I’ve actually only played offline poker so far. I used to meet with a couple of colleagues once or twice a month for a nice round and then play poker in a friendly manner. Most of the time it was about nothing, we just handed out the same amount of chips to every other player and then played without any real money bets.

That’s why I had a few concerns when a colleague told me to try out online poker, because he said that you could make a good profit with just a few skills. I hadn’t been the player who liked to play poker for money before, but I still wanted to try it and signed up on the platform bwin.

After I had loaded a small starting credit of 25 Euro, I started to play Texas Hold’em at home on my PC. Getting started was quite easy and with my knowledge I was well prepared to get through a few rounds. I looked for tables where the stakes were not too high, but not too low either. When I was playing for money, I wanted to be a little bit more demanding and not play for cents. I found a table where I had to pay 2 Euros for the small blind and 4 Euros for the big blind. That was a good start for me. The first rounds were relatively balanced. Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost. On one evening I had won 14 Euro, on the other I had lost 9 Euro. I didn’t play very cautiously or cautiously, but simply used the cards as I got them. With good hands I liked to play a little riskier, a few times I tried a bluff on lower cards, but I rarely threw away the cards. But even though the bets weren’t necessarily low, I didn’t have the excitement to stay on the ball.

Then I tried out the missions that you can unlock at bwin. It was always about small tasks that you had to fulfill during your poker games. For fulfilling the missions you could get a small gain, depending on how difficult the mission was and how many requirements you fulfilled. In one mission, for example, the task was to play to the Heads Up and win it. It didn’t matter which cards I played or in which round. As long as the mission was activated, I could keep trying to get a player to Heads Up, which I found quite tricky. Maybe it was just my teammates, but in the first few games no one seemed to want to play their cards to the full, or I was raising the stakes too fast. It certainly took his ten rounds before I was finally in Heads Up with a player. My cards weren’t very good, but I just wanted to play it. In fact, my opponent had even worse cards in his hand, so I won with two pairs. Already the first mission was done and I had a gain of 1.2 Euro. I repeated the mission a few times and tried out the different objectives. That was really exciting, because I not only had to pay attention to how I had to play my cards, but I also had to keep an eye on the goals for the mission. The more missions I played, the more new tasks were unlocked. One mission was about reaching a full house, another was about winning with a 7 and a 10 in my hand. Depending on the degree of difficulty, I could win 3 Euro or 5 Euro. That sounds like relatively little, but since I could repeat the missions over and over again, on good days there could be a nice additional win together. But since the game became more difficult, I had to recharge my account at bwin more often to be able to continue playing.

Before I knew it, I had become a real online poker fan. I even downloaded an app for my iPad so I could play on the go when I was on the train or out of the computer. It went so far that I literally forgot the world around me when I was playing poker. I wasn’t brought down to earth until three months later I took a look at my bank statements. Within just three months I had invested almost 640 euros at bwin, because I had probably lost more money than I had won in pursuing the missions. That was the moment when I decided to stop playing poker for the time being. I wasn’t angry or sad, I was just shocked at how easily I invested the money. When I start to play online poker again, I’ll set myself a limit after which I’ll play, so I don’t experience such unpleasant surprises again.

 

Experience report written by Frederick, 43 years old, from Solingen