If
you had a time travelling DeLorean what would you do and where would
you go? Aside from the obvious ‘back in time to last week so I could
pick the winning lottery numbers’ that is…

Unlike Marty McFly and friends I’d forget 1885 and the old West – it
might look cool but riding a horse gives you a sore arse and makes you
walk like John Wayne, plus you stood a great chance of catching TB.

As a poker player I often wonder what it would have been like to
play in the old West where cheating was rife and you were as likely to
be outdrawn by a headcase with a Colt as by a fish with a flush
(interestingly flushes were a late edition to the game of poker and
were introduced around 1850 along with the British 52-card deck which
is used today). Just ask Wild Bill about getting outdrawn… There’s a
reason Aces and Eights is called the ‘Dead man’s hand’.

No, fuck that for a game of Cowboys and Indians. Myself, I’d go back in time nine years to early 2000 before the ‘Moneymaker effect’ happened  – where people were still all rubbish at poker and it was easy to win online.

Runner,
runner flush… Damn it Marty! That\’s the third time I\’ve had my Aces
cracked this week. I thought this whole online poker nonsense was
supposed to be easy…

It’s fair to say that the modern game of poker, especially online
moves slightly faster than the 88mph needed to send the DeLorean back
to the future and some of the outdraws you see on the old intermaweb
leave you muttering more than just ‘Great Scott!’ under your breath.

But is it still possible to win consistently online? I think yes,
it’s just the edge is getting smaller and the margins become narrower
as everyone three/four-bets and seems to want to get it in so light.

The online game must be beatable as the new generation of
up-and-coming professionals like Tom Dwan, Luke ‘FullFlush1’ Schwartz,
Andrew Feldman and an army of others spin $50 into six-figure
bankrolls, seemingly in a matter of minutes…

Well ok that’s a slight exaggeration but it got me wondering, being
as Chris Ferguson and Daniel Negreanu managed to turn nothing into
$10,000 and $10 into $100,000 respectively, is it still possible to
spin up something from nothing – or more accurately a lot from a little?

Well in true Doc Brown style I’ve decided to conduct a little
experiment – a micro-stakes experiment to be exact; here on my blog
with a view to writing a couple of features on it for a few of the
poker titles I write for.

So first of all I’ll let you folks know the rules and parameters
I’ll be setting myself, but the general goal is to prove that online
poker is still beatable. That and it’s a pretty good challenge to set
yourself to prevent you from becoming bored and your game from becoming
stale. After all if I can beat $1/$2 and $2/$4 six-max cash games how
hard can $1.20 SNG’s and $0.05/$0.10 cash games be to beat?

Now I haven’t actually set myself a timeframe for this little jaunt
into the microcosm of small stakes poker. Rather, I was just conducting
it to see how long it would take me, more to prove to myself and others
that the whole poker dream of rags to riches is still possible even in
today’s highly aggressive game where your average player now actually
knows a bit about pot odds, will have read a variety of poker books and
is probably signed up to an online training site and is a member of
poker forums like2 plus 2 or  Pocket Fives.

The Rules

The goal:

Phase 1 – Turn £10 into £1000

Phase 2 – Turn £1000 into £100,000

I will be starting with a bankroll of £10 (around $16 US dollars).

I am only allowed to buy in for a maximum of 5% of my roll for SNG’s and cash games.

No more than 15% of my roll can be in play at any one time up to a maximum of 5% per table.

If my stack is more than 10% of my total bankroll during a cash game I must cash out and find a new table.

I can only buy into MTT’s for a maximum of 3% of my bankroll.

The moment I have enough in my roll to move up to the next level I HAVE to move up.

The moment I don’t have enough in my roll to play the level I’m playing at I MUST drop back down.

Rakeback counts towards the challenge (bearing in mind that I am
using only one of my online poker accounts for this experiment and will
be playing only games directly related to the challenge/experiment with
this account). After all in today’s online game where someone is
effectively offering you a money-back guarantee you’d have to be crazy
not to take it, right?

Feedback Frenzy

So there you have it folks, feel free to chip in with any thoughts,
ideas, other weird things that can make the experiment/challenge more
interesting, or just give me your opinion on what I’m doing.

I’ll be keeping you posted with regular updates in a sub-section of
my blog (see the right hand side column under the tab marked ‘Back To
The Future:The Micro-stakes Mission’) this will be separate to my
regular blog where I will still be posting what articles I’ve been
writing, where they’ll be published and also any other random topics I
feel like talking about.

Let the games begin. Let’s see if these short-stackers can do 90…