Hey ECGrinder,

I'm all about poker and taking shots and what not, but I also graduated college with a technical degree and my advice is that you do the engineering stuff first and poker as a secondary income.

When you graduate college with an engineering degree, you have a 1-year window to get an engineering related job.

The way technical degrees work is that companies don't think you can immediately step into a job and do it. The technical degree is nothing more than a type of qualification that certifies that you have the necessary aptitude to be trained.

So, companies hire freshly graduated engineering majors and then subsequently trains them to be engineers.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that there is a very very limited window of opportunity to step into the engineering world.

If you decide to give poker a shot and poker falls through, then your back up plan needs to be to go back to school to get another technical degree or Master's so you can graduate again and re-open that window of opportunity. Or put another way, if you graduate with an engineering degree in 2013 but don't get an engineering related job by end of 2014, it will be near impossible to get one in 2015.

Poker will always be there, but the engineering has a very limited window of opportunity.

Anyways, sorry to derail the thread with the "get a real job" rant but I felt obligated. I'm sure you've heard it all from friends and family but I'm not sure you've heard it from a poker pro who has a technical degree.

I won't bring it up again and if you decide to just take the shot and live the poker dream then I wish you well and will be following.

Speaking of, how much 2/5nl and 1/2nl hours/experience do you have?

Fair enough points brother. I am putting in a lot of hours now in order to see if poker is going to work out as soon as possible. By this spring I should have a pretty good idea or be busto, which will be less than 1 year after graduating.

I have some solid work experience, good personal skills and am pretty sick at design even though I don't like most of it, so I'm truly not concerned about getting a job if I fail at poker. I've thought about getting a PhD in theoretical physics a little while down the road.

800 hours at 1/2 and 56 hours at 2/5. Thanks for the well wishes man! Living the dream

Making $10k with 2/5nl in two months is doable

This combined with your other goal means you wish to make $21k in two months with 2/5nl. This is possible if you CRUSH the game and go on a heater. I think this goal is a touch unrealistic. I would slide the completion goal to April 2013

Your short term goal from Oct 2013 - April 2014 should be to sustain a positive poker income while improving your winrate and getting to a position where you can follow decent BRM. In the beginning you have to take a bit of a risk since you are underrolled. However, you need to "not" establish those risks as part of your permanent BRM practices.

So basically, I think your focus is a bit off. Your focus needs to be more centered on winrate, BRM, and improving your game, etc. do that and the monetary stuff will happen naturally

I hate this goal, or more to the point, I hate that you have this goal slated for April of 2013. Again, this kinda tells me your focus is in the wrong place.

Imo, your goals and focus for pretty much the first 6 months needs to be purely survival and improving your winrate and game and growing your bankroll.

If I were to try to construct a proper analogy. Imagine that your bankroll is an Apple Tree. If you take care of it, and grow it nice and strong then it will bear fruit for you. But if you are too aggressive with picking fruit off that tree as it is growing, then you hurt the tree's ability to grow big and strong.

Yuck, that analogy sucks... What i'm trying to say is that the beginning needs to be focused on growing that bankroll and improving your game and establishing yourself as not only a winning player, but a player that CRUSHES the game.

Once that has happened THEN you can start that IRA.

I would recommend that the IRA goal be slipped to Oct 2014, basically one year from when you started this venture.

This is much better and what I've been saying above. I like this goal.

The last comment I want to make deals with downswings and BRM. In my opinion, the thing that separates pros from everyone else is how we handle downswings. Not just downswings, but devil driven descents into soul crushing negative variance hell.

When I first started out, I would here all the "stories" from pros about horrendous bouts of runbad and I would just shrug and say, "Well, that's not gonna happen to me because I'm awesome..."

And then it happened to me, then again, then again, and then again....

I was a hair away from being homeless several times but managed to bounce back (thank god for 2+2).

So my concern based on your goals is that I don't think you are properly accounting for the bad stuff and I think your focus is slightly in the wrong place for the near term. For the near term, every ounce of energy and mental focus should be on improving your skill level, growing your bankroll, and BRM. Other goals like IRA should be AFTER you've established yourself as a winning player that has a solid handle on this pro poker stuff.

hope that makes sense.

and I wish you do well. Its always fun to follow a thread from the beginning and watch it grow into something awesome.

GL

GL man. If the future of online poker gets worse I'll seriously consider this path as well.

Grinding 2/5 at Foxwoods. Driving 2 hours home tonight to write up a post for you homies. Quitting cigarettes. Not going to watch how I met your mother until 4am anymore. Establishing good habits. Making $$ let's go!

Week One: Maryland & Parx

Jamie, Brad and I drove down south to grind at Maryland Live Thursday – Sunday. Pretty much killed it and won $2,370 over 28 hours. Not a huge fan of the poker room itself. The tables are tightly packed and the room was crowded. Action was great, however. They spread a ton of 2/5 and had 5/T, T/25, and 25/50 running while I was there.

Stopped at Philadelphia on the way back and played a session at Parx, in which I made some hands against weak players and won $1,176 in an hour and a half. I liked Parx and will be definitely go back when I can afford to buy in to 2/5 for $1k… Jamie and Brad cleaned up as well and our table broke, so we got dinner and had some beer before heading back to Foxwoods. Octoberfest! In total I Spent $250 on food, transportation, and beer for the trip.

Bankroll/Liferoll = $8,480. I hit my first $7,500 benchmark. Got in 40 hours of playtime this week. I’m thinking of going Mike-Wolfe and driving down to grind in florida soon. Not sure how the change would affect my goals.

My lifetime $2/$5NL stats:

I agree with everything you said dgiharris. The Roth IRA goal is because you can only put in $5,500 per year and the deadline for this year is in April 15, 2013. Maybe I'll find someone to loan me $5k short term to stuff it in on time though, haha. Right now my focus is entirely on improving my game and building up a big enough bankroll to not fear going broke playing $2/$5NL as soon as possible. I can feel my game improving drastically, and i'm only 64 hours into 2/5.... This game will make or break you.

Great Start!!!!

couple of comments though. Do you routinely play at the same table as your friends? Do you soft play with your friends (i.e. check it down, etc)?

Also, do you have a regular poker room you can play at and establish yourself as a regular?

There are several advantages to being a regular.
#1) Table selection-- As a reg you know which tables are going to be juicy and which ones are going to suck due to knowing your villains
#2) Villain profiling-- Similar to #1, you know and recognize the donk droolers, ego maniacs, action gamboooolers, super nits, good semi-pros, etc
#3) History-- You can take advantage of previous battles/history you may have with other players and exploit that
#4) Floor courtesies-- as a regular the floor is more likely to sneak you into games and jump the list for you. This is HUGE on busy nights where instead of waiting 1 - 3 hours for a game the floor sneaks you into a game in 10 minutes.

Not to say traveling and playing poker isn't fun or profitable. Just saying there are some benefits to being a reg and establishing a presence at a casino.

I've had a few huge 5 BI nights simply because I instantly recognized which were the good/action tables and table changed my way to them...

GL

subbed. GL.

nothing says you have to go the full amount. you can go any amount. i agree with dgi's apple tree anology. plus, how old are you, 22? you're not sacrificing a lot if you don't put money in a roth right away.

subbed, gl.

meh earlier the better but the priority right now should definitely be having a stable bankroll first

Thanks man!

I play at the same table as friends fairly often, but never softplay. We talk a lot of mutually beneficial strategy off the felt in which I would never think of deluding them in order to gain an edge. However, on the felt I expect them to take advantage of what they know about my game, just as I will take advantage of what I know about theirs. This results in a little bit of leveling and mixing up my play when we are in pots together, which I believe is beneficial to my game in the long run.

As of right now I have been a 1/2 regular at Foxwoods, but have just moved up to 2/5. I'm in the process of learning the field and how everybody plays.

thanks brotha!

@johnny_on_the_spot and TheTyman9 - I'm 22. The Roth IRA is certainly something you want to get money into ASAP. However you are both correct in that this goal is on the backburner - I won't be putting any money away for 37 years until I establish myself as a fully bankrolled, winning 2/5 player with 6 month living expenses and some emergency savings. Having a lot of fluid cash is the most important thing.

Sweet giraffe man

Very nice trip, looking solid. I would like to check out MD Live and Parx next time I make it out to the East coast.

By the way, I played 2/5 in FL last May at Hollywood Hard Rock, Isle, Best Bet, and Gulfstream. All of them had multiple tables to choose from. I didn't think the games were much better than anywhere else I've played. Small sample size though.

Nice trip, hope you feel super good about the results and had fun!

Keep focus, keep confident!

Had a good day off at home in which i accomplished nothing. Gave my x gf $100 for her birthday. Grinding at Foxwoods. I Just got in kings vs aces for 80bb, is it possible to find a fold that shallow at 2/5. Vs a normal player?

Queens and AK you can sometimes fold for 100bb and less. I'm never ever folding KK for less than 100bb without some super specific read such as they haven't raise pf in 8 hrs.

i've folded Kings pre once in my life. made a thread on 2+2 asking if it was the right play and basically got flamed by like 75% of the people who answered. I still think i made the right decision.

when it comes down to it, after you wade through all the crap everyone knows and talks about and all the analysis and statistics, the point of the game is to make money. at least in my perspective. granted, i want to play well, but getting patted on the head because i played well and lost money blows. most people will say you get in because the chances of them having AA is slim and in the long run it is a money making play. thats great for online where you can literally play 1,000,000 hands in a year. but live, it will take you years for that situation to go from short run to long run analysis.

bottom line, if you can be certain you are an 80/20 dog, why bother drawing with such long odds?

gl man

Obviously you can never be fully certain. Folding kings 100bb deep just doesn't make sense because there is always a chance that even if someone is a super nit that they are randomly spazzing or have QQ/AK. If the person you are playing against is literally soooo tight that they will never reraise with anything but aces than you shouldn't even be 3betting them in the first place

Not true. Just because they aren't reraising with worse doesn't mean they aren't calling with worse.

I thought about not including that last line because obviously you are right in general but the point was made in the context that if someone is tight enough for you to actually be able to profitably put them 100% on aces then they need to be so tight that they essentially only ever play aces. If you are wrong even one time then that soul read fold becomes a big mistake.

And on this day there was an epic battle of the nits in a 2/5nl game. On an AA553 board there was a bet, followed by a raise, a reraise, and an all in! To the great surprise of the table, they chopped the pot with aces full

I graduated with an engineering degree and it took me a full year to find a job. During that time i grinded (ground?) live poker and learned that...it sucks. Now I has job and play for fun. Basically what I'm trying to say is...you should really consider getting a job.

GL OP, hoping to read about a success story.

Thanks man!





Sorry you are owned by the corporate world. But I bet your girlfriend loves it! Hell, I'm well aware that this is a long shot, I may end up in a similar situation. But I have to at least take a shot.

Lost a grand today. Hurts having such a small roll. Ran pretty terribly but also didn't play my best. Nothing extremely spewy but a couple of lay downs I should have made. Planning on selling my motorcycle to pick up another 2g's. BR currently just north of $7k.

Sleeping in my car now and grinding a long day tomorrow.... but I made one hell of a bed in my car! I'll post a pic tomorrow. I booked 2 nights / WK at foxwoods for the next two months. Playing here until I feel inspired to adventure south...