as many of you already know, i have been a full time player for five months now. i've made a decent living at it, despite the fact that i'm not a great player and have no affinity for massive simultaneous play. i made all of my money simply by working hard. i've enjoyed my freedom, travelled the world, and done a lot of things that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.
in poker, just like in any other profession, hard work is the single most important ingredient for success. no one that has ever been truly elite at anything has done it on talent alone. not that you have to be truly elite to be successful, but it just illustrates something that SHOULD be common sense: the more time and effort you put into something, the better your results will be.
most people reading this will already assume that they understand what i just said, but how many of you actually put it into practice? how many people that want to be something, whether its a singer, or an athlete, or a comedian, or a poker player, actually spend most of their free time working towards it as opposed to watching tv, playing video games, or partying? not too many, and that's why most people never actually become any of those things.
one thing that you have to realise, is that you're probably not that one in a million special talent that is going to make everything look easy on your way up. you can't do math like stephen hawking. you can't jump like michael jordan, and you're not brian townsend. neither am i. most people, especially young adult males, tend to think that they're smarter than most of the other people around them at any given point in time. in reality, almost all people are pretty close together when it comes to intelligence, and what really separates them from each other is experience and wisdom. when you start a new job, you're an idiot at first, because you don't know what's going on. this is just an illusion though, and after a while, you seem a lot more like the people around you. you shouldn't let these sorts of illusions fool you into thinking that you're more talented at anything than you really are, and let your work ethic suffer as a result.
all of that being said, knowing that working hard is important and actually doing it are two different things. we all know that we shouldn't eat at mcdonald's, smoke cigarettes, and get hammered 3 times a week, but we still do these things. there is no magical cure for that. a person just has to decide that they want to change in order for it to happen. however, when a person is ready to change, there are things that can make it easier. i can't help you with the cigarettes, but i can share some ways that i've come up with to help myself become more productive.
before i get into that though, you guys should know that i'm not some old school farm boy that was raised to get up at 4 am and plow the fields (or whatever it is that old school farm boys do). when i was younger, i got kicked out of college because i slept all day and never went to class. i got thrown out of apartments for not paying the bills, despite having the money and just being too lazy to take care of things that i needed to take care of. i was a complete mess and pretty much had nothing as a result. now things are different, simply because i put in some hard work to turn that ship around. i worked extra jobs. i went out less. i spent less money. i kept my eyes out for new opportunities, and finally i picked up poker and applied the same kind of work ethic towards that as i had been to other things.
time efficiency
i put this at the top, because i think its the single most important key to being more productive. if you put in your 40 at some crappy job, come home, watch tv, and then go to sleep each night, guess what? you're gonna be working that crappy job forever, barring some sort of divine intervention. if, on the other hand, you use your spare time towards your own goals, you might actually get something done other than just paying your bills. it doesn't matter what you do. it could be a part time job on the side. it could be writing, or inventing, or playing poker. the point is, you sleep 1/3 of the day, you work 1/3 of the day to keep up with your bills, and what you do in that other 1/3 is the determining factor in how far beyond keeping up you will go.
television and video games are a waste of time. i know its entertaining, but you should limit the ammount of time you spend on this sort of thing. i watch a few of my favorite things, but i keep myself from getting sucked into more, because the meter is always running.
you have to also be control of the ammount of time you spend with your friends. you're always going to have friends that won't care nearly as much about their free time, and you can't let them own yours. yes, you should still have friends. yes, you should do things with your friends, but at the same time, you shouldn't be a pussy that lets your friends stand between you and what you want to do. you have to set limits on it, just like with tv, and you have to say no sometimes.
when it comes to girlfriends, wives, children, etc, its not so easy. obviously you're talking about a lot more obligation than with friends. there's simply no way around it. if you're not already locked down, you should take some time to realise just how important a factor this will be in your life if you get yourself locked down. i'm not saying you should give up girls, but what i am saying is that if you're serioius about your work, you should make a real effort to try and find people that fit with what you're trying to do instead of being an insurmountable obstacle. also realise that once you start achieving your goals, the caliber of mate that you're able to attract magically becomes a lot higher than it was before.
resource investment
there are a lot of resources available to give you advantages in poker. you should take the time to research them and have any of them at your disposal that will be helpful. you should also take the effort to learn how to use each of them to their maximum potential. i posted a thread a while back about making complex filters in table selection software, and most people had no idea what the hell i was talking about. i experimented and expanded on those ideas on my own, for my own use. you should do the same, not just with that, but with anything you can get your hands on. get all the stuff you can. learn everything you can about the stuff you get, and think about how you can use that stuff to its fullest. if you don't make enough money to afford all of the resources that you want, then make a plan to get that money, and carry out your plan. if that means working a job or working more hours at a job you already have, then do it. its stupid to play unarmed for change if you could just bag a few groceries and arm yourself with everything you need to get going.
scheduling
as a poker player, you are a business. if you want to be a successful business, you should model yourself after any other successful business if you plan on actually accomplishing anything. there's a reason that businesses fire people that don't show up for work. no one can fire you, but if you want to get things done, you should act as if someone could. otherwise, your business will fail.
one easy way to stick to a schedule is to syncronize with a roomate, or girlfriend, or whatever, that works a job of their own. when i was in moscow, that's what i did with my girlfriend. when she would get up for work, i would get up for work. while she was working, i was working. when she got done, i was done. obviously we don't always have someone to sync with, but its really not that hard to sit down and put together a reasonable schedule if you give it some thought. if it doesn't matter when you play, even better, because you can just sleep during the hours when tables tend to be particularly bad. once you get used to a schedule, it becomes routine, and you won't be phased by long sessions nearly so much. playing randomly always leads to more downtime, more tv watching, and less working. a little structure makes things a lot easier.
one last thing to add that pertains to both scheduling and time efficiency is that you should always try to be smart when it comes to windows of time that only allow partial productivity. if you set aside some time to review your play at a time when games are good, but then later end up sitting out of games at a time when tables are bad, you just wasted a good bit of play time that you would have had if you had done it the other way around. if there's a book that you want to read, and you know you have a long road trip coming up, don't read the book when you could be playing and then stare out the window or play tetris for 3 hours on the trip.
endurance
when it comes to grinding out long hours of poker, the big hang up for most people is endurance. we're taught that we shouldn't play when tired, and we get tired and lose focus pretty quickly. frankly, this is stupid advice, and i don't care who disagrees. i'm right, and i'm proof. while i do agree that playing tired negatively impacts your play, the simple fact is that you can never increase your capacity for concentration without pushing yourself. if you always quit as soon as you fade, you'll always fade relatively quickly. if you push through for a while, you'll find that your capacity will increase greatly. its like that with anything. good luck running a 5 mile race without getting tired, and good luck improving your time without ever running. if you run every day, naturally what was once gruelling becomes trivial, even easy, and the same is true with poker.
another big key to endurance is preparation. while some people would argue that winning poker isn't played systematically, that's simply not true. while there are always hundreds of variables in play at any given point in time, through our experiences and our work, we all build our own personal system in our minds. the more blanks there are in your system, the harder that you have to work at the tables. if you set aside some time to think about your methodology for making decisions and playing hands when you're away from the table, your brain won't have to work so hard when you're actually playing.
stability
if you've been around these forums for a while, you've read a lot of advice about bankroll management, shot taking, moving up, and moving down. there have been a lot of posts, by a lot of smart people, that illustrate just how much money you're cheating yourself out of by being conservative with your money. you know what i say to that? i say bull****, and it is bull****, for a few simple reasons.
if you ever get to the point where you are playing poker as your primary source of income, you cannot simply rate ev as the ammount of money you stand to win or lose. you have to factor in life ev as well. if running bad for a while will severly reduce your quality of life, or possibly even cause you to have to take up a job in order to reload, then -$1 suddenly isn't evenly offset by +$1 anymore. on top of that, the more you move around between different environments, the more stress you will have while playing, and the more time you will have to devote to management and analysis over play time.
i recommend simple, conservative, stable, and low stress systems over ev maximizing systems, and its not even close in my mind in terms of practical results. i set weekly volumes for myself, and i make a weekly withdrawal of a fixed percentage of my expectation based on past results. that way, i know what to expect, and when to expect it, so long as i have the bankroll to absorb the hits i take when i don't actually achieve that expectation. i will move to a new level with a set ammount of buyins for that level, and back down at a set ammount of buyins, and think that these moves should be made no more than once a month. that way you have time to prepare and gather data for the next level, and you're not jumping all over the place all the time, creating more stress, more work, more chaos, and more distractions that lead to excuses for breaks.
that's basically it. that's what i do. i'm not a freak of nature, and people really shouldn't WISH that they could grind like me. if you want to wish for something, wish for my rugged handsomeness. if you want to work, get to work.
