. These games are very loose and with my tight/aggressive approach I have been able to clean up! My Bankroll stands at $440 today, and I have withdrawn what was left in my Firepay account ($100). So I am in the black for about $400, not bad for 5 months. They say that UB's players are some of the best online, but at the low-limits that I play I think this could not be true. Of course I have never played on any other site, so I can only go with what i've heard. I would like to eventually open up another account on either Party Poker or Poker Stars. That is one of my next goals. The problem is I LOVE UB's interface and tournaments. So my goals for the time being are this. In the short term (2-3 mos), I would like to move up in stakes and get my bankroll to $800. With this, I would withdraw $400 and put it on either 'Party or 'Stars. My long term goal, one that I have pretty much only told my wife about, is to get enough $$ to play in one of the low buy-in events at the 2006 World Series of Poker. $1500 seems attainable at the rate I am going, even considering the variance. But I would rather not take all of my $$ out of my accounts to do this. So the long term goal would have to be at the very least $2500. Can I do that in 10 months? We shall see!