Poker Dreams Online
Turning $10 into $100 then $1000 and more

I have now given back all of my winnings at Cake Poker for the month of July. I just can’t seem to shake this slump. Once again I was playing my usual cash games at Cake Poker. When the slide started. The first thing I did was break my no reload rule. NO CONTROL! This opened the flood gates and I ended up leaking out over $120!! Now with my Cake balance below $500 again, I am back to play lower stakes poker.


Another interesting tidbit I want to bring up is that Cake Poker now pays their rakeback on a weekly basis. The weekly cycle now runs from Wednesday 00:00:00 until Tuesday at 23:59:59.

The last few days have not been kind to me at Cake. I’ve had a devastating hit of just over $250 in two days!!! I try to do everything right like call my nerves, don’t try to rush and win back lost money and just play consistently. Well.. obviously that is currently not working for me.


It basically comes down to the coin flips. To many of them I am ending up on the wrong side. I guess I need a strategy adjustment. First off, I am going to take tonight off. Second, I am going to play with a new rule for a while just to get my cash games play back tight. If I bust out of a cash game table, I can no longer play cash games at that site for the rest of the night.


Next time I sit down to play, I sure hope everything is back in order. Poker can be such an up and down game but my goal is to control the variance as much as possible to maintain a consistent bankroll increase every month. I am still above $1000 overall but I am not leaving my self a lot of breathing room right now.

It was definitely one of those grinding type days last night. Once again I was playing 6 $0.25/$0.50 cash game tables at Cake. My luck from last week seemed to disappear tonight. On more occasions than I can count, I always seemed to be one step behind. If I flopped a set, they would turn a straight. If I hit a straight they would river a flush. This is how it went for about 2 and half hours and I had busted out 3 times and was around $80 down.


After my 3rd bust out, I decided to open a $0.50/$1.00 table to play along with my other 5 lower stakes tables. I brought in $60 to the table and was feeling a little worried when the 3rd hand in, I dropped down to $35. However, right after that, the poker storm seemed to pass. All of my tables seemed to be hitting their cards and sticking. I played for another 30 minutes and I was able to win back all of my losses plus another $10.


It was a challenging night but I’m glad I was able to keep my head on and not lose it before the tide turned. I will probably end up making more from rakeback last night then my play but every penny counts.

The weekend is here and so last night I felt like getting into a little tournament action. My play started at around 9:45 pm and I checked for tournaments on both Cake Poker and Full Tilt.


At Cake, I found a $5.50 re-buy, add on tournament. I registered a little late and immediately spent another $5 to double my chip stack to 3000. I lasted a while until my AK ran up against QQ and I got no further help on the table. I decided to buy in once again for another $10 and 3000 chips. By this time, 423 players had registered and the top 70 would get paid. When the add-on option became available at the break, I bought another 2000 chips for $5. Unfortunately I could not buy myself a win and I ended up dropping out in 111th place.


Also on Cake while playing the big tournament, I decided to play some double up sit-n-go tournaments to try and at least win my entry fee back. These tournaments went very well and I went 3 for 3. This was enough to pay for my entry fees and finish my play at Cake with a couple bucks in the black. Oh yah, the registration price for the double-ups actually dropped to $0.70 from $0.80. A nice little change from the guys at Cake.


The one other tournament I played was at Full Tilt. They had an $8.80, max 180 player, regular time no limit tournament. This one kicked off at 10 pm. The top 18 would get paid so it would be tough to cash in. Well after 4 hours and 15 minutes. This one little tournament turned into the gem in my challenge so far. I was able to place 3rd for a cash prize of $183.60 !!


The evenings play was able to put my best one day record to $177.20. What a week it has been.

I was able to reach a major online poker milestone today by breaking the $1000 barrier in my challenge. Taking a break from Cake Poker, I decided to bring up Party Poker for a change. Similar to my style of play as of late, I played on 6 tables but at $0.10/$0.25 blinds due to my lower bankroll at Party. After about an hour of play, I decided to call it quits after making just over $17 across the tables. This was enough to achieve my challenge milestone so I didn’t want to risk tampering with my elation of the achievement.


The play at Party Poker definitely seemed easier. At the stakes I was playing at, there was always a few players with under $5 and a lot of loose callers and bluff betters. By playing tight aggressive, I was able to capitalize.


Although Party seems to play a bit easier than Cake, I think I will stick with Cake for a while due to the large rakeback. Party has revamped their promotions as well which may equate to a decent rakeback but I would need to earn a lot more points to take advantage.


What now is the next challenge level? Well to keep with the theme I am now shooting for $10,000!


You may have noticed that the sidebar still says current bankroll of $855.35. This is because it is only a summary of completed months played. In the future, I hope to have a more realtime update to my status. For daily updates, please browse through the charts on the Challenge Overview page.

Oh and you may have noticed that there is now a webpage icon associated with Poker Dreams Online. To do this, I just created a custom favicon.ico file using photoshop and a plugin from Telegraphics.

Once again tonight, I stuck with Cake Poker and the $0.25/$0.50 cash games. Unlike the last few sessions, tonight did not start off with major losses in the first half hour. Instead, I was able to maintain a steady increase across most of the tables. My play was really tight and my main focus was to avoid getting into a precarious position where it could go either way and I had to call just for a slight chance that I may come out ahead.


The end results of my enjoyable hour and half is a new best day record of $126.65 !!! Not only that, but my bankroll at Cake Poker broke the $600 mark which was what I wanted to reach before bumping up to the $0.50/$1.00 tables.


As a final summary, I am now less than $8 away from the $1000 benchmark. I am hoping my next post will be the one I have been waiting for since this challenge began… the announcement of $1000 reached.

Last night I decided that I would stick to cash games after I played a single $10.80 double up tournament before my daughter went to bed. In the tourny, everyone was very tight and my crap shoot push didn’t payoff so I ended up out of the money in 7th.


At around 9:00 pm, I started up 6 $0.25/$0.50 9-man cash game tables. In typical fashion, I was down $60 in the first half an hour. It seems to always take at least 30 minutes until I settle in and start to feel comfortable. What was really getting me in trouble was calling big bets when going for flush and open ended straight draws. Of the 3 I called, I missed all of them. Of course I shouldn’t have been there in the first place as the bets should have priced me out. Anyways, after the initial downturn, I began a slow and steady comeback, finishing off around quarter after 12 with a positive earnings for the day of around $6. I did break my record of most hands played in a single session at Cake with 1411 hands. This should end up being good for the rakeback bonus.

I tell you, these automated spam engines on the net, once they find your site, they just seem to lock on and just pump in the spam messages. My spam story at poker dreams online began with receiving the occasional 1 or 2 spam messages a day. However, during the last week, the number has ballooned to over 300 a day. Most of them are from a John### account. This has begun to be very frustrating going through and deleting all of these spam comments.


To combat this plague, I finally got Akismet working which is an anti-spam service from wordpress.com. I had to get an API key to activate the service which becomes available after registering at their site. Man I sure hope this works.

Yesterday I was checking the Internet to see what is happening with the WSOP events currently taking place. Now wouldn’t that be something to spend a month in Vegas taking in the excitement and grandeur of the tournament atmosphere. I’m sure I will get there one day. Well by the evening once the kids were in bed, I was in the mood to play some high return tournaments. Full Tilt was going to be my site for the evening as I have mentioned before, I love the variety of tournaments here.


I registered in a $11+1 9-man speed sit-n-go plus a $24+2 911 man, 6 person per table, knockout tourney with a top prize of almost $4000. After about 40 minutes I managed a 3rd place finish in the sit-n-go for a return of $19.80. I was still playing the big tourney and in the middle of the pack so I started another $11+1 sit-n-go. Well 20 minutes later, I reached the break point in the big tourney and I was in 2nd place in the sit-n-go with 8 people left when my Internet Connection went down! Oh crap, let’s hope it is only for a moment….. 2 hours later, I was still down and definitely blinded out of the tourny’s by then. I couldn’t believe. My first expensive tournament and I lose without even playing. I sure hope this was an anomaly as it is going to be tough to make my Poker Dreams Online without being able to get Online!!

June is now done and Canada Day is here!!


As can be seen from my stats, I played a ton of poker in June and most of it was for not. My regular play ended up in a negative balance!! First time since I started that this has happened. On the other hand, I earned a lot of bonuses from my Cake rake back plus Party Poker clearing bonuses and their Million Dollar Hand promotion.


Overall, the bankroll is still going in the right direction which is the most important thing when all is said and done. I have started playing 4 $0.25/$0.50 9 man cash games at Cake Poker bringing $30 to the table for each. In addition, I like to also play a $10.80 double up tourny on the side. This seems to be a good combo for me right now.


I have also played a lot of heads up matches. These are a lot of fun and generally have quick turn around in game time. After so many heads up matches, (I think around 100 this month alone), I’ve settled in to a style that seems to work. Generally when I get beat now, it is due to my opponent hitting a low percentage card after going into the ring with me where I had the upper hand. This is part of poker so can be expected every now and then. This of course is playing at the $10 game. I’m sure I will have to re-adjust when I make the move up.


My play today went really well. I finished up over $50 and even won a 4 man heads up shootout tourny at Full Tilt. Good Times. I can almost taste that $1000 goal… Ooohhh so close now.