My First Table — Two Weeks Into Online Poker

He knew poker from films, and that was roughly all of it. The install took minutes — he went through the download page, joined the ClubGG Israel community and got approved on WhatsApp. The real difficulty started at the table: he couldn't follow what was happening. What fixed it, by his own account, was to stop playing and open hand rankings and the rules alongside the table, then play slowly. Five understood hands beat fifty confused ones.

Like every beginner, he played almost every hand. It felt like participation, but in practice he was paying for hands with no business being there. His fix was simple: start from a tight opening range using the preflop chart and fold the rest. Within a week the feeling changed — fewer hands, clearer decisions, and a first understanding of where table position changes the answer.

He tried moving up once, to "win it back". By his description, that was the only session where he felt the money inside his decisions — and that is exactly where his worst decisions happened. Since then he stayed at a stake where the buy-in is insignificant to him, following the basic rule from the bankroll management guide. This isn't a story about perfect discipline; it's a story about one mistake learned quickly.

The thing he calls most significant is that he started practising hands against the free AI bot between sessions. It gave him fast repetitions on spots he didn't understand — especially flop and turn decisions — without paying for the lesson. After two weeks he moved from "I don't understand what's happening" to "I understand why I did what I did", which is exactly where improvement becomes possible.

Asked what he would change, his answer was short: start with a written stop rule — an amount or a hand count — and never invent it mid-session. That is precisely the subject of our second story, from a player who learned it the expensive way. Back to all journeys: player stories.