Day 255 ... Who is the April Fool ? ...

After 255 days of writing this poker blog I think its fair to say that I have no idea who if anyone ever reads it ... But my money is on nobody.

I still have no more idea how to write a sucessful poker blog than I did when I started it ... and it shows.

You may think - whoever "you" is (I'm assuming my readership is singular at best) that I'm not being terribly positive, well guess I'm not. I started this blog with a total lack of focus and very little purpose. I knew that I should have one when I was setting up my poker site 4kingpoker.com and had vaguely thought that a blog was somehow going to help with SEO (whatever that was), getting traffic and everyone promoting a site used it as some sort of promotional tool but I started out with no idea how to use this tool.

My limited aims were ...

a) To keep track of my inevitable poker losses hoping this would act as a check on reaching for the credit card more than I should. This was never going to hold more than a passing interest to anyone except for me. With the exception of anyone who wanted to see just how badly someone could play with a maximum monthly budget of $50 - so far it's fairly conclusive that I can play somewhere between poor and reasonable poker which gives me a net losing game over time.

b) To somehow get massive amounts of readers and therefore piles of traffic to my new poker website.

c) To have somewhere which regularly updated the entire web universe of any changes or progress of my poker empire.

I've succeeded in the first and tried and failed in the other two. 4kingpoker is growing and going from strength to strength but somewhere along the line this blog has lost its way ... Or more probably never found it in the first place.

So where is this moan going - I have no idea other than it needs to go somewhere. I've made a million and one mistakes setting up my poker site but I've learnt from every one. As a result have a much better site than I ever expected and now at least half an idea what I'm doing. This blog however seems to be going nowhere and I still don't know how to improve it or save it. There are a pile of totally nonsense blogs that have nothing in them and yet are doing well. Also a hell of alot more that have something worth reading which also do well. I have no idea what I am doing so wrong for mine to still be failing to show up on the blogging radar but if anyone knows anything about blogging - I'd love to be told what to do and where I'm going wrong.

In the meantime I'm going to give the thing an overhaul, try going in a different direction (still with no clue about the rights & wrongs of bloggery).

I'm guessing that giving it a structure and putting in the same info everyday isn't good blogging. I've ended up with a blog like groundhog day and from what I can figure your better off putting in the weather report from Alaska rather than the same thing twice but I don't really know how that works either. Anyway I'm looking at good blogs and will try and figure out what the rules for success are. One thing I do hope is that in another 255 days I won't be writing exactly the same blog under Day 510.

But then I also hope I'll be playing better poker ... I'll settle for 1 out of two.

Royal Vegas Poker ... $3.62

$3.62 NL cash 0.10 ... 00.00 ... - $3.62

Royal Vegas Poker ... $ 3.62 ... -$3.62 ... total $00.00 (-$00.00)

Finally got broke at Royal Vegas - At least it's one less 2 dollar acount to try and keep track of.

UltimateBet ... $2.72

$2.00 cash NL 0.02 ... $4.77 ... +$2.77
$2.00 cash NL 0.02 ... $2.44... +$0.44

UltimateBet... $ 2.72 ... +$ 3.21... total $5.93(-$82.07)

Slow progress in the micro limits at UltimateBet and still no sign of a refund for that crashed tournie - think I'll give up on that vain hope - everyone lost money that day and I don't think they have the first idea where to start sorting it out.

I think as a quick sum up I started on the basis of no more than $44 per month on poker, this ended up growing to $50 so total of $600 annual bankroll. But it's still very much beer fund poker - money you can afford to loose if you can't make anything much of it. I've lost money at all sorts of places along the way, making pitiful sized deposits and making some progress only to wither away to nothing.

The only place it's really gone right is HoldemPoker where I've grown my $44 to around $180 ... not impressive but at least it is a plus.

PokerRoom - Ended up taking care of $308 eventually, but it's still my favourite network and I was doing ok for a while.

UltimateBet - Was going ok until I cut my bankroll in half paying out the prize money for a 4kingpoker freeroll and it just never recovered. Maybe I can make my $5 there turn into 100's but I doubt it.

Interpoker - Looked like the promise land for a few days, very juicy until I started to panic about clearing the bonus and focussed on that instead of the $100 profit I'd made just playing poker. Moving up a few stakes guaranteed that I would loose the profit, the bankroll and the bonus.

Titan - Just hasn't gone right for me since the off. I deposited $116 on the basis of starting with a decent bankroll and planning to play it up steadily as I had done at HoldemPoker but it's just been steadily going down - now about $50 so I guess not all is lost.

Poker Heaven - The latest new site is at least a very pleasant playing experience and looks like a good proposition but so far my $50 is down to less than $20 and once your down there it could go either way on the next game - so we'll see.

Approx bankroll - total $ 255 out of $600 and some chance of clearing a couple of bonuses but this still along way off square.