OP, have you considered doing poker half time and doing another normal type job that doesn't require you sitting in an office all day?

This could range from selling real estate to being a bartender. Anything that keeps you grounded in the real world will make your poker game more enjoyable and the results would likely follow.

You are absolutely right. To my recollection, You originally wanted peoples thoughts on where the best place to settle and play for a living is, not weather you should turn pro or not. It's obvious to me that you have unequivocally already made up your mind. So, all these opinions on whether you should reconsider turning pro is rather nonsense.
I can sense it through your writing, you are burning to take the next step. So, there is no turning back. You have to follow your passion now and whatever happens happens. If you crash and burn at least you'll be able to say to yourself at least you gave it a go and have no lingering regrets of not trying.
From what you've written about yourself, I'm sure you will be successful.You're educated, you are obviously intelligent.
My only advise to you would be two things and this is by no means suppose to discourage you so please don't misunderstand what i'm about to say.
You will probably, initially go broke.You have already stated how you come from the online world and that you don't have that much experience playing live cash. Internet cash games are a lot more difficult than live low stakes nl holdem but live play from internet play is also day and night, It's a different game. You're going to need a while until you make the proper adjustments. You might go broke in that time. You'll eventually figure it out and be a winner i'm sure. Just be cognizant of that fact.
That brings us to the second point I wanted to make. Your biggest criteria of the place you eventually wanted to settle down in and start your poker adventure should first and foremost be a place you like to live. If you settle ,lets say, in south Florida and are miserable there, you don't like the people, it's too muggy, a hurricane blows your house down, your poker results will suffer if you're not happy and you'll blame it mistakenly on poker.
I personally would choose Vegas. Good luck kid and keep us posted.

good post except for the fact any pro filing 90k wins in a year can easily get a mortgage

Totally agree with every point made in this post except for the going broke part. Not sure that he will actually. He's definitely aware of variance and bankroll requirements. He's definitely focused on playing well and as you pointed out he is seemingly quite intelligent. Seems like it gives him a good chance to succeed at the $2-5 level. A big plus is that he's totally up for playing many hours a week.

@Shai - keep us up to date. Put in lots of hours to build your roll. I'm pulling for you as well.

You seem to post a lot about players who post about playing live for a living or poker in general.


Im just curious but did you ever tried to play poker only as an income? Or were you mostly a winning recreational player who put in hours but not that much.

You are absolutely right. His bankroll is much too healthy for him to go broke if he sticks to 1/2. What I should of said and the point I was actually trying to make is for him to expect to probably go on a downswing during the adjustment period. Point well taken.

I'm a 100% recreational player* but most of the poker people I've met are pros, with a large minority of serious recreational players who probably could go pro if they were forced to.

It is universally agreed that poker pro is a really tough job and multiple income streams are important to offset the variance.

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* Technically, I was a poker pro for a week. I quit my job for another job but set my end date and start date two weeks apart. I took my kids to Disneyland one week and then gambled the other week away.

Update OP?

So, it's nearly April and time for an uodate. It's been swings the past six months, at the table and In life. In October I got really sick and played zero days. In November I had to be hospitalized after my third trip to the doctor (pericarditis). Got almost no hours in November. The lack of health insurance playing poker is pretty terrible. My hospital bill was 25k. Luckily I qualified for their financial assistance program and didn't have to pay any of that.

December I decided to move up to 2/5. I was underrolled. You can probably guess what happened. I did well for a couple weeks and one Saturday when the waitlist was insane decided to play 5/T. It wasn't as tough as I thought but I ran bad and lost 3k. So I went back to 2/5 and hit a downswing and lost about 7k more.

In January I dropped back to 1/2 and have been grinding up my roll and playing more hours. My bankroll has recovered past the point where I started playing 2/5. I've averaged 11BB/hr over about 600 hours at 1/2. I'm at the point where I'm thinking about moving up again but I want to be overrolled for it this time so I'm waiting until my roll hits 25k, which will probably happen some time in May.

So I've had some ups and downs and some costly learning experiences but the good news is my 1/2 winrate is decent, and the 2/5 games don't seem much tougher. I feel confident I can beat 2/5 at a decent clip once my roll can absorb the swings.

@shai - thanks for the update. I am curious as to where your play has improved the most. Your win rate seems damn good actually.

Thanks for the compliment. I've really improved in pretty much every aspect of my play, but I would say these are the areas where my play has improved the most.

1) Procedural mistakes

I made far, far too many procedural mistakes my first few hundred hours of play. They got pretty expensive. The worst was in a 2/5 game. I was listening to music in seat 1. Seat 9 opens in EP, I 3 bet him with AK, and he flats. We both have about 2k. Flop comes 432r and he makes a motion that looks like a check. I toss out like 75 bucks for what I think is a C-bet. Dealer deals the turn. Okay. He immediately deals the river. At that point I'm feeling confused and villain quickly turns over Aces. Only about 2-3 seconds have passed since I made the c-bet. I ask the dealer what's going on. Apparently Seat 9 verbalized an all-in and what I thought was a checking motion was just gestural hand movement. Normally the dealer tosses an all-in button to the guy but this didn't happen. My "c-bet" even though it was three green chips was construed as a call. So I lose my stack. Expensive lesson.

Anyway, I don't listen to music anymore and I try to avoid seat 1 as much as possible. I'm also very very careful about memorizing my hole cards (more than once I've thought I had the nut flush but got one of the suits wrong) and clarifying previous action if I'm not completely sure what has happened. I haven't made any procedural mistakes in the last ~300 hours of play. Probably made about 20 in the first 300, most minor but a few quite serious. But I think I have all that behind me. I hope.

2) Reading people / spotting tells

I have gotten pretty damn good at reading when villains are weak, strong, bluffing, whatever, particularly when heads up. I initially thought I would suck at this part of poker because my people skills are not so good but it's really just pattern recognition and most players have patterns, whether they realize it or not. People don't bluff much at this level, but I've gotten pretty good at spotting the rare cases when someone is bluffing. I'd guess when I'm in a spot where fundamentals say I could go either way (for instance, whether to call an all-in or fold), live reads help me make the correct decision about 80% of the time. Some people are harder to read than others but I've encountered nobody who doesn't leak information at least some of the time.

3) Knowing when to bluff

Initially I was bluffing too much. More accurately, I was bluffing about the same frequency I do now, but just doing it in the wrong spots and getting snapped off. I've gotten pretty good at finding those spots in 1/2 where you can launch a huge bluff and actually succeed. I know 1/2 is 90% value and I'm not bluffing often, but once or twice a session I'm able to find a spot where I get a read villain is fairly weak and can get him to release. I feel I'm especially good at knowing when to double barrel, and how to size effectively to get max fold equity without excessive risk.

4) Knowing when to fold strong hands

This one is actually pretty easy but still took me hundreds of hours to build the discipline to actually lay down my set when the diamond draw comes in and villain pushes all in (or w/e). Very few players at this level have a significant bluffing frequency for large bets, especially on the river, and they don't value bet thinly enough. So if I bet KTss on a KT92Jdcdhd board and villain raises (or he switches from check-calling to leading) it's an easy fold against 90% of opponents. Passive players aren't raising worse 2p here, or even KJ, and many won't even raise with a Q. If they raise they probably have a flush, maybe a straight, but no way KT is still good.

5) Being patient

This was hard for me coming from online poker which is so, so much faster. It took me a while to build the discipline to play sufficiently tight even when card dead. It is very tempting when card dead to deviate from the plan and do something like raise ATo UTG, but now I just fold it and move on without a second thought.

6) Optimizing bet sizing

I used to just bet 2/3 pot for pretty much any situation I wanted to bet. I now utilize anywhere from 1/4 psb to 2x psb to AI in different spots and I think it's improved my results a lot for getting more value when I'm ahead and getting folds when I'm not. I'm still working a lot on this one, trying to squeeze every drop of value I can.

The stuff I was already good at like the mathematical aspects I'm still good at but haven't really improved that much. My biggest problem area is probably tilting. I've gotten much much better at not tilting but it's still a concern and has turned some nights that would have been moderate losses into major losses. But I'm aware of how tilt affects me (my aggression goes up) and can usually "reset" myself by taking a break and reminding myself it's all one long session so it doesn't matter if today's session is winning or not.

But I've still got a long way to go! I hope to keep improving as long as I'm playing and never grow complacent.

Nice thread OP. What casinos have you been playing at? Just hard rock? I've been considering going over there. Are you content over there? Did you ever go to Oklahoma? Anyway, I'm subscribed to this thread. Good luck OP, keep us posted. I'm sure we can manage to learn something from your posts.

I've played the other rooms a handful of times but I feel like Hard Rock has the most advantages for a grinder. It is the closest to where I live and also has the best game selection. Often the tables are really nitty but with the new transfer rules you can transfer your entire stack even if you exceed the max buy in so I have been using that a lot to table select. This rule has also led to tables being much deeper stacked late at night. Around 4 AM it's not uncommon for everyone at the table to be 250BB+ deep and very few know how to adjust to a deep stack so this is very beneficial for me. My winrate has gone up a lot lately but it's too early to tell if it's just random or possibly related to these rule changes.

Anyway since Hard Rock is closest and has the deepest games I pretty much always go there.

I played about 60 hours at Winstar on the OK-TX border. It's a nice enough casino but just a nothing town. I also ran insanely insanely bad the whole time I played there. After getting several hundred more hours under my belt I can confirm that I did indeed experience -4sigma level variance, and unlike so many people suggested, my bad results were not because I'm terrible.

In retrospect the player pool at Winstar is softer than the player pool at Hard Rock but the games play much shallower so that may even things out as to which place is better to grind. And Tampa is a real city unlike Thackerville so I'm glad I chose to move here. I do wish I had had the chance to visit Las Vegas as well, but I'm sure I'll visit someday.

Don't want to derail thread so not asking for a long explanation, but how did this work? You just proved that your income and assets were below a certain # and the forgave the ENTIRE amount? Surprised that instead they didn't lower it by a certain percentage or put you on some low monthly payment plan. But if that is indeed what happened, i.e., you got really sick, the hospital gave you decent care and you didn't have to pay anything, it sounds like the lack of health insurance is working out great for you...

update?

Been lurking on this forum for a while and this thread has been very informative/inspirational. Hope the grind is treating you well!

Great thread OP! I've been thinking of doing the same and I was considering Vegas or South Florida as well. Reading the first post of this thread was almost like I wrote it. I'm really interested in another update. How is the poker life going?

I'm grinding 2/5. Living the dream

Sorry for lack of updates. I've had some major health problems lately followed by a serious downswing, and have been a bit slow getting back to it. I moved up to 2/5 not long after my previous update here. I had an absolutely ridiculous winrate before I got sick in August. This time my lung pleura randomly filled with blood and it got harder and harder to breathe as my lungs collapsed. Had to be hospitalized. The doctors did hundreds of tests to try to determine the cause of the bleeds--it's usually trauma, cancer, or an autoimmune disorder. Everything came back negative. I had surgeries to insert chest tubes and drain my pleura of what amounted to 4 liters of blood. Got let out after 16 miserable days. Never found out why I got sick which is a little alarming as I was about a day away from dying.

When I got out I was still recovering for a couple weeks and didn't go anywhere. Finally started grinding again late September. I was really nervous my first day back grinding. In fact I was nearly hyperventilating in large pots from my lungs not having fully recovered (they still haven't, and I'm not sure they will). I think nearly dying messed with my confidence also, as I have been on a huge downswing since I got out, roughly 12k. I initially blamed negative variance and while unquestionably I have run bad I think I tilted during a few sessions. Better discipline might have resulted in me losing considerably less.

Current state of things is I'm trying to get back to my previous level of volume, master tilt control, and better deal with the boredom of grinding live poker for large number of hours. Yes, to those people who warned me I would be bored, you are right, but I am making decent money and constantly improving. Not the most glamorous "career" but I don't regret the decision at all. My life is better now than it was. I hope to move up to 5/T in another year or two. Maybe sooner if I get some rungood. Honestly the 5/T games are softer than the 2/5 lately. My normal hours of playing 6PM to 2AM have become nit grinder central so I'm going even later and playing more like 10PM to 6AM which so far seems like a good move. I'm never awake in the day but I don't see this as a sacrifice. I've always been a night person.

Summary: Aside from continued health problems things are going well. I'm a bona fide 2/5 grinder. The life roll has run out and I am living off my earnings and should be able to continue to do so indefinitely even without improvement.

Man, talk about some life run-bad. I am glad you seem to be out of the woods with the lung issue, and I hope your lung capacity improves. Kudos to you for not letting the down swing in poker drag you down mentally; especially after the health issues. Keep grinding!

Thanks for the update. That lung condition sounds scary. Especially that they don't really know what caused it. Glad you made it through and hope you continue to make a full recovery. Best of luck at the tables.

Any chance your schedule is contributing to the health issues?

Wishing you a quick and complete recovery!

any update OP? I am late to the thread but thoroughly enjoyed reading through it all. hope all is well with health and poker

With all the health issues, I think you're best off trying to get a good IT job with solid health benefits. Then do poker as a 2nd job.

I know you said you dread the 9-5 job but I'm sure you can find an IT job somewhere that's not your typical 9-5 (maybe and overnight gig where you don't have to deal with many co-workers and the typical office BS).

Who picked up the tab from your prior health issues/treatment ? How did that not wipe you out financially ?

Absolutely, get yourself onto some employer-provided health insurance.

OP how are you?

I’m interested in knowing what happened to the guy who started this thread ? Did he end up playing full time ? Did he move to Vegas or south Florida ?