On the 1st April (date is insignificant) 2010 then I undertook to do what I called a $100-$10,000 poker challenge. The goal was simply to try and convert $100 into $10,000 playing nothing but no limit hold’em poker games. I knew that if I could do this then anyone could and I was telling the story in Poker Pro Europe and Online Poker Pro magazines. I eventually reached $10,000 on the 30th December 2010 and it was without a doubt the single most difficult thing that I have ever done.
My discipline became pretty bad when I hit the $600-$700 mark and I had started playing in $2 games even though I had the buy-ins and bankroll to play higher. I wanted to feel the micro-stakes levels but winning around $5 per day was doing my head in but I was making money. By the end of month one then I had reached my first goal of doubling my bankroll to $200 and I was already playing $10 games and the process suddenly started to speed up. I was at around $650 by the end of the second month and playing $20 and $25 games at full ring.
I knew that I had the technical game to beat higher levels like NL100 and NL200 but how I was going to react to playing such low levels was anybody’s guess. I am prone to tilt when things go badly and I was tilting all over the place. The problem was the low-stakes, I know that as a professional then I should be able to play at any level and do it justice. But I am certainly no Chris Ferguson and I fell way short of having the mental strength that he showed when he turned $0 into $10,000 in 2007.
It is not something that I would look to do again although it sort of taught me something along the way. This was that playing poker can be the worst thing imaginable if you are not enjoying the process. I had previously turned $1000 into $14,000 in 2008-2009 in an aborted challenge to take $1000 all the way to $100,000 and so I knew that once I hit $500 or so then the rest was automatic and NL50 was a comfortable level for me and so $1000 meant 20 buy-ins. But it shows you what can be done with bankroll control and perseverance with a solid ABC poker game.
Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk
