Quote:
Originally Posted by Askesis
I put in 270 hours in July, so I needed a little break after that. I actually did play more than that report shows, because that's cash only and I played probably 25 hours of tournaments over the month.I've been playing a long time: Moneymaker era or perhaps slightly before. I was an online guy who transitioned to live when things started to get complicated. However, I never really had the bankroll for the live game, so I was in and out of action periodically over the years while working a deadend job. As for an actual number of hours or stats, I don't really know that information.
It's definitely a great feeling to get this kind of start. I'm smart enough to know there's no guarantee I will make it, but if I fail, I look at this almost like a freeroll. All I have to lose is money, and it's all money that came from the game. Worst case scenario is I go busto, I'll be in a slightly better spot than I started, and this will turn out to just have just been a long vacation. We are trying to avoid that, of course. I am always trying to inprove my game and avoiding that "I'm a winning player, so let me just go on autopilot and let the money roll in" mentality.
Yea, it wasn't the most fun, but the casino had an unbeatable promotion that month so I put in the work. Guaranteed money is hard to pass up.
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Wow. This is/was me to a T. I used to play on Party on the side to make money for eating out and stuff so I could live better until I finally got a good job. The good job never came. I've been gambling full time for about 5 years now.
Congrats on the great start. Your willingness to grind the crap out of a good promo is as good a sign as the win rate.
My number 1 piece of advice is to diversify. There are lots of ways to do this, the best of which might be to find an SO with a decent real job. There are other ways to make money gambling, though most are not as widely discussed as poker. A fairly easy one is to open some sports accounts and get the bonuses as you arbitrage. Unless you think that's a potential leak for you.
Some sort of freelance type side job is also desirable. Even if you barely touch it some months, a little stream of no variance income is very stabilizing. Even if the job kind of sucks, doing real work a few times a month will keep you from getting complacent.
It's not just stability though. With rare exceptions, poker will eventually become boring for most intelligent people. When you are bored and have forgotten how much the dead end job sucked, it becomes very, very tedious to think about stuff like, "does this random guy care about position in Texas hold em?" And as soon as you figure it out, he leaves and some other random guy, who doesn't care that much sits down,and now you start thinking about his poker game more than he ever has. And the reason he hasn't is because it's not very interesting.
While there have been times I've been obsessed with it, at the end of the day, poker is just people throwing betting discs around based on their guesses about playing cards.
I think this is the main reason the grinder turnover is so high. I started off poker only and did it for a couple years, and I was definitely a worse, more OMC type player near the end of that.
Now, I might go a month without playing, and when I'm do I'm engaged and playing more like I did at the start. In fact, a promo came up lately and played around around 270-300 hours in a month myself and I kind of enjoyed it. You don't have to go to those extremes, but I think playing 40 hours of poker a week for the next 30 years or whatever is a tough plan to follow.
You're doing really well at poker, so make that your platform for never having to dead end it full time again.