my "poker story"

so its been a little bit since my last post but like i said i was going to do a vegas recap, and i decided to also add in my poker story and then end it with my vegas trip recap since thats the end of my poker experience untill the future. so this will porobablly be a 2 part story and myabe a long story so your forwarned but ill try and bring out the interesting facts, so with out no further wait i present to you

askillz2 poker story: dreaming of real life...

my first memory of poker was a pretty bland memory i believe it was late in my junior year and i was home at night time flipping through the channels on t.v. looking for somthing to watch and for some god awfull reason i stopped on espn while one of the old episodes of wsop was playing i think it was actually the 2003 main event but i cant really remember that well. but i do remember all the "all ins" it showed in the 20 minutes that i was watching it. at the time it was kind of interesting but i had no idea what they were doing and what the actuall hands were so nothing really sparked the interest. i believe it was a couple months later that i was in the same situation and i was flipping through the channels trying to rid my self of bordem and i ran across wsop again. this time there was a little more explanation in the episode and it became a little more intersting to me. over the next few months i would watch more an more poker and learned the basic hand rankings and it all started to intrigue me, then BAM! a pokerstars commercial came on one of the commercial breaks and i seen them a few times and then a marble in my head started to roll around and i got the idea of actually learning how to play poker and downloaded the software, and so started the epic roller coaster that was to become askillz2. when i started i downloaded the play money version of pokerstars and still remember the feeling i had which was "holly crap im doing somthing illegal". and thats pretty much how i felt i really had no idea wether playing poker online was legal or not even if it was for play money, mainly because i was under 21 at the time so yeah i was very uninformed of the actuall legality of poker. didnt matter though an i quickly started playing play money tournaments, the very first tournament i played i was nervous through the whole thing and by whole thing i mean the first 10 minutes untill i busted out with somthing like 2nd pair. from that point i played the play money tournaments every once in a while maybe everyother day or somthing just like one tourney a night or somthing, and then it turned into every night i was playing a play money tourney, and then i went to a whole nother extreme and started playing 2 tourneys a night. that was a big step, not really but yeah i started to progress into my intrest in learning poker. at this time i believe i just turned 20 and still had very little experience with poker but was doing ok in the play money tournaments and was actually up 150k in play chips so i thaught i was doing well lol. from there i got a couple books and started getting interested in learning the basics of poker, and at the time i had a pretty basic style of tight fit or fold poker style, but poker started to become fun to me and i like winning even though it was all for play money i started to get very involved in the game. i didnt really start thinking deep about the game untill later in my experience but ill get to that. and then my 21st birthday was coming quickly and the thaught of vegas quickly ran through my head and before i could really decide on the specifics i knew i was going there for my 21st. about 2 weeks before my 21st i decided to actually start depositing real money online and try and win more. i didnt really have a plan on what i was trying to achieve but i just wanted to win, so i deposited 500$ and started playing tournaments. i think i started playing 10$ tourneys and maybe the ocassional 15$ tourney and i wasnt making a dime. i think i actually ran through that 500$ within the first 2 weeks right before i heaed off to vegas. when i got to vegas i had some tourneys alreay lined out and i think i took 3000$ with me. the deepstack exstravaganza was going on at the venetian and those are the tourneys that i mostly played in which were a 330$ buyin. the first tourney i played i busted out about halfway through, but the second tourney i played i actually got rather deep and busted out in 16th from a field of 360 and won 900$ which was pretty cool. i think i only entered 4 or 5 more tourneys the rest of the trip but not cashing in any of them, i had a couple other things i was going to do in my week i was in vegas but i quickly found myself more interested in playing poker and thats what the trip turned into. vegas was also the first time i played cashed games. i believe i busted out of a tournament and walked over to the mirage to check out there poker room and decied to take a seat in a 1/2 nl game, no suprise i lost i only played at the cash game tables 3 times but nothing really came out of it. so it came time to leave vegas back for home, i left the trip down in money like 1500 or somthing but to me it was more of a birthday trip and fun time than actually there to make a lot of money but i was still trying to win. when i got back home i quickly deposited another 500$ onto pokerstars and started where i left off...losing i didnt really see any huge success from the tournaments i was playing and was strating to get dissapointed, i mean i had a couple scores here or there but nothing really huge i think my biggest win was 900 online but that didnt counter balance my loses. i decided to try a new plan of attack and started playing the double or nothings, at first i was doing ok in them i think i was playing the 5 dollar ones, but then just like the tourneys i eventually lost there as well, at that point i was down 1500$ i decided ill deposit 500$ and if i lose then ill quit playing, but realistically if i would have lost i probablly would have still played and deposited in the future. so i deposited another 500 and was playing double or nothing when one day i saw a guy with supernova vip, i was like wooahhh im only silver star i asked him how he got to be super nova and he said playing cash games, i asked if he thaught that was a better way to make money and he sayed yeah he thaught so. so the next day i started playing at the cash game tables. i remebered in vegas they had the 1/2nl games and they didnt seem to horribly difficult so surley i could beat .50/1$ online right, which wasnt the case and people online know how hard 100nl is for a beginning player specially one with no cashgame experience. so with no suprise i quickly lost 300$ then like magic i hit a heater to save my career and in 2 weeks i won 1900 and from all my deposits i was now sitting 200$ up. i ened up having to stop playing for a few months while i was away for work with no internet connection but i had a couple poker books with me to keep me company... (to be continued)