Time is up, still no winner.
So this is what happened - prepare for some tl;dr stuff, just scroll to the end if you only want to see the results. I'm only sharing the story because maybe others quitting poker can find it useful.
I waited about a month after september to see if the games really died or it was just a ****ty month, and when I realized they did, the first thing I did was crap my skinny jeans (UG, does this make you horny?) because I had no plan B at all and really-really I didn't want to end up like Elo.
My remaining bankroll was enough to cover about 1,5 years of living expenses, so that was the timeframe I got from ground zero, with no plans and literally no marketable skills at all. The only advantages I had after 5 years of poker were solid learning skills, and discipline to apply them, plus I was confident that I can learn pretty much anything if I have enough time and I can get my hands on enough high quality info.
I first looked into fantasy football but I quickly found it's not available from here. Bummer, so much for gambooling on.
Then, having zero clue what to do, I googled terms like "ways to make money freelancing" -I could only imagine doing something as a freelancer/enterpreneur of some sort - even though I'm not as extremely introverted as Elo, I'm not exactly a great teamplayer either plus I can't stand having a boss and/or a rigid schedule.
I read all the ideas which popped up, then started looking into ones which seemed reasonable (and all the other ones too).
After about 2 weeks of spending most days researching my options at daytime and partying at night to blow of the steam from my quickly growing panic, I came up with a list that looked something like this:
1. Start some websites, do a lot of search engine optimization, marketing, etc. to run up the traffic and try to sell some stuff like ebooks, or make money from affiliate marketing, etc. Lots of people seem to be able to make money in this field however the general consensus was that it can take at least 6 month to run up a website from nothing to a working business (and that's when you have experience). I didn't want to waste 1/3rd of my remaining time to find out if this can work for me.
2. English-Hungarian translator - I used to do this about 15 years ago, but the rates have gone down really bad since then, and the market is badly saturated. No money in translation, everyone is solid.
3. Graphic designer - I had decent photoshop skills, maybe I could work hard on my design related skills and I might even enjoy this one if it works.
4. Learn to code and work as some kind of a freelance developer. Sound like a decent option too.
So I started with option 3. Watched like a dozen of design related online courses on Lynda.com, did lots of practice, then jumped on some freelancing sites and entered design contests, and started bidding on projects (logo design and similar). I did make a couple hundred bucks in about a month but I realized that this approach would be super hard to scale up, and finding local clients with nothing but graphic design skills isn't exactly easy either.
Luckily I had an old friend who had worked as a successful freelance webdesigner for over 10 years, and at this point he convinced me this is what I should try - the money is there, he could pass on some project to me to get started, and it doesn't take forever to learn.
So I spent about 4 month/8-10 hours a day studying HTML, CSS, Javascript, Wordpress development and lots of related stuff while practicing on real life projects I got from this friend and making some money on the side - not much, around 1-1,5k/month, just enough to not have to cut further into my backup money.
This is where I'm at now, goal for July is to try and find some clients of my own; I'm planning to run a cold email campaign, contacting owners of crappy/outdated websites, then go from there.
Plus I keep studying my ass off every day, this field is like poker, you can't afford not improving continously.
So, for those who didn't want to read all that crap and just scrolled down to see the results:
Last edited by daiquiri; 07-07-2015 at 06:17 AM.