-$540 today...

Not a single cash if I remember correctly.. *Shrug*

Ya I dig ur thoughts on the omega 3s. I pop a couple of fish oil pills daily along with a multi vite.

What's your mix off mtts like? Was thinking if it's higher concentration of turbos it can be swingy.

Also do you tend to renter certain mtts if busting? My leak atm is firing 2-3 bullets on multiple mtts which essentially doubles my normal buying for a sesh which I think is prolly -EV for me long term.

I only play 2 turbos a day on bovada, and then that $22 megastack on WPN, which isn't as much of a turbo. (Nice job on the 2nd last night btw I was railing a bit)

Basically what's happening now is the opposite of what was happening back when I was winning a lot.

Just not winning flips, not being put in good spots, etc. Just variance.

I also don't re-enter much at all on WPN... If I bust really early I'll reg again, but I usually feel like it's breakeven or -EV to re-enter when the average stack is so much higher than the buyin stack.

Well this game is putting me to the test for real this month.

-$800 today, didn't cash anything, lost in DoN's, lost in cash...

I'm almost at my BR limit for moving down stakes now.. hope I won't have to but coming into this I knew making a living at this game wasn't going to be easy, so I'm just taking it a day at a time.

I really do believe this is all variance and not poor play on my part. Today I took an obscene amount of 2-outers. I'm just not hitting flops, not winning flips, etc etc. I think I'm pretty honest with myself in that regard and if I was playing poorly I'd know.

Anyways, there are definitely some things I could work on, so I'm off to study for a bit before bed.

Night!

Hey,

Just drop the stakes a notch and grind yourself into solid black in net worth. What would the downside of this path be? I believe this would be a +ev move.

Ps. reserve satellites to 100usd+ satellites to 'shot taking'..

Only downside would be I would theoretically make money at a slower pace, but it may be necessary. I have about 1.5k left before I drop 44's and 55's from my schedule. I dont reg anything higher than 55's.

+340 today

9th in the WPN 25k for $580, nothing else worth mentioning really.

Played well and felt really good physically and mentally today.

Drinking tons of green tea and eating a tin of sardines right after waking up and right before going to bed every day.

I REALLY, REALLY want to murder these games.

Night!

Oh yeah.. I also got 4th in the WPN 2k rebuy for $220 or something.. busted for the chiplead AK < AJ

Man, eating a tin of sardines in the morning and before going to bed sounds +EV for the poker game but prolly -EV for the dating game, unless we take into account variance, lol.

You getting really deep and definitely primed for a big score soon imo 😎

I was gonna do the $25k too but was unable to get off work early enough.

What days do you take off from the pokers?

I usually only take Saturday off, but I still do a fair bit of studying that day, and sometimes I can't resist the urge to play.

We're due for a double FT as well in that $22 3k megastack at night. Seems like both of us are always crushing that one

Meditated for 1/2 hour this morning. I used to meditate every day upon waking, but I always managed to mess up my sleep schedule and then got out of the habit.

Feels really good.. I just feel more focused and ready for the day. A one-track mind I guess. I can always tell when I'm in this mode too because I get a slight pressure in both of my temples.

Time to fire em up!

Had a nice little score today...



103 people and it took 7.5 hours lol.. HU took 2 hours.. I had him on the ropes 2 or 3 times and he pulled miracles out of his ass. Was pretty sick, but played the best I could and pulled it out in the end.

Finished +$750ish total today.

nice job on the insanely long tourney! i busted the 2 big tourneys sunday on bovada with a mincash in the bigger one, 88<a7 for 16 bbs and KK<AJ when i cold 4 bet shipped for around 30bbs and got snapped by the opener for almost his whole stack.......lolz. dont know how you solely play mtt's day in and day out, how much volume can you get in a average day playing multiple US sites? parlay todays score into something much bigger this weekend, gl

Nice man even the mincashes in the bigger ones are pretty good money..

I can get in about 15 MTT's on vada if I play everything down to the $11's, and 5-6 on WPN.

There seems to always be some kind of series going on too that allow for a couple more.. Bovada's series is done but WPN is starting one in a week or so.

^^ my day in a nutshell.. action went I cbet flop he called, turn check check, river i bet 1/3 he shoves...

finished -$350

brutal! i got 1 outed myself today KK<QQ. doesnt seem like you can get in enough volume to help offset variance playing only 15-20 a day. youve been mixing in cash at all? can definitely bink some mtt's but as i said before in your thread i think your best bet of reaching your goal alot sooner is to grind cash steady while mixing in a few mtt's. also youre doing this for a living, unless if youre rich already you need to be making money consistently and constantly boosting your poker and life br's, bills come every month as im sure you know. either way i love your mindset and work ethic and im pullin for ya

I have been playing a bit of cash, but game selecting while playing MTT's is quite a hassle.. I've started to play some DoN's, but I need to go over ICM spots in them to make sure I'm playing them correctly.

I think you're right, though. I've gotta rethink my strategy a bit because right now everything is riding on binking something big before the new year, and if that doesn't happen I'm screwed.

I've added a couple MTT's on ACR and eliminated some high variance ones on Vada... no more turbos and no more shallow stack tournaments for now. The deep structures on WPN are going to be a better option for me at this point.

I think it will help me mentally a bit as well as I seem to get quite frustrated with a lot of the bovada tournaments. I really hate when the bubble pops and then it's just a push/fold game even throughout the final table. At that point it largely becomes about who gets the best cards.

Took a couple days off because my brother came to visit..

Made 3 FT's today.. unfortunately couldn't close anything.

Got 8th in the WPN 15k, 6th in the WPN 10k, and 5th in the WPN 3k for $700, $480, and $300 respectively.

Finished +$950 in total.

Hi,

I recall addressing the 'What if BR is less than CC debt?' situation earlier and your answer sounded like you had solid plan how to continue. .. What you just wrote sounds like the plan is more of a general nature and not so specific.

I would advice on using few hours / week to work on plan B. (say start with 2 or 3 hours / week and increase by 1 or 2 hours each weak ). I believe that having a plan B (and putting few hours to make it happen) will help you prevent stress as the end of the year approaches.

I would dare to say that solidy of plan B will have great impact on how aggressively you can bush your CCdebt inflated BR. To say the same with different words.. if you do not have a solid plan B the effect of having a negative balance at new year will be multiplied (as you will not have cash flow to pay it off)

While I do focus on dangers and negative aspects of the situation.. I do try to bring them up with a positive twist instead of just being negative.. I mean.. to caution about danger and encouraging you to address it. I hope you can find some insight or a different point of view from these.

GL and all the best!

I totally agree.

TBH at the start of the thread I was so confident I wouldn't have this problem that I didn't consider solutions to it. I thought worst case scenario would be that I would pay off the CC debt and have a smaller BR and I'd just have to build it again.

Now I'm realizing there's a chance I have more CC debt than a poker bankroll.

TBH I've thought about it and I'm willing to go into even more debt to make this happen. If I pay it off in the new year and have next to nothing left, I'll just sign up for more credit cards until I've made myself self-sufficient from poker.

I know how bad this sounds, but I'm willing to do anything to make my plan work. It's also an extremely good motivator for me to work on my game since I'm going to need to squeeze out every last bit of skill I can muster if I'm going to pull this off.

I'm very confident I can do it, but I'd be lying if I said it hasn't affected my sleep.

Please sir, I fear you are seriously underestimating both the risks involved in your plan AND what effect failure in this project would mean to your life.

Please collect (for yourself at least, post if you choose so) spreadsheet of your weekly/ bi-weekly/ monthly results. At very least, results from poker (money won/lost) before expenses, all expenses, money won/lost after expenses.

I fear you are now slightly winning before expenses and slightly losing after expenses. This is not a good enough situation to consider going pro on cc debt.

I do believe you can make it in poker .. You are putting yourself to a situation where you can not take a steak of cold deck .. and where impact of such streak would be amplified by the ccdebt

I do recommend getting a job for 14-18 months and building a BR by saving up and by playing on the side. I do see the upside of building up a roll fast with extremely aggressive BR management .. I just do not consider it worth the risk or impact of failure.

Why jump over a chasm if there is a path and bridge you can take and still get to your destination (bit later)?

I've been following this thread for the last 6 weeks or so, and I have to echo what Monsieur is saying. I've been playing poker in some capacity for a decade (have lots of online sng and mtt experience, live experience has been the last 3 years). I'm not sure if you ever stated what your life roll is, and if you haven't, it's not any of our business. But you definitely need a life roll set aside to give this a go. I know from experience. Relying on credit cards is not the way to go, and it has the potential to add stress to your game that you may not even be catching. I've been there before. I've also been playing full time for the last 2 years.

I'm not sure on your past volume, but I can tell you that this won't be the worst "downswing" or dry spell you'll go through, especially if you're primary format is mtts. You have to always be mentally prepared that the next downswing can be worse than the current one, and you need enough money set aside to deal with it accordingly so you avoid any stress, etc. leaking into your game, causing you to play less than optimally without even realizing it.

I think you're doing most of the right things so far, and you have a solid mental game foundation that you can and should build upon. I tend to stay away from monetary goals (30k before the end of the year, have a 10k month) because those aren't always completely in your control. And if you fall short, you may be hard on yourself, stress, overwork yourself to get to that point, and/or lose some life balance.

You have the passion and you seem to have the work ethic to get to where you want to be, and it'd be great to see you succeed. I'd just hate to see you dig yourself into more debt and be relying on credit cards to live month to month. You'll always be chasing losses and digging yourself out of a hole unless you hit a big score.

I hope this doesn't come off as someone talking down to you, and you're able to take it as constructive criticism (which you seem to do well with based on your previous posts in this thread). Feel free to correct me anywhere you may feel that I'm wrong or not seeing the entire picture or if I've missed something somewhere along the way in this thread.

Good luck man. Keep up the hard work.

Appreciate it man.

I wouldn't necessarily be digging myself deeper into CC debt. I'd be paying off my current debt, and then signing up for more 0% interest CC's to replace it to try again.

My life roll is dead even right now as my poker bankroll sits at about 10.5k just as my CC debt sits at 10.5k. I have no other valuable assets aside from my car (worth about 4k).

As a conservative estimate, I'd be making $3k-4k/month EV-wise. This covers my living expenses and then some. I'm aware I could run below expectation for a very long time, but I probably won't be able to bring myself to do anything about that until I've already experienced it.

I've got the mentality of not having a plan B because it distracts from plan A. (Plan B would be getting a part-time job or something) Maybe I'm watching too many Kobe and MJ motivational videos, but I believe in that mentality. I feel like I can't fail if I keep putting everything I've got into plan A.

Here's a quick timeline of what has happened in my poker career thus far:

Mid Feb: Deposited $450 on Bovada, had some savings to use for living expenses. Eventually had to sign up for CC's to pay for living expenses so I could build my roll w/o withdrawing.

Mid June: Making enough where I can withdraw from my poker BR to pay living expenses, but still not making any progress on paying off CC debt. It is not going any higher, however.

Last few months: Basically breaking even in life. I'm running pretty poorly and only making enough to cover living expenses. Thus, my poker BR is staying the same, and my CC debt is staying the same.

My plan is to keep riding like this until I have a good month or months, and then repeat until CC debt is paid off and I have a solid enough roll to play buyin levels that will allow me to at least pay my living expenses.

Now let's say I pay off my CC debt and replace it with new debt at 0% interest like I plan to do (if I have to) in January. Maybe I run even worse and get into more debt than I'm in now.

I don't have an exact plan for that because I'm still very optimistic and think I'll be doing just fine in the coming months, but off the top of my head I would keep going deeper into debt until I felt like I was digging myself into a hole I couldn't get out of. At that point, I would probably revert back to grinding cash games temporarily for steadier income.

I never want to get a normal job because:

1) I promised myself I wouldn't (maybe an ego thing but w/e)
2) I've never been good at juggling multiple things at once. It would be a lot tougher to keep a steady routine of studying/playing with a job. I feel like there's a lot of value in seeing as many hands as possible day in and day out just for the purposes of staying sharp.

I would also probably develop more of a social life with co-workers, which also wouldn't be good ATM. Don't get me wrong, a social life would be nice, but it would distract from my ultimate goals right now.

What a rant that was.. sorry.

Just curios as have been following since the beginning. If January comes around and you were at the same point as today, how would you pay off your CC debt? The only options I see are:

Withdraw from sites and pay off CC (please take into account how long some American rooms have taken in the past to pay out!). This means you wouldn't have a roll online? Does that mean you would use a new CC to deposit online? If so that would be a terrible idea for your credit rating...

Option 2, pay off CC debt with new CC, also terrible for your credit rating and can be a pain with some hidden Ts&Cs.

I'm just saying this not to demotivate you, but it would be foolish to not think of these things with around 6 weeks to go

GL

Yes I would withdraw from the sites to pay it off and redeposit with new CC's. Most of my money is on ACR and with bitcoin I can have it in my bank account in 2 days.

I might be able to do some balance transfers as well.. I haven't looked that far into it yet.

Why would these methods be terrible for my credit rating if I make (at least) the minimum payment every month?

Credit companies don't just look at payments. They look at what they are being spent on also. Using a credit card for what is deemed "gambling" is super -EV just like taking cash out on a CC is. Using one to pay off another is also pretty self explanatory...