Background Info

My thoughts, views and experiences on my life as an amateur poker player!

Ok, my first proper entry (finally) . Chris has been nagging me for a few weeks to get started, and finally forced me to get set up on here after I won through round 2 of a world series of poker qualifier last Wednesday (17th May 2006). I kept meaning to get started, I even sat at my pc on the Thursday evening and tried to write a description for this blog, after about 30 minutes of coming up with nothing I gave up!

Anyway, here I am. A bit about me to start with, my name is Claire, I’m 31 and a full time Maths teacher. I live with Chris, my long suffering partner of over 10 years now. We have no kids (thankfully ) and we usually go to Las Vegas twice a year, work and money permitting.

I’ve been playing poker ‘seriously’ for about 18 months, 2 years now and its where most of my free time goes. I pay mainly holdem, limit and no limit, cash and tournament. I prefer online play and feel I am a much better online player than live player, but I guess that is only to be expected with the amount of experience I have had with each. I play on a lot of different poker sites; I started a long time ago on Planet Poker but haven’t played there for years! I have played most of my poker on Party Poker and Poker Stars, but have played a lot on Empire, Paradise and more recently the Cryptologic sites (and anywhere offering decent bonuses!). I started by playing mainly low limit sit and go tournaments (SNGs) then progressed to low buy in no limit cash games. Following some long chats with Steve during last summers ‘Summer O’Poker’ in Vegas I gave limit cash a try and now play mainly $1/$2, $2/$4 limit cash games. I still pay tournaments, sngs and multi but find that time is often against me with these so I have to plan around what time I have. My highest win was about 18 months ago in an Aussie Million qualifier. I played through 2 SNG tournies to win my place in the final qualifier, got up at 4am to play it and ended coming 4th. I missed out on a seat but got about $3.5k for my trouble. Since then I’ve placed in a few other multi table tournaments (MTTs) (but nothing as good, best since has been about $1500 I think!) and maintained a bankroll through cash games.

Until recently that is