A (52-year-old) Kid With A Dream

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A (52-year-old) Kid With A Dream

LordShinRee avatar
OP
21 posts · member since Dec 2024
1yr ago

February 28, 2025

I’ve been toying with the idea of blogging for a while, and I’m just beginning a new chapte

01 March 2025 at 04:54 AM
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261 posts · member since Oct 2021
1yr ago

Can’t you go on meds for bipolar disorder?

LordShinRee avatar
OP
21 posts · member since Dec 2024
1yr ago
by TheOneWhoYawns

Can’t you go on meds for bipolar disorder?

I'm on several. They keep me from going completely batsh*t crazy, but I still have a lot of swings. And this is with much trial and error finding the meds to get me to this point. Meds help, but they're not a cure.

My particular form of bipolar is very rough. They consider people who have a few swings a YEAR to be "rapid cyclers". I usually have swings that are measured in terms of a few days. I'm beyond "ultra-rapid-cycling". They don't really even have a term for people who cycle as fast as I do. So I'm lucky that my meds work as well as they do and keep me from going WAY too high or WAY too low. I don't get full-blown mania and I don't get suicidal depression. That's a win for me.

LordShinRee avatar
OP
21 posts · member since Dec 2024
1yr ago

March 14, 2025

Bankroll: $1,000 (cash)

I have decided to retire from online poker and focus all my energies on live cash. I have $1,000 as a “f around and find out” starter from my consigliere and potential backer. The weather doesn’t look good for driving this weekend, so I’m going to study for another week and then try my luck next Saturday.

I pulled my money from Coin and ACR and added it to my liferoll. I will mess around with freerolls and such, just for something to do in my spare time, and I have $11 and $22 tickets to try out on ACR during their OSS series, but I’m not going to deposit online again for the foreseeable future. Any poker-related money I come into is going to go towards a live cash bankroll or things (ie books/training) that will help me build a live cash bankroll/good winrate. The microstakes cash games online have a totally different dynamic than what I expect to see live, and I decided in consultation with my consigliere that playing there was probably not helpful and might actually be counterproductive in terms of getting ready for live cash. I wasn’t putting in much volume anyway because I’m more focused on studying and preparing to play live.

Not really much else to report. Study continues apace, and I feel I’m absorbing the material well. I may not post much until I have something to report from my live cash adventures. I’m just gonna be hunkered down over my study materials for the next week.

Thanks for reading, and good luck out there.

261 posts · member since Oct 2021
1yr ago
by LordShinRee

I'm on several. They keep me from going completely batsh*t crazy, but I still have a lot of swings. And this is with much trial and error finding the meds to get me to this point. Meds help, but they're not a cure.My particular form of bipolar is very rough. They consider people who have a few swings a YEAR to be "rapid cyclers". I usually have swings that are measured in terms

Got it. Well best of luck with getting it handled and finding peace. Make sure to include physical exercise, good nutrition, stretching, and meditation in your life. No matter what someone is dealing with, these things are always a huge positive.

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LordShinRee avatarLordShinRee
1yr ago

February 28, 2025

I’ve been toying with the idea of blogging for a while, and I’m just beginning a new chapter in my poker career, so I figured now would be a good time to start. I enjoy writing, and I think it will be helpful to me to chronicle my journey as I go. Hopefully some of you will follow along with my adventures.

The journey is this: I play on CoinPoker and ACR, and I currently have a bankroll of $123.31 between the two sites. The majority of that ($103.43, to be exact) is on CoinPoker, and that’s where I will spending most of my time. The idea is to turn this $123.31 bankroll into a $15,000 bankroll for live cash games, starting with 1-3NL and working up to 2-5NL, which is the biggest game generally found in my area (the Mississippi Gulf Coast). I want at least 50 buyins for 1-3NL to feel comfortable, hence the goal of $15,000. Once I reach that level, the majority of my play will (probably) switch from online to live.

Now, while my ultimate goal is to beat a 2-5NL cash game, I am going to be playing MTTs online to get there. I just don’t like the online cash scene. If live tournaments weren’t so expensive and didn’t have ridiculous vig, I would play those instead of live cash, but that’s not really an option right now. Maybe someday I’ll be comfortable plopping down a grand for a tournament buy-in, but that’s a long ways off. So, for now, my plan is to grind online MTTs, with the hope to transition to live cash when my bankroll gets above $15k. I am ahead on MTTs lifetime, although I don't have a big sample size. But I think I am (or can become) a winning MTT player. I am also ahead at 1-3 live cash over my lifetime.

Here’s my situation: I am a (divorced, no kids, one cat) 52-year-old man living with and caring for my 88-year-old mother. Yes, I’m a loser, but at least I don’t live in a basement. I am on a fixed income, and as long as my mother and I are splitting the bills, it’s enough to get by on. But when my mother eventually passes (she’s in good health now), I won’t be able to support myself on what I get each month. I need something to augment my income, and due to some limitations that I have, getting a job isn’t really an option. I basically have two ideas on how to keep myself afloat once my mother is gone: writing or playing poker. And of the two, poker seems like the best option. So I’m going to give it a go.

The plan is to start with the satellites on CoinPoker—the centrolls and small-stakes satellites with buy-ins of up to $2. This $123.31 is not an irreplaceable bankroll, so if the satellites bust me, I can reload another $100 every so often. But ideally I won’t have to.

I’m starting with these satellites on Coin for a few reasons. First, and most important, I’m a pretty good satellite player. Satellites are a strength of mine. Second, the satellites on Coin often have significant overlay, which should help me along. Third, I think Coin is a good site in terms of population strength. The games there seem to be a little softer than on ACR, from my experience. Fourth, I like that the tournaments on Coin don’t end up with hundreds of players like on ACR, because that will help keep my variance down as I build my roll.

So I’m starting at the bottom, and I’m going to try to work my way up. I don’t have a target ABI in mind, really, but I’d like to be able to manage a range of buy-ins from $10 to $100, possibly taking some shots above that in the right circumstances, and using satellites to keep my entry fees down.

Like I said, my mother is in good health now, but she’s 88. It’s not like I have forever to accomplish this and keep myself housed and fed when she’s gone. The clock is ticking. In my ideal scenario, before my mom passes I will have established myself as a solid winner at the 2-5NL level live and will have a bankroll over $50k. That seems pretty pie-in-the-sky right now, as I sit here with my $123.31, but you have to start somewhere. I don’t really have any other options. I have to make this work.

I’m going to be studying and playing A LOT. I’m not a big video person, so I’m going to build my foundation with books. I have crafted a study plan that includes 26 books all told, spread amongst different categories like NLHE theory, MTT theory, live cash theory, mental game, etc. I even have a couple books on PLO, because eventually I would like to be able to play live PLO also, when it’s an option.

I’m aiming to post here 2-3 times per week, but it may be more or less depending on what I have going on and what’s happening in my journey. I won’t be dispensing much poker advice, because I’m not that good of a player yet, but I do have some thoughts on theoretical concepts and tournament strategy that I will discuss eventually. For the most part, though, this will be a record of my journey—what worked, what didn’t, what I learned, and how I (hopefully) pulled this off. While this blog is primarily just for me to have a place to express my thoughts, I enjoy writing, and I will try to make it an interesting read in case anybody wants to follow along. Hopefully this first post wasn’t too boring.

Today (February 28, 2025) was to be my first day playing, but Coin had technical issues, so I’m going to begin in earnest tomorrow, March 1st. I’ll post after the weekend with my initial thoughts and observations. Wish me luck, and thanks for reading....