Two solid pieces of advice....one for each side of the fork in his road.

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I tend to look past any rudeness or bad manners and look at the point someone is making. And he made a good point.

In your opinion, what does lead to emotional fulfillment? (and please don't say volunteering in some 3rd world country, everyone says that )

creating situations where you can feel real joy and space.

Such as...?

Taking a 1 week break from poker

So I told my girlfriend exactly how I feel about poker right now and she's being very supportive of me. She agreed to let me use the laptop late at night, to give me something to distract myself from the casino. In return, I told her that I'll spend some time looking into new apartments that we can lease: just the 2 of us, as opposed to having 5 people crammed into one apartment like we're currently doing.

One thing which held me back a lot was that I had limited my searches to only "furnished" apartments, and this removed about 85% of the search results. I had a conversation with a friend about this and he recommended that I should just invest 1k into buying second hand stuff off gumtree (fridge, bed, couch, table, chairs, TV, etc.) and getting an unfurnished apartment instead, so I'm most likely going to go with that option.

I plan to go to the gym at least 3 times in the next 7 days and I plan to eat at least one healthy meal per day (must contain steamed vegetables).

When I return to poker, I want to feel refreshed, energised and enthusiastic about the game. I want the spark to be there; it should be a game that deeply interests me, a game I love to play and analyse, not a game I grind when I'm bored and have nothing better to do.

If I don't feel this way after a 1 week break, then I'll extend the break to 2-4 weeks. But I won't take longer than a 1 month break from poker at most. I have no intention of quitting. This is just a short break to help refresh my mind and improve my health.

Youre going to think this is some kind of joke or insult but you should seriously go to a doctor to do be examined. It really sounds to me like you are Bipolar.

He's just a lazy, entitled millennial. He wants the world, instantly, without having to put in any significant work. Furnished apartments? Jumping to high stakes with no bankroll and under developed skills, and looking to get rich quick. He needs reality not a doctor.

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I saw a counsellor a few times last year and he said that there's nothing wrong with my mental health.

It's funny how you old guys call us lazy and entitled. Back in your day, you could buy a house from just 3 years worth of income. Nowadays it costs like 15 years of income. Back in your day, you could get a decent job at the age of 18 after finishing high school. Nowadays, we have people with Bachelor's Degrees and even Master's Degrees that are struggling to find employment. Back in your day, 200nl online was a joke, but now it's full of solid GTO pros that use PioSolver, HUDs and do deep game theory analysis. You guys had it so much easier than we did.

I'm 37. I work over night just like you. I use poker as supplimental income just like you. My day and your day aren't much different if any. The difference is that I'm not stubborn and I don't make excuses, I find solutions. If something isn't right or I don't like it, I change it, I don't complain about it.

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The way I see it, the OP doesn't like monotony, routine and doing the exact same thing 40-50 hours a week. Is this now what is classed as bipolar?

If everyone were to face reality, 99% of people would have to accept the fact they are an average nobody who won't achieve anything significant in their lives. That is quite a horrible and depressing reality. Most people want to believe they are extraordinary and special even if they are not.

Don't be so pessimistic....average nobodies don't need to fear being a high profile robbery target after playing 2/5. There's a silver lining everywhere.

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As I mentioned in earlier posts here, monetary goals are bad goals.

Please realise how awful you're feeling right now OP, having reached your goal for the YEAR already!

Imagine how you would feel if you lost that BR or got in debt. You have the money now but still feel like youre at rock bottom. Lose that money now and youll discover that rock bottom has a very, very deep basement.


THE SOLUTION TO YOUR CURRENT MISERABLE STATUS OF BEING:

Copy paste all of my replies in this thread into a Word-file, create a summary of what was helpful and create your plan and new goals.

You have ignored all my advice so far, which I understand as I would have done the same. Breaking the cycle will be the hardest thing you will have done in your LIFE, but also the most rewarding thing! At this moment with your current mindset, you can't imagine how rewarding and energising the process of improvement will start to feel after getting through the first weeks or month.

DO IT OP. Or choose to sleep walk through life, missing out on genuine moments of happiness and joy, waiting for your next chance to turn your miserable life around.

Not only are you not going to get rich, but from the way OP is fitting it into his lifestyle it sounds like it is having severe negative consequences.

Why not quit poker altogether, attempt to find a typical daytime job that you can tolerate, and find other healthy fun hobbies to do in your spare time? And then if all goes well then *maybe* re-add poker as a fun hobby you do when you feel like it?

Galmosteveryonedoespokerwrong,imoG

The irony of this post cannot be overstated.

The glamour of being a full-time poker player is hugely over-rated. Who would have thought?

Housing costs have not risen 5 times more than wages in the past 20 years.

When I was 18-19 minimum wage was $3.35. A movie ticket was about $3.35. It took one hour of minimum wage work to buy a ticket. Currently minimum wage is $7.25. A movie ticket is about $8ish. Not much change

When I was 18-19 gas was about $1.29 a gallon. You could buy 2.5 gallons of gas for 1 hr of minimum wage. Gas is now about $2.75ish (varies obviously). You can now buy 2.6 gallons for 1 hr of work. Not much change.

My first house in Dallas cost $140,000. My first real career type job paid $24,000 to start. That's 5.83 yrs of work to pay for the house. I sold that house for $230,000 20 years later. I was still working that same job (although I had been promoted and made much more money). The starting salary for that exact same career type job now has a starting salary of $50,000. That's 4.6 years of work. A young guy starting in my exact same career path could've bought my exact same house from me cheaper than I bought it. (inflation adjusted)

Things have not changed nearly as much as people like to think. In fact many things are cheaper now in relation to inflation adjusted prices. People would just like to make excuses and think it was so much easier for everyone else.

Lets add in how much easier and cheaper technology has made so many different facets of life and the "life was easier for you old guys" is out the window. Nice try.

How do you mean? Obviously grinding poker is monotonous, but OP is chopping and changing between games. It is clear to me that he gets bored of doing one thing too much. He strikes me as the kind of person who can't stick with anything for any length of time and needs variety in his life to be stimulated. Which isn't a problem, but he needs to find something which fulfills that desire.

Try living in Melbourne or Sydney, where the median house price is $800k and the median salary is $50k.

A few decades ago, my grandpa migrated to Australia from Italy. He never finished high school. He worked as a mechanic. He had very little in assets when he first arrived. And he managed to buy 2 houses which today are worth $1.1M each. At the time, I believe it cost him around 3 years of pay per house.

Maybe things are different in the USA, but over here, house prices are rising at a significantly faster rate than income levels are rising. It's gotten to the point where doctors, lawyers, engineers and investment bankers are competing for tiny old houses in suburbs that used to be infamous for being rough, dirty, working class suburbs. And that's why the city suburbs are going through gentrification here.

The 1980's were the golden era when the economy was booming. But we just got through the biggest global financial crisis since the 1930's great depression and we're still recovering from that. What a time to be a young adult.

The technology argument is valid, however, what's the point of living in a world which has access to a lot of technology if you're too poor to be able to afford to use any of it? And technology works against us a lot too: so many jobs have been replaced by self-serve checkout machines, poker and chess games have gotten tougher since computer programs came out, etc. Automation is a huge issue in the present and future.

If you feel automation is working against you, get a job in automation. Also technology made the games harder but everyone has the same tools and people still refuse to use it so that should be a pretty big advantage. But I get it, jobs that don't require an education are under stress, and this should be an incentive to pursue a career that is actually wanted. Be honest, is poker something you could do for 40 years? I have for a number of years and for exactly the same reasons you and others find it tough sometimes, it got unbearable.

If you have $9k and you're not emotionally in a great place (and boy did that shine through from the beginning, not gonna lie) then take it and plan for something you could actually see yourself doing for the rest of your life. Something that is not only achievable in the short term (like poker) but that allows you to be happy in 20 years. If that means sucking it up and completing school, so be it. If that means teaching yourself how to program then that's what you need to do. If you're going to try sales or something like there are plenty of opportunities to prove yourself and having some money to last a few months you won't feel immediate pressure.

When I finish school I am at best 29 years old, which isn't great but I will be working in a field where jobs are well paid and basically unfilled for the foreseeable future. In other words, if you can do something that isn't generic then you'll be fine.

Housing prices can only go up so much (its called a housing boom). At some point there arent enough people who can afford to buy a house. Some catalyst comes along like rising interest rates or whatever and then BOOM!....the real estate prices fall like a rock. It happened in the US about 8-9 years ago. People were living in tent cities in rich suburbs. People had a mortgage for $750,000 and the house was now worth $400,000. Lots of those people bought a different house in their neighborhood with the same floor plan for $400,000 and then let their house go into foreclosure. Instant debt reduction and there were so many of those foreclosures that the prices just kept dropping.

If the median salary is really $50K and the median house costs $800K, look out below. Real estate is going to crash very soon.

Only 5 days short of your initial plan to take the week off. Great job.
Heater on the PLO tables. Great job.

I will keep saying this, reconsider your lifestyle because you don't have any alternatives. You don't have any skills or abilities. You're not educated or 'streetsmart'.

At the moment, the only thing you have is HOLDEM. You think you can casually walk into the PLO games and crush those? You are probably barely a winner in holdem, so please, instead of playing PLO and enjoying the gamble, improve your current holdem skills.

I can imagine now what parenting feels like if you have spoilt kids that just won't listen.

Thanks for that insight.

I understand this comment will again hurt your feelings and upset you. That I'm just another hater who wants to 'slow down your rise to the top'.

You should seriously reflect on how you have been wasting away your life and that this massive heater is no good indicator of succes. You cant make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The problem is that youre still not thinking critically about life. To avoid thinking about your flaws you just go play poker.

Youre so high on winning at the moment that you couldn't care less about anything. This is also why youve ignored literally all advice given.

Anyways, Im done with trying to help you out. I will stick around to see you go broke and become a miserable pizza delivery boy, who wished he would have listened.

However, when you go broke in a few months I will be happy to try and help you again. Because when youve reached that point, you will finally be ready to listen, improve and change!

Im ordering a pizza right now. Im not giving tip.

Meh, I agree on the part where he can't even take a week off, but PLO games are a gold mine if you have any clue how to play.

I was just in San Jose, CA for 2 weeks for work and most days in the 5/5/10 PLO there were at least 6-7 people at the table that had no idea how to play.

I understand those games might be crazy soft, but it is not a good alternative for working on your game. Actually, playing PLO will be detrimental to his Holdem game, as he doesn't have a clear strategy mapped out to fall back on when playing Holdem.

Holdem will be boring again for OP and he will start to make some more of his 'genius exploitative plays', looking for action.

If OP put some time in studying PLO and approach it more structured, that would be fine. But no, after one hot run he decides that he crushes the games and that theyre soft. The variance in PLO is not something that will be positively contributing to OPs life.

The purpose of me taking time off was just to give me a rest from poker and make me feel refreshed. I said before that I couldn't pinpoint the exact amount of time off that would make me feel that way, but it turns out that 2.5 days was enough. All I needed basically was a weekend off and then I felt ready to go back last night. If anything, I think it's a great thing that I'm motivated enough to bounce right back into things after only a short break. I don't see it as a bad thing that I cut my holiday short.

I think that variance goes down a lot, at both NLHE and PLO, when you play tight. And like KatoKrazy said, PLO is often a gold mine because people have no idea how to play. Poker is a game of relative skill, not absolute skill. I'd rather be a fish on a table full of whales than a competent pro on a table full of other competent pros. Even though I'm far better at NLHE than I am at PLO, I feel that my edge is similar, if not slightly higher, at the PLO game, due to how bad my opponents are.

How do you want me to reflect on how I've been "wasting away my life"? The damage has already been done. My ex already left me. Already f**ked up uni. Already went bust and had to rebuild everything from the ground up. I'm at the point now where I have basically nothing left to lose, except the money I've made over the past 2 months and except for my current girlfriend, who seems somewhat accepting of me playing poker anyway.

If there is ever a point in my entire life where playing poker is the responsible thing to do, then this is it: I'm 24 years old, I don't study, I'm not married, I don't have kids, I don't have any professional job and I don't have any debt. This is literally the optimal time for me to be playing poker. Maybe in a few years I'll go back to uni and I won't be able to grind as much. Then I'll get a full-time office job and again, I won't have much time to spare on poker. Maybe in a decade I'll get married and have kids and responsibilities. This is the one time in my life, right now, when I'm not tied down to anything.

And I don't want to spend my life asking myself "what if?" What if I had just gone the extra mile? What if I had given poker everything I had? What if I sacrificed everything to make this work? Could I have been the high stakes reg making $300k+ per year? I want a clear answer to these questions. I don't want to sit on my death bed pondering at all of the things that I might've been able to accomplish if I had just seized the opportunity and given it everything I had.

I understand what youre saying. What im trying to get at is why did you mess up in the first place? How are you different now, compared to “screwed it up self” back then?
Watch this video on mindset. https://youtu.be/KUWn_TJTrnU

Let me know what you think and how the concept applies to you.