History (part 2)

Show me the money

I had to figure out how online poker players can get their hands on their online pokerdollars.
I contacted live support on CDpoker and heard I needed to deposit real money before I was allowed to withdraw any funds from my CDpoker account.

In general there are 3 ways to deposit money on a pokersite.
1 - Direct bank transfer
2 - Credit Card
3 - Online money processors

But CDpoker only offered payout in paper checks or an online money processors. They didn't offer direct payment to an bank account.


Scam?

I was baffled. Were all the hours I put in and the money I won fake? It sounded like a bad scam, make me deposit money and then never give it back?


Neteller

I decided that I would try an online processor. I read online that Neteller was a good company, so I made an account on Neteller, and got swamped with requests for legal documents and ID. It felt like ages before I had an active and working account, in reality it was probably a few weeks before I had an active/working account on Neteller.

I made a small deposit from my bank to Neteller and then deposited from Neteller to CDpoker. After that I could withdraw my money from CDpoker to Neteller to my bank account again. (All except the initial free $50 I had from CD-poker)

In the meantime I only played a little bit of poker on CDpoker. I didn't trust the whole online poker, until I had at least some of my winnings on my real bank account.

So my trust in online poker was renewed. I had made a profit and it was on my bank account, even if it took a month before I saw some of my winnings on my bank account.

This was still June 2007. I had taken half of the winnings as profit to my bank account, and decided to play with the remaining of my winnings I had left on Neteller of around $500, and never deposit money from my bank account again.


Deposit bonuses

On CD-poker it was almost impossible to play enough to clear the $50 initial bonus. So I didn't even try (It's still there to this day, I still can't withdraw it)

I figured that it would be more profitable to sign up to a new pokersite and get a deposit bonus that was easy to clear.
I started with an easy to clear bonus on Partypoker. There I had to play cash tables to clear the bonus, and it went well. So after Partypoker I started downloading a bunch of other pokerrooms, deposited money from my Neteller account for a nice signup bonus and after clearing the bonus, withdraw all my money to Neteller and move on to the next pokerroom.

I did that for months and saw my online bankroll grow bigger and bigger. I had cleared the deposit bonuses of a bunch of pokerrooms by now. Nothing seemed to stop me. I became better and was winning more and more. These were my golden months of bonus hunting, but then everything went wrong.


Losing my cool

I was playing mostly cash games by now, since that was the fastest way to win money and clear deposit bonuses. I was multitabbing on $0.50/$1.00 cash tables. And then I had my worst session ever.

I had 2 pair, the villain had a set, I had a set, the villain had a straight, I had a straight the villain showed a full house. I did an all-in bluff, he called with A high. It felt like being run over by a truck and being struck by lightning at the same time and the moment seemed to last forever. Every move I did failed. Switching tables, etc, nothing helped. It was by far the worst series of badbeats, lost coinflips and in the end bad play from myself I ever experienced, and every time I lost, I believing that my luck had to turn around, but it never did. I went on tilt. I kept on playing and losing... somewhere in the middle of the night on a saturday I saw that I lost all the money I had on that online pokerroom.

I was staring at my screen in total perplexity. I worked months to build a bankroll online, constant steady growth, and in one evening I lost a huge chunk of that. I still had money left on Neteller, so I hadn't lost all my winnings.

It wasn't just the loss of a lot of money, but also the fact that I did go on tilt. Never thought I could really go on tilt, but when I did, I felt so bad and disappointed in myself afterwards... How to describe it? Guess I can't. You have to have experienced it to understand that feeling.


I quit

After that day from bad beat hell I would have to take one or two step down in limits if I wanted to keep to my own rules for bankroll management.
I decided to take a break from poker.
This was somewhere around November 2007... days became weeks, weeks became months. And I thought about quiting poker permanently.

It wasn't until May 2008 that I returned to the online pokerrooms with the remaining money I had left on Neteller...