A year or so ago, Chris (Jesus) Ferguson decided to challenge himself by trying to turn ZERO into $10,000 by playing poker online. You can read about it here, but in a nutshell, he played in online freerolls until he was able to win a few dollars, and from there, he slowly built his bankroll up to $10,000 in around 18 months.
If this proves anything, it proves that the game of Poker is a skill game, and not luck. Sure there is short term luck, but it’s a game of long term skill, and Chris proved it with this experiment.
So I thought, if he can do it, why can’t I?
While I’m not nearly at Chris’s skill level (yet) I believe I’m good enough to do something similar, so I decided try my own challenge that I’m calling the “$300 Challenge”
Why $300 to start with? Well, unlike Chris I don’t want to spend months playing in nickle tournaments, I think he proved the point that you can start with nothing, and turn it into something. My objective is to prove I can turn a few hundred bucks into a substantial amount of money, with good play, sound money management and by playing in a ton of sit-n-goes and other small tournaments.
For this experiment I’ll be trying to go with Chris’s money management advice. I will spend no more than 5% of my stack on single table Sit-N-Gos, and 2-3% of my stack in multi-table Sit-N-Goes or larger tournaments.
My plan is to start low, with the $6.50 turbos on Poker Stars, and work my way up when (and if) my bankroll allows. I’ll be trying to play good, tight single table Sit-N-Go strategy, the sort of strategy you can read about in Collin Moshman’s great book on playing single table Sit-N-Gos.
I’ll track my progress day-to-day so you can see how I’m doing, complete with nifty graphs and notes about my play (coming soon).
Will I be able to turn $300 into $10,000? who knows, it’s going to be a long hard road I’m sure, but as long as I see a positive upward trend, then I must be doing something right.