Hi, I’m Stefan Prodan and this is my poker blog.

My poker history is similar to almost everyone else’s in that I started off playing limit poker at baby stakes (.25/.5) on party around 2004. I made almost nothing from 2004-2006 (like maybe $3000 total) being a basically breakeven limit player. For some reason I always thought that if I played NL I would lose my house and all that, but in 2006 I got an offer from poker.com to be a prop player for 150% (!!!!!) rakeback so I accepted it within minutes and had deposited $1000 to try out NL50.

For the first month I think I actually lost money playing but made $300 in rakeback. The month after that I worked my roll up to $3k with $600 rakeback, and then I just kept going up the ranks at poker.com, taking extremely aggressive shots and playing 5/10 with a $10k roll at one point. Poker.com dropped their rakeback to “only” 100% for all the props, but it was still ridiculous.

Pretty soon someone told me about cake poker and I decided to move there since poker.com didn’t really spread much above 1/2 and 2/4 very often, and cake poker had REALLY GOOD 5/10 and 10/20 games. I did really well in the cake NL1000 and NL2000 games, but they also played like 1/2 anywhere else, and now they are dead which is sad. I regret that I was very lazy and would grind out like 10k a month at those games and then just play Team Fortress 2 or something, when if I had just grinded them all day I probably could have made 20-30k a month easily.

Lately I have just been grinding 2/4 at cake, full ring, 6max, whatever. I’m starting to add some headsup games also, as it’s really easy to bumhunt and just wait for someone without a brain to join your table. I’ve played several opponents at headsup who I am convinced just cannot win in any way at all unless you continuously flop huge second best hands against them because they never value bet or raise and will just check down anything below top pair all the way, so you can basically just sit around until you get like second pair+ and value bet it and win easily with very little risk. Some people don’t like grinding at lower stakes after winning at 5/10+ and will keep playing there even when the games aren’t good, but I think one of my better qualities is that I have no poker ego, and will play in whatever games are good all the way down to 2/4. I have no problem admitting if a game looks tough for me and won’t play in it, and I think this has been one of the reasons I’ve been remarkably consistent (I’ve only ever had two losing months and in those months I lost less than I make on average in a month). I practice good game selection always, and since I make a living off poker I am very careful with my roll since my #1 priority is to make sure I can provide for myself and my girlfriend and to not have to get a job.

I’m also considering taking a shot at FTP’s games. I’ve never played NL on a “real” site before so I am a little worried I’m going to die, but I’ll probably only spend like 3-5k on it so it won’t be a big deal if it goes tits up. I will report on my findings and interesting hands in this here blog which nobody will read. I will continue to practice good game selection, I just think it might be harder to find a good 5/10 game than it used to be on cake or whatever, but I’m sure that the bad players are out there. I just hope I don’t get my ass kicked by the good 5/10 regs in the process of trying to beat the bad players.