I sat down for about 2 hours last night and just crushed it. It was one of those nights where even my marginal hands were holding up. I must have gotten pocket 10’s five or six times, and each time the flops fell, they held as over pairs. How often does that happen? It was nuts.

Also I don’t know what’s going on but I am flopping a lot of sets. I get these little pocket pairs and I am fairly confident now that I will hit the set on the flop. So much so that I don’t raise pre-flop cause I want as many people in as I can get. Those two things stand out in my head for my play lately.

So I sat down and 2-tabled it for two hours. My initial buy-in of $10 turned into like $28.22, and that was only after a tough suck-out on my last hand as I was trying to push the session total over $30. What’s the fuss about thirty bucks you say? Well that puts my little experiment bankroll now over $100 and moving pretty steady.

It also pushed my BB/100 mark to a little over 25. I have managed to maintain pretty good discipline with a SawFlop% of around 33%. That’s a little higher then I would like it to be – but at these limits it’s expected. For me it will be my main focus to tighten those screws as I move up.

I am still going to hold fast onto the fact that I want a $200 bankroll before I move to the $10NLHE tables, so I still have some time to go. I have also yet to take a considerable losing session so I know that will probably pop it’s head up sooner or later.

I am growing a little antsy at these tables as the better I play I do tend to think about “man if this was only 2-4 or even 1-2 this would be that much better.” But I knew I would think that at times, and it actually hasn’t happened that much. It’s all economies of scale and I am not really looking at the money as much as I am looking at it as “points.”

It was to the point last night where I had top set against two to a flush on the board and I go all in to get called by 2 players. When the turn and river come rag – rag I actually raised my hands in the air and pumped my fist. Looking back I am surprised I didn’t do the Tiger Woods fist pump. I was that excited about winning ten bucks. Haha this is free poker. When you look at it like that, it puts a big damper on things, but when you look at it as tripling up your buy-in that puts it in perspective.

I am finding that I am a guy that needs a comfortable bankroll. I like to play aggressive and lean on people. I like to serve out pressure on people and to do that you have to be pretty comfortable with your bankroll. At the $5 NLHE tables, it’s pretty easy to do that cause what do I care about 50 cents. But I know that will change as I move up, so in order to keep that sense of security I need to keep a nice sized secure bankroll.

It’s one thing for me to play tight and aggressive – but once I start to play tight conservative, I am off my game totally and my results usually show it. If I am able to sit at a table and get into my game, I fall into a flow and I usually start to see my buy in multiply.

That is probably my biggest goal when looking towards moving up. Being able to keep this sense of secure aggressive play. It is fun to watch as my personal play style seems to be surfacing from all the hundreds of poker books, magazines, websites and thousands of hands. I have such a melting pot of poker theory in my poker psyche that it’s nice to start to see my own sense form. And basically that’s the purpose of this entire experiment.

Yet despite that, I managed to grind out a nice win for the bankroll. I walked away from the two tables after just under two hours with a net of +$11. Not too bad doubling up my buy-in in 2 hours.

Not where I want to be – but on the right track. Like I said I don’t even feel like I played great cards. It was just a grind out session taking down pots mostly with aggression. Hey maybe that’s the secret. It definitely could have been more profitable, especially since the two tables were never even full tables. One was usually always like 8-9 players, and the other one was usually 5-6 so I had to loosen up a bit more on that one.

I am starting to feel my game adjusting. Not really “my game”, but I need to adapt my so-called poker game to these tables. It has been a while since I played this low and I needed to tweak my poker game a bit. Hopefully I don’t wreck what it was. But hey that is the goal of this experiment, blow up my old game and rebuild it from scratch.

Not bad to take a $5 initial bankroll and to turn it into 13x’s that in 13 hours of play. That’s basically doubling up the 5$ buy in each hour of play. Especially when you consider I had a couple problems trying to find my stride and adapt my game. Hopefully now it will start to snowball and I can get on a steady roll.

Good luck to you.