Online Casinos Regulated by the State of Schleswig-Holstein

As land-based and social gambling is popular and allowed in Germany, all types of casino games are popular. If we look at the market share, enjoyed by each type of gambling activity then it breaks down like this:
* Sports betting - 38% Market share: Place a bet on any and every type of sports or event in Germany where Football is the highest-grossing market! Watch out as Germany is set to host the UEFA Euro 2024 tournament so there will be non-stop action in the run-up to this!
* Online Casinos - 34% Market share: This includes online Slots, Blackjack, Roulette, Scratchcards and loads more. Thanks to the Schleswig-Holstein Gambling Act there’s plenty of action to be had gambling online in Germany, 스포츠토토 despite the strict regulation in other States. A core part of online casino’s success in Germany is that they can offer awesome online casino bonuses that land-based counterparts, cannot compete with.
* Poker - 24% Market share: Enjoyed both online, socially and at land-based establishments, Poker is loved up and down the country. Social card games are legal so players are free to enjoy and host friendly games at home. Live Online Poker is also popular in Germany with Evolution and NetEnt providing casino options.

(you can find a TL;DR at the end of this post, containing my yearly results and my goals for next year)
My first contact with gambling started with the famous "use this strategy to get rich at XY" (XY being mostly blackjack or roulette). As i was still very young i believed these stupid things. I didnt know better. Hours after hours i played for playmoney online, and i got fascinated having the idea to win money by playing a game. After a while i finally learned that in every gambling game the edge is on the side of the casino.
Every game? No. There is poker, a game of skill and psychology. A game where the better player can be a winner. I HAD to learn this game. So i bought a few books, and started learning. I only learned the very very basic stuff, but i thought that was enough. I deposited 10 bucks and started playing 2NL, with the occasional 5NL or 10NL mixed in because i was on tilt or "trying to win my money back". Obviously i was a total fish. I lost my money very fast, and got frustrated. Every now and then i came back to try but, who wouldve guessed, i lost over and over again.
I am a very competetive person, but my competetive drive was focused on other computergames. After i peaked and plateaued in the games i grinded for hours and hours each day for years (at first CoD, then League of Legends where my best ranking was Diamond 3), i started looking for a new challenge. And then it hit me. POKER! But this time i would take it more serious. This time i would be a winner! So the journey began...
On the 1st of january i created my account on pokerstars. This time i deposited 50 bucks. I was still in school, so i couldnt play it fulltime, but i used every free minute i had to play and learn the game. I taught the game to myself by reading through articles online, learned the basics from pokerstrategy.com, and started playing 2NL with proper BRM. For christmas i got money to buy Pokertracker4, so i could finally track my results aswell. After a bit of trying everything out i decided that 6max Zoom was the game made for me. Action all the time and the ability to grind for hours without getting bored. Perfect. So i did. And i was winning, what a great feeling. With the things i learned i was able to beat 2NLz all by myself. I didnt care about the amount of money, which obviously was nothing, but i was making money all by myself, with a thing i loved doing. My passion grew with each and every day. At first my mother was against this whole thing. She didnt like it if i "gambled". Obviously she had no clue about poker not being gambling, but i was far away from being able to correctly explain it to her, as i was still a noob too, so i cant blame her. This is the 2NLz graph for the whole year: http://i.imgur.com/iKHbI6W.png
As you can see i was a solid winner at 2NLz. But moving up was hard. I did take many shots, but the first 50k hands of 5NLz i was losing at it. I had all the typical problems: i was money scared, i thought villains were playing better, i just didnt play the gameplan i had established at 2NL. That is also the reason why i had such a big sample at 2NLz (100k hands), because i always had to move down again. I was getting more and more frustrated. And i was stubborn. I didnt even think about studying more to get better. I was just grinding and grinding each and every day, trying to finally get the succesfull shot. I was still somewhat active in the online community though. I started watching twitch streamers, and i even became mod in "KomodoDragonJesus"' stream. I started reading articles again and i recognized that if i wanted to beat 5NL i had to study again. So i did. And ca. in the middle of may i finally started winning. From one day to another i was good enough. It was like someone turned on a switch. The big thing i learned in these days was that i cant just grind the whole day, because i will be plateauing sooner or later. If i wanted to climb the ladder i needed to study all the time. I started reading more and more, most of it in the 2+2 forums. I started connecting with people, chatting with them over skype. It could be that that was the time where i started being active here on /poker. I was always a big fan of reddit, and i was happy that there was a sub for poker. Here you can see my 5NLz graph for the whole year: http://i.imgur.com/KWVQsPw.png - and this is the graph since i was winning: http://i.imgur.com/rTCiqrl.png
After grinding for some time i started taking shots at 10NLz, and history repeated itself. It was pretty much the same as when i wanted to move up from 2NL to 5NL. Not much to say to this situation tbh. BUT a big thing happened at 10NLz. My first BIG tiltingspree. This was the first time a major downswing hit me, and i got mad at the game, mad at myself for playing poorly, and so on. You cant miss it if you take a look at the graph: http://i.imgur.com/OIswdAg.png After a while i could stop myself from tilting though, and focused on improving again. As you can see in the graph i didnt win enough to move up yet though: http://i.imgur.com/evkw3Ef.png
I was always playing some MTTs on the side for fun. I never really took them serious, never really learned how to play them properly. But in august i had the luck to bink two of them. One was a 1.10 deepstacked MTT where i placed 3rd for 72$, and the other one was the Hot 1.10, where i got 4th for 243$. A MASSIVE boost for my bankroll. Suddenly i was rolled for 16NL, and i took the shot. It wasnt my first shot at it, but it was succesful. From here on its basically the same as always. I grinded, took shots at 25NLz, they didnt work out, i had to move back to 16NLz. Here you can see my lifetime 16NLz graph: http://i.imgur.com/Lsy12An.png and this is the graph since i was winning: http://i.imgur.com/4ZtzI7o.png
In the meantime many things in the reallife happened. I just finished school in summer, and since february i was living on my own in a small 1-room-appartment. I started working 39 hours a week (if you are interested in that you can ask, but its too long and irrelevant to put in this post), and didnt have that much time for poker anymore. I still devoted pretty much all of my free time to poker. Now that i had results and knowledge, i could also finally convince my parents that poker isn't gambling, and that its not bad to be a pokerplayer. My mother taught me to always have the right priorities in life, which i am very thankful for. I always made sure that i had enough time for my friends, my girlfriend, and school. Well maybe not school, but not because i couldnt. I simply decided that school wasnt worth my full attention anymore. My goal for the future was to study psychology, and even IF i put my full energy into school, i still wouldnt have been able to reach the grades i needed. And to get the spot at university it wouldnt matter if i was close to the requirements or more far away, i would need to wait the same time (or i would sue the university for a place, which i will try next year if they dont let me in. Yes, its possible to sue the university for a place to study, god i love my country sometimes :D) So it was irrelevant if i tried my hardest in school, or just made sure i could finish it and get my "abitur", which is german for the graduation from highschool. If i look back i can say for sure that i put more energy and time into poker and studying for poker than into learning for school. But because i already knew what i wanted and how i could get it i didnt regret this decision.
The second big thing that happened was the legalization of online poker in Schleswig-Holstein, the nothern part of germany where i live in. Before they gave out licenses it was a grey area, so not totally illegal. But following that we got an own client, "pokerstars.sh", and a few rules, eg. not more than 10 tables open at a time etc.. These changes didnt affect me that much though, as i was always only playing 4 tables of zoom anyway.
Then i had my first live poker experience. In september i decided to take a 50bb shot at 2/4 in my local casino. It was basically just meant for fun, because i never played live before and wanted to experience it. In my first night playing live i left with 1238€ profit. I decided this would be my live bankroll, and went to the casino about once per week. I grinded it up to 4.5k, then went down to 2.5k again. Here i chose to stop, because i needed money for next years vacation (me and my gf want to travel to japan, which will be very expensive). Also i felt like online lost the needed focus and dedication from me.
To give online poker my full dedication i needed to get better. But learning by myself just wasnt good enough for me anymore. I needed to learn more efficient. I needed to get a coach. And i found one. We had coaching roughly once per week, and i learned so much every single day. I got better and better every day, and finally the day came where i would take a succesful shot at 25NLz.
This is where i am right now. After exactly 1 year playing/studying i went from 2NLz to winning at 25NLz. And my current winrate is pretty impressive, even though i guess its only samplesize and not my real winrate :D here is the graph of my latest 25NLz shot, and hopefully the last one: http://i.imgur.com/Kt5tdYj.png - and this is my lifetime 25NLz graph, with all the shots that didnt work out: http://i.imgur.com/GLBQr0T.png
I hope this wall of text was at least somewhat interesting for you guys. The main reason i wrote this is to remember the year and be appreciative for how far ive come. I've had an awesome poker year, went through ups and downs, but i still managed to come out ahead.
Here are some final results of this year:
The cashgame graph of my whole year, including every cashgame ive played: http://i.imgur.com/QLQZ9Ku.png
And this is the graph only showing my zoom results: http://i.imgur.com/FMFf317.png
edit: HeyitsClay suggested to show the results in bb to show a clearer picture. Here is only the zoom results shown in bb: http://i.imgur.com/SHl8Mzc.png
My online bankroll went from 50€ (~55$) to 1400$.
My live bankroll went from 200€ to 2500€.
My passion for poker is more alive than ever before. My plan for 2016 is to beat 100NL, and maybe play live again with a proper bankroll. When i start going to university this fall i will hopefully be able to finance myself purely through poker. That is the dream...