One of the most important things in poker is balance - how to balance poker with family, friends (if applicable), other career (if applicable), etc. I'm curious about the ways that pros, semi-pros, and serious recreational players schedule their poker time in order to achieve some semblance of balance. Have you found a good schedule for playing poker and seeking the other things in your life that you desire?

Right now, I have been doing some consulting work with a very flexible schedule and playing poker about 25-35 hours per week. I've been playing all different hours of the day, but mostly 6pm-2am or 9pm-4am during the week and usually not playing on the weekends. Its been okay, but the lack of a regular routine can be kinda taxing. When I pull an all-nighter, it usually ruins most of the next day in terms of productivity. Having a more regular set schedule is something that I will eventually settle into, but I'm undecided if I should continue to play nights (more profitable imo) or if I should just play the daytime games and live a more normal existence. A few people I know have full-time jobs and play during their lunch breaks or after work.

What's the ideal poker schedule to you?

When I'm in heavy work mode, I play zero poker.

During lighter work schedules (~50 hrs a week), I usually like to play ~15 hrs of poker a month, usually in two bi-weekly sessions (every other Saturday or so).

When I'm not working and just playing poker for sole income, I'll play 25-30 hrs a week for 100-120 hrs a month. Never more than that no matter what, because I burn out -- and I'd rather enjoy the time I spend playing.

I think your situation is rare for a non-pro in terms of actually being able to choose your schedule. I (and I assume most people, but maybe not most people on this board) am constrained by things I consider to be more important than poker. So my "ideal" schedule is more of a local maximum rather than a global maximum. How important is poker to you relative to the other things in your life? (rhetorical question) Set the most important things first.

If poker is important enough to schedule around, note that the games themselves have a schedule (e.g., playing 30/60 at the Oaks at 9am is not schedulable).

PJ, when you don't play for a period of time, do you feel your game is worse when you come back, i.e. you get rusty? Do you spend mental energy and time to be sharp at poker and improve during those 'away of poker' periods?
And lastly, do you feel like your day job 'competes' for your mental/brain resources vs poker, in a way that it is really hard to be a true expert in both, so you have to make your peace with being 'just good' at both?
Of course true expert or just good are all subjective but you get the point

A little bit, but that effect is lessened by my posting here and discussing hands with people who do play (e.g. texts from Jesse, etc).

Yes.

No. And I'm definitely no expert at poker, but I have pretty solid results over many thousands of hours, so I'm good enough. I'm better at my job though, because my career is more important to me than becoming a poker expert.

wake up at 8am when gf gets up for work, make breakfast for her and myself. get on the treadmill and run 5mi after she leaves. play with my dog/walk him, play online poker till gf gets home, hang out with her in the kitchen while she cooks dinner or go out for dinner. do the dishes and watch tv together before a little more online poker then sleep at 10-11pm. 1-2 days a week go play live for the magic show where they give it away like they know theyre supposed to. pretty sweet schedule. i call it "2009".

2012 poker schedule: go to sleep between 11pm and 2am, wake up at 10-11am, shower and get ready, go to the casino to play 10/20 plo or 2/4 mix. get it in with 45-80% equity 6-10x a session in plo, run it twice every time and get scooped every time, go home earlier than expected 75% of sessions bc i have reached my stoploss for myself since im not rich and cant afford to go off like a rocket ship like i used to. come home sit on the couch and wonder how it is that im not broke since i never win. depending on anger and depression level either watch netflix, play with my dog or play online against people that cant read their own hands let alone what i might possibly have and wonder how it is that im so bad that im winning about .01bb/100 after rakeback. still better than 2011 poker schedule which was something along the lines of go to sleep at 4am, wake up at 2pm. sit in bed until 4am, go to sleep and wake up at 2pm.

20 game kinda dies during summer months so I deal pretty much ft and play lower and max 6 hr sessions but average about 3 hours. Mostly before and after work when I have nothing better to do.

I can't keep a schedule other than wsop, but thankfully I'm some sort of hermit robot, weaknesses are only hungry and sleepy currently.

If somehow Bellagio could guarantee overnight 40/80 I would probably wake up late afternoon and play 10-12 hours, rinse repeat. If staying at commerce was free, 20-28 hour sessions for a few weeks, take a month off, cycle.

Game still going as of 9am haha. I had the jesus seat on a 80vpip player and pulled an all-night session. Decided it was easier to wake up for my 9:30am meetings by staying up instead of sleeping for 3 hours.

If you are playing poker for a living, you have to treat it like your job. That means that sometimes it is going to take everything you've got (compare a month in Las Vegas at the WSOP to the push to get the next release out the door in time for E3) and sometimes, like most other jobs, you need to leave it behind when you head for home.

I cannot stress enough the importance of having a social life apart from poker. The game itself is a social game, and it is easy for a pro to fall into the trap of having it be the source of the social interactions that we all need. But however much we might like the people we meet at the table (hi, obi_wang!), we can never forget that they are out to get us, and we are out to get them.[1] We need to spend time in the company of people who are not out to get us.

I learned a long time ago that, as OP has discovered, pulling an all-nighter is a terrific way to trash the following day. If one is going to play overnight poker, I think it's better to live the overnight life. I found what worked best for me was to go to bed at sunrise, sleep until the afternoon, try to squeeze what I could (banking, doctors' appointments, etc.) into the last hour or two of business, and relax/socialize in the evening. Head to the cardroom at midnight, lather, rinse repeat.

But living on the graveyard shift is really stressful on relationships. Now I'm playing days again.

Personally, although it's prime time for poker, I like it best when I keep my evenings free for social and intimate life. Most of the rest of the world world works day shift, plays swing shift, and sleeps graveyard shift. If I want enough of a social life to keep me sane, I need to keep the swing shift free to match my free time with that of my friends.

Moreover, my primary partner places a great value on eating home-cooked meals together, and that means dinner. If I were to play poker on the swing shift, that would put an even bigger strain on our relationship from our not eating together than my graveyard shift play put on it from our not sleeping together.

[1] This is in fact part of the appeal for poker to me: that there is a part of myself that, despite all evidence to the contrary, thinks that dog-eat-dog is the way of the world, and the poker table is comfortable because it is out in the open and we can be honest about our intentions.

This question can be answered like any other lifestyle question: What are your priorities and needs? The way you handle poker will depends on that.

I would say as a relatively long time live pro whose sole income is derived from poker that we have vastly more difficult challenges to a person who has additional income from another job. Real talk, poker's ultimate purpose is to win money. Despite all the recreational players on this very forum (and in the cardrooms ofc) who like to use it as a mental or academic exercise/hobby, when you take out the need to make money, you create a huge change in the poker experience. I'm not just talking about all the strategic poker mistakes they make, but how they actually DEAL with their bad play/downswings (or the opposite). They more easily can shrug and forget about it or constant chalk it up to intellectual learning or curiosity (or variance which it can be) when things go poorly. Or throw tantrums because wtf, I'm here for 3 hours how can my genius self not win in 100 hands?? So basically, a recreational player's lifestyle is pretty lol easy to figure out since it literally is a hobby and no one should have any more trouble fitting it than any other hobby in their life. That's just time management.

Anyway, even a significant full-time professional winner will eventually go on a long breakeven or losing stretch which, in terms of live poker and real hours, can feel endless. I just saw on tpiranha's blog he just completed a 170k hand online BE stretch (in terms of dollars, but probably close in Big Bets), which was real months for even online poker. No matter how amazing your tilt control is, which for pros has to be really high, it can just wear you down and affect your mood and happiness. So a true professional really needs a lot of outside sources of utility (not to mention bankroll) in order to deal with it.

It is for this reason that I think the odd hours of poker are unsustainable in the long run for pros who want healthy lives in society. You might face some really rough mental states that have you driving home at 8am during a massive downswing and realizing you're physically exhausted/gross and have only a few hours after you sleep with your outside social circles, which you can't even focus on because you are on that massive downswing but know you have to go in again because of you eventually make that big purchase of something needed in life. This can be a terrible phase in your life.

But again, even that example is laced with assumptions (do you have/care about that many social interactions, do you care about big purchases, etc). Answering those will help you logically figure out the most appropriate schedule given that you know the variables and parameters of what poker will offer you.

play between 8 p.m. - 4 a.m. every Friday and Saturday.

do other stuff the other times.

Unless you're living on the graveyard shift the rest of the week, this is the equivalent of taking a transcontinental round trip evey weekend. That's terribly stressful.

I am about to stream of consciousness rant and do so less effectively than tpfka howmany but here goes. I have always, with two short exceptions, had a day schedule. My girl works office jobs (formerly at Oracle, 9 to 5, now at google, 9 to 9) so that has kept me pretty honest. At heart I am a morning person, and I believe that is why this schedule has always worked well for me. I feel genuinely good when I've accomplished a lot of stuff before noon, and my capacity for critical thought and hard work degrades almost linearly the longer I have been awake. It's important to know one's self in this regard. My girl, for example, does her best thinking/working between like 4pm and 8pm. I find this utterly incomprehensible, but we are all different.

Twice in my life I have worked other schedules. I was a graveyard prop in the bay area for something like 2 months, and while it did suck donkey balls it was manageable. I would leave for work at 10:30pm, and get home at 6:30am. She'd get home from work around 5:30pm, and we'd actually have five hours to spend together most evenings. This is a far, far cry from the amount of quality time we spend together now, and in retrospect could have been actually good for our relationship. That said, the weekends and holidays were ****ing awful. I mean just...terrible. But the workday part of it was pretty much doable. I also worked, for just one week, a 2pm to 10pm schedule. That was truly counter to everything my body wanted to do. I ended up rushing home right at 10pm after my shift to spend a little bit of time with the girl, then just sort of wasting away the morning. It just didn't work for me.

So I guess what I'm saying is that you need to figure out what your body can do and work within those constraints. I, too, have found that playing "late" (which for me qualifies as like after 11pm) is a great way to wreck the next day. Just last night I quit an unbelievable 40/80 spot because it was 9pm and I knew I had to get home by 10:30 or so to not jeopardize getting back in by 9 or 9:30am and getting a seat in what has been a redonkulous 60 game. And sure enough I snaked the last seat at 9:01am this morning. What's important is that I quit AND made myself go in early. I didn't stay all night and take the next day off (which would have been fine), but I also didn't stay til midnight, wreck the next day, AND not spend all night with the whale.

As to the night games being better....YMMV. The bay 20 game was always SUPER good from like 11-4. I find the commerce 40s to actually be "worst" from like 4 to 8 or so (and here I mean the must move game conditions...the main games are often swell at that time but if you arrive then you'll have to fight through the must move or even have your game start and break once or whatever). I have almost no experience with the 10pm to 6am games, but have heard they (and the 20s in particular) are simply amazing.

I do think that having and respecting a circadian rhythm is probably the right thing to do. You should have an N+2 hour window during which you do your N hours of sleeping, and that really should be that. At least that's how it works for me; other (less pussified) people can probably get away with N +3 or 4, but getting past that is probably bad for business for just about anyone.

Now in terms of balancing the other things in your life....Honestly of late I haven't been doing really anything but playing poker and going on trips. Bachelor parties. Weddings. The meetup in vegas. More bachelor parties. A water skiing trip to hell (they call it yuma...it was hell). More weddings. I just don't do much of anything at the moment other than grind my balls off. And for me, at least of late, that's kind of been working. I've worked my way into the fabric of the commerce top section, I have some friends that I actually see and enjoy interacting with, it's pretty much ok for me. Do I have any actual friends or activities outside of poker? No...zero. And is that bad? For sure....but for right now I'm OK with that.

Captain R once told me that the key to happiness in life is to prioritize every single thing you do above work. That's the opposite of how most people do it, but most people are horrible at everything, so I'm starting to think he could be on to something. I suppose another way to look at it would be to find a job you don't consider work, which is sort of what I've been trying to do all along.