Hey everybody, been playing poker for about a decade on and off now and have found nothing I love more than being at the table. I'm 28 in the Indiana area and have played the local games pretty successfully over the past few years, though I've been out of the grind for the past year due to a deployment. I find the time away to be a blessing in disguise since I was able to pay off my 50k in college debt finally, along with having about 12,000 in savings. Not sure what my final starting bank/liferoll will look like but I am going to spend a week in Vegas to play in a couple WSOP events late June/ early July and expect to make about 15k off my condo, so I should be safe for a bit.

My goal by the end of the year is to have 50k bank/life roll (about 6 months to go from about 20k-50k), and if the going is good, maybe move to Vegas afterwards. I'll probably keep a part time job in sales while grinding it out for about 8 hours a day, four days a week, until I see a concrete possibility of doing this professionally. My goal is to continue reading as well, at a rate of about 1 poker book a week.

I still have a bit of time before I make it back to the states and was looking for some advice before getting back into the grind. Most of my time has been spent reading poker books for the past year while free, from Super System to the Mental Game of Poker to the Book of Poker Tells. Love to hear any advice from the community, been gone for a bit!

Good luck! I hope you can hit your goals! Wish I had read the books when I was younger! I feel like some are good while others aren’t, but of course we all have our own styles that work. Wish you all the best

Good luck with your plans mate and congrats on paying off your debt

A lot of the books on the market are kinda out of date.... especially with GTO and game solving software like PIO.

The basis for calculating financial goals is to set some goals around how many hours you will play per week and over time, you should be able to develop a rough idea of your hourly.

I am conservative so I would wait until 2020 or so to start tournies - personally, I would want to be at least a 5/10 cash game crusher before putting any $$$ into tournies - my reasoning is that large chunks of the field are throwing their money away for the most part to incredibly creative and talented players.

Having a year's play under your belt will go a long way to sorting your finances out for better or worse and will give you a much better idea of where you stand from a skill POV.

Cheers and glgl

gL