Recently, I won $0.50 in a Poker Stars freeroll. I’ve decided to try and grind it out into a $1000. Not an easy task. Luckily, Poker Stars has some incredibly low limit games that I could actually buy into with just a mere .50. So, I’ve been playing the .02/.04 limit hold’em games and doing fairly well… well, for starting out with .50 in my account.

Currently my balance is at $3.27. This is after a few days of play, playing for an average of about 3 hours at a time.

There’s no amazing strategy at these kind of levels. Basically, you play tight. Wait until you get a good hand and get in the pot. With monster hands, you raise raise raise. With spec hands you call. If you flop a monster, you bet. If you flop something rather weak like a pair where more than 1 or 2 people are still in the pot, check/call so you can keep the pot small. If you flop nothing, you usually get out.

In other words, it’s no brain required to play. So typically I do this while I’m working on other things (I do NOT recommend that you do this for any other level or game). But at this level, you aren’t really worrying about other people’s hand so much… they’ll bet nothing just as much as they bet the nuts… so hand reading is pretty much useless… just play your hand and when it’s obvious your beat, don’t even make the extra .04 call… just save yourself the money, regardless of pot odds.

I guess that means that I’ll have to start keeping regular updates. I wasn’t even planning on doing an experiment like this, but it sort of fell in my lap. My goal is to get it up to a $1000 before the end of the year. However, I few ground rules.

1. I will never risk my entire bankroll in one game.
2. I can only buy into tournaments and sit-n-gos that are less than 10% of my entire bankroll.
3. (Once I get to bankroll amount where I can play no-limit) I can only risk 20% of entire bankroll in any no-limit game.

So, there go. Grinding through these lower levels is sure a pain, but I guess I should have won more than $0.50 in the freeroll.

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