Okay, like a said in an earlier post, over the last month I had built my pokerstars account to about $2200 so I decided to cash out $2000 last week and felt comfortable with a $200 bankroll to play in some $5.50, $11 and $22 Omaha H/L tournaments. Little did I know that 2 things would happen. One, Pokerstars would stop accepting echecks, and two, that I would not win another tournament and suffer bad beat after bad beat. For example, I would river 10's full of 3's only to be beat by four 3's. Or I would flop the nut low and nut flush only to have the board pair and the river kill my A2 and A3 would take it. It was really getting me down.

My account hit 38 cents. That is right, I was stuck with only 38 cents 3 days ago so I knuckled down and decided that I needed to start playing the .02/.04 Omaha H/L and work my way back up. I also read a great story on Full Tilt poker about Jesus Ferguson wanting to prove a point. You can literally start with no money and work your way up to a $10,000 bankroll. He started about a year ago playing only freerolls and finally worked his way into some paying tournaments but was stuck on about $6.50 but then hit a $1 tournament for over $100. The rest was history but it took him about 7 more months to hit $10,000. You can read about it here:

http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/chris-ferguson-challenge

At the end of the story here, click on Chris's bankroll management for some very good advice.

It took about 3 hours on the 2 cent / 4 cent game to get me up to over $3. I then entered a $1 tournament yesterday and lost. Went back to the 2 cent table and worked my bankroll over $3 again. I entered another $1 tournament last night and lost again. That is when I posted on the board that I would love to trade some Pokerstars cash for some paypal cash. Smitty graciously stepped up and sent me $100 earlier today. But before that happened I entered a $2 tournament after making another $3 on the 2 cent table. That tournament just ended and I finished 7th finally for a $25 payout. I am going to listen to one of the lessons from Jesus Ferguson. Don't put any more than 5% of your bankroll at risk in any tournament. I am going to stick with that and only play $1, $2 and $5 tournaments until my bankroll gets to $200 and then I can play the $10 tournaments and so on. A lesson learned. Here is the Pokerstars email in my 7th place finish with a total of 387 entrants.

PokerStars Tournament #169962390, Pot Limit Omaha Hi/Lo
Buy-In: $2.00/$0.20
387 players
Total Prize Pool: $774.00
Tournament started 2009/06/13 15:30:00 PT [2009/06/13 18:30:00 ET]

Dear OmahaMike,

You finished the tournament in 7th place. A $25.16 award has been credited to your Real Money account.

You earned 100.54 tournament leader points in this tournament. For information about our tournament leader board, see our web site at http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/tournaments/leader-board/

Congratulations!

Thank you for participating.