Hey everyone,

first of all I’m not a native English speaker so I hope you will bear with me if my writing in English is not perfect and maybe even painful to read for some of you.

I signed up at PokerVIP almost a year ago but till now i was not active at all. I just came here from time to time to watch some videos, read some articles, lurked around the forum and took advantage of the great rake back deals.

As far as I can see this is a great community and I want to be part of it. This means to stop lurking around and start being an active member.

So who am I?
My name is Carlo, I’m 28 years old and I’m from Germany. Actually I got to be a very introvert person so writing about myself in public is way out of my comfort zone. Nevertheless I want to make big changes in 2016 so I think writing a Journey is a good thing to keep me motivated and to follow my progress.

Thinking about how to start and what to write I had the idea to interview myself and went through with it.
I tried to keep my answers short but as you can see by the giant wall of text, this didn’t worked out as planned

Even if no one ever is going to read all of this it was already worth doing. Just writing this down helped me a lot and was a lot of fun. I can just encourage you to start your own Poker Journey if you ever felt like this is something you want to do.

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Hello Carlo you are here today to start your Poker Journey, so why don't you start with giving us some background information about your current situatuion?

To keep things short all you really need to know here is that my life was heading in the wrong direction after I left the house of my partents. What got me back on track was a Vacation in 2011 where I met the love of my life and I decided I had to change my life.

Back in Germany I moved back to house of my parents despite the fact I was already 23 years old it was the best place for me to start changing my life.

Things were going good. I had a job, started doing sport again and kept staying away from drugs and all the negative things I did when I was living by myself.
I was planning to move out again and to start a future with my girlfriend. But sadly I didnt't get the chance to do so.

It was 2013 when my father was diagnosed with dementia. The beginning of the dementia was not that bad. It was till the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015 were things started to get more complicated. Up to the point where I needed to quit my job to help my mom taking care of my father cause she just couldn’t handle him by herself anymore.

After you quitted your job what did you do to have an income?

Luckily the pension of my father is good enough to support the 3 of us. We also get some kind of support by the insurance for taking care of my father and not putting him into an elder home.

So the money by the insurance is basically what I use as my income for taking care of my father.

Talking about the engagement ring what happened to the plans of getting married?
I was already planning the proposal, looked for an apartment for the both of us and started to safe money for an engagement ring.

But with the sickness of my father he was slowly getting my number one priority. And sadly the plans of our future were getting less and less important to me. Luckily my girlfriend is the best girlfriend ever and understood my situation very well and never stopped supporting me.

We are now in a long distance relationship for almost 5 years. For me it is important that I will be able to provide her a good life whenever we are getting married. Something I really dislike is to share a house with my parents where we can't have any privacy. I mean for me it’s not a problem to live with my parents but I hope you can see why that is something I don't want my future wife to go through.

Ok I guess that's all we need to know about your life for now. After all we are here for you Poker Journey, so what can you tell us about your Poker career?

I would defenitly say I was one of the whales in the golden years of online poker, just deposited for fun after I saw the story about Chris Moneymaker and tried my luck. Because I thought luck is all you need to become the next big thing in Poker you can imagine how this worked out.

I never really played much Poker besides the occasional home game where it was more about drinking and feeling bad ass while playing. Still I had no clue that Poker was a game of strategy and not only luck.

And how comes you are here now?
It was the end of 2014 when I saw an ad from 888 Poker which said something like"88$ for free! No deposit needed!" And I thought this is perfect for me why not trying to earn some money while you are at home maybe you'll get lucky this time.

And lucky i was... I somehow managed to win a 45 man SnG with one of the 1$ tournament tickets. And this how it all started. I was playing on 888 Poker for a while and it seemed like the good run will never stop.

After a while I decided to move to PokerStars cause all in knew was that PokerStars is the biggest online poker room so I transferred around 100$ to PS and started playing there. In the beginning everything went good there as well.

I got more intrested in Poker and found out that there are books you can read to get better at this game. It was a friend of mine who borrowed me the first book I've ever read about poker it happened to be the Full Tilt Poker book about tournament poker. So what I did was focusing on tournaments. It felt so good to believe that I knew what I’m doing and it even felt better after I managed to get third in a 2.20$ tournament and shipped a 650$. Of course I still had no idea of what I was doing but just to imagine it already felt so good.

This should have been a jump start for my Bankroll but it was actually the beginning of me getting way to confident…

What happened next?

I played stakes way above my limit. Bankroll management was nothing I cared about back then cause I felt like I’m the next Phil Ivey so who cares what buy ins I’m playing I will manage to win anyways. At least that’s what I thought…
After losing around 200$ in tournament buy ins the next thing I found for myself were spin’n’go’s. Trying them out was one of the worst decisions in 2015.

I don’t even know anymore exactly how it all happened but what I know is that I played them all 1$, 3$, 7$, 15$, 30$, 60$. I was addicted to play them. I think after a while the most exciting part for me was the Spin and when it was just an 2x I almost didn't care about that game anymore and already fired up the next one...

This time was just crazy and it was an up and down all the time. When ever I lost I just started a bigger one in the end my bankroll was at 50$ just were I started after I won my first SnG at 888 Poker. I finally stoped and realized what I had done.

Not the amount of money I lost but the way how I lost it just made me feel sick and I just had to stop playing poker for a while. I left the 50$ on PS and didn’t thought about playing poker for a while.

With the intention to look a PoE stream I somehow ended up watching a twitch stream of some dude playing poker. It was the way he was talking about poker which got me so interested in poker again, that I just had to do some research about the strategy behind this game and while i was doing this research I stumbled across PokerVIP.com and had to signed up.

I lurked around and absorbed as much information as I could. Started playing on PS again tried out all the different variations of poker and found out that I mostly enjoyed playing regular 6 max cash games.

After a while I found out about the rake back deals here and decided I will give another side a try. I joined William Hill using a rake back deal and started playing there. I didn’t had a tracking software back then but to make a long story short. I failed and I failed hard again. After some losing sessions I tried to win back my money with Twister SnG’s… I guess you already know how this ended…

Another side another try this time it was StanJames and for the first time I had to use my own money and deposited 200€ Sadly I was too lazy to put in the Volume after I deposited so I never got to take advantage of the first deposit bonus. The good thing about StanJames is that they don’t have anything like Spin’n’Go’s so I think that will be my poker room of my choice for a while.

But enough about my horrible Poker history… Let’s forget about it and just focus on a better future.

So it sound like you still want to belive you can be successful in Poker?

My biggest flaw was the lack of self-discipline and maybe the subconscious thought that I wanted to win back the money I once had on PS.

But I think I am finally able to leave this behind and I’m really looking forward to my Poker Journey in 2016.

Also my current situation just gives me enough time to study and play Poker so I want to use this to my advantage. Basically there is nothing better I could use my time for than studying and playing poker while I has to stay at home most of the time to take care of my father.

There are 3 things I want to mention that changed the way i will aproach poker in the future

1. The Title of my Poker Journey: “Don’t be upset by the results you didn’t get from the work you didn’t do.” I first read this in an article here but I cannot recall which one it was. But this quote is sticking in my head since then and I want to use PokerVIP.com to it's fullest potential from now on.

2. Watching “Mingthemerciless93” on twitch. I just love the way how he is talking about hands and also reading “Aplications of NLH” just let me think about Poker on a whole new level.

3. Another book which inspired me a lot was “The Mental Game of Poker” I can't even find the right words to describe what this book did to me.

But to get back to your question, with the correct mindset and the right work ethic I really believe that I can be successful in poker. And in the worst case scenario I just have to accept that I cannot make a living out of it. But my love for poker will still grow while I’m on this journey and it can always be a hobby for me. So learning more about this beautiful game now will never be waste of time.

I’m sure putting more effort into it was the plan every time you signed up on a new poker room, so what makes you think you will not fail again this year?

Together with my family I visited my girlfriend for Christmas and New Year’s Eve. A serious talk with my girlfriend made me realize that I’m actually just procrastinating any serious plans with her and using my father as an excuse. Last year I was never really trying to find a way to get married to my girlfriend.

I was basically just waiting for my father to die before I would start thinking about our future again. But now i know that one of my deepest wishes is to make my father happy and still being there when his son is getting married to the girl he already sees as his own daughter.

Now i have the motivation once again to change my life. I cannot just sit around at home, take care of my father and wait that something will happen. I has to take action and make this year different then 2015.

How are you planing to make this happen? What are your goals for 2016?

I would like to split this up in 2 different categories. My Life goals and my Poker goals:

Life goals:
Looking for 2 apartments in the same building and selling the house till the end of 2016.
The house we are living in right now is not ideal for my father anymore with his health conditions not getting better.

Getting engaged with my girlfriend.
If ever I will earn money in poker I want to use this money to buy an engagement ring. But if ever I will fail to earn money in Poker I can still get a plastic ring and my girlfriend would still be happy that I’m finally ready to propose to her.

Doing more sport again. To be more specific it will be mountainbiking. I already bought a bike for it last year and it's just so much more fun than jogging. So i cannot wait for better weather but while it's still cold i'm just using our hometrainer to get in shape again.

Poker goals:
I want to split up my Poker goals into long-, mid- and short term goals.

Long-term:
I want to spend at least 100 hours reviewing my hand history in PT4 this year
I want to accomplish this by reviewing my last day of poker for 1 hour as warmup before I will start playing poker

Crushing NL10 is what I'm aiming for this year. And as I mentioned before I want to use poker money to buy an engagement ring so what I'm planing to do is to always withdraw half of my bankroll whenever I get to have 500$ in my pokeraccount. I know that is not the best way to earn money in poker but thats just what is my plan for now.

Mid-term:
Have a complete rest from poker one day per week.
This is to prevent burnout and also a way to keep my will up to play. I think after a one day break I really want to play again

Short term:

Start a Poker Journey on PokerVIP and update in on a daily basis and post at least 1 hand per day

Take a break every 1-2hours for a minimum of 10 minutes.
I had to realize playing more than 2 hours without a break will result in playing my B or even my C game.

It’s already February now so what have you been doing last month?

After we celebrated New Year’s Eve in Belgium with my girlfriend and stayed there for another week we came back to Germany on January 7.

What I decided to do was to play 30k till the end of January to figure out the state of my game and to observe my mental game what I haven't really done before.
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If some of you really took their valuable time off the tables to read this I'm really thankful you did so and hope you enjoyed reading as much as i enjoyed writing.

I really apreciate any kind of feedback. And I'm looking forward to answer any questions you might have.

February 1 was my day off and today I didn't manage to find enough time to do a proper review of January. The main reason for this is that I had to spent way more time than I planed to write this OP but since i feel like everyone loves to see some graphs I will finish my OP with one and just give you my thoughts about it tomorrow morning as my first update. So that's all I have to say for today... Goodnight

NL10 playing 4-6 tables at a time