You'll want to create a tamer as your first character. It'll take maybe two hours to GM taming. Create your character with 50 taming, 50 magery, and decent strength, then lock all of your skills except taming and lore (the more skills you have total, the slower all of your skills gains are).
Skill Gain Guide
You can follow that guide, but I tamed bulls in Delucia until I was able to tame swamp dragons (80ish skill, if I recall correctly), and GMed from there. Ask someone to give you a rune to Tessa's Library for easy access to anywhere you'll want to go.
Using Tessa's Library, recall to the various cotton fields and load up. You should be able to get enough cotton to sell at a shop for reagent gold and get a decent number of bandages for vet skill. Work your magery until you can gate.
Use the library to locate a dragon or wyrm spawn and use paralyze to immobilize your target while you tame them. If you can get help in taming one of these, do it, because it'll be a hell of a lot easier.
Once you have a pet, you can hunt cyclopses, which are easy to kill and drop 700 gold. Just be ready to recall, because most good hunting spots are constantly watched by reds. If you get attacked, you can AIM me at ArkaneFATE and I'll come slap them around. I can usually handle 2-3 mediocre-moderate players.
With your tamer, it'll be pretty easy to get gold for any reagents and supplies you need, and if you decide to stick with that character for awhile, you'll be able to kill Balrons without an issue (aside from reds). Balrons drop 2800 gold and several magic items apiece. All you need to kill them is a bonded mare and dragon/wyrm. This, in my opinion, is the best way to get the gold you'll need for poker. The optimum poker table has a 100k minimum buy-in. The lesser tables are simply a waste of time, as Balrons would give you gold faster.
