Poker: How long does it take to become good at Poker ?

Unfortunately I never kept records of my "Casino trip" poker tournaments, but can tell from my expense claims that my very first game of tournament Poker was the evening of 15th January 2001, in Sheffield. No, the company didn't pay for my gambling, but a work trip happily coincided with the Hold'em tournament night in the Casino near to the hotel I was staying :-) It was a £5 Pot Limit rebuy tournament and although I don't remember how I did, I do remember feeling very nervous until the game started.

I have been keeping meticulous records of my online poker games (the real money one's anyway) but have never really bothered to do any analysis of how I have been doing, so out of interest, I thought I would do a quick summary

First online game was 2nd September 2002 with Ultimate bet. It was a $15.50 buy in to a NL MTT with 160 players. I finished 25th (didn't win any money) but not too bad for a first attempt !

Quick summary (might get around to analysing further some day) as at 22nd June 2006
Ultimate Bet 390 games total loss $973
Poker Stars 17 games total loss $ 50
Ladbrokes 427 games total win $ 67
William Hill 14 games total loss $145
Party Poker 121 games total loss $ 84

My career total so far is therefore a loss of $1040 (about £562 at todays rate) over 969 games spanning nearly 4 years. Not an expensive hobby by any means, but could do better.

So why so many losses ? That I will have to analyse more, but I used to play a lot of MTT with large fields (smaller chance of winning) and also tended to play large stakes games once I built up my bankroll, so if I lost that one game then it would wipe out months of small gains.

To answer my own question "How long does it take to become good at Poker?" the answer for me seems to be more than 4 years :-)