Quote:
Originally Posted by Playbig2000
hey man, i'm sorry to hear about your misfortunes, whatever they might be. I do want to stress to you that if you have been playing part time while holding a regular job, playing full time "FOR A LIVING" is a totally different animal, to say the very least. You really really need to be ready to do this, and not because of a series of misfortunes.
I'm not trying to be an *** hole. But it is what it is. Live full time poker, even with your win rate (which is not too bad based on that sample size but could be much better) is something that you should really only do once you are so far ahead in this game profit wise and you don't have to worry about money and living expenses for like 2 years. It's really easy for you now to say "Well, I lost my job. My girl (or boy haha) left me. I'm going to play poker full time finally". But the reality is, if you have never played as a sole means of income, about 40% of the time you are gong to come home feeling like **** because you dropped a buy in or three and you have rent due the next day. You have to hope and pray things will turn around for you, and trust me, this WILL interfere with your decisions on the table unless you have tons of expenses paid and tons of cash on hand (I mean like a hundred grand or more, which isn't hard for a good player).
I appreciate the words of wisdom. I should've mentioned in the OP that I actually did play professionally for about 2 years. It was my sole means of income and trust me I am more than familiar with the sole-crushingness of it. But that's why I feel like I'm better tuned to succeed this time around. I learned a lot of lessons the hard way.
There are mainly 4 reasons I failed my first go-round as a pro:
1. LAZINESS - not putting in anywhere close to enough hours, traveling around to hang out with my friends, having a monster session and thinking I'd earned the next few days off, etc.
2. TOURNAMENTS - my skill set was honed for cash games, yet I kept chasing the big score and never hit it
3. LOCATION - I moved to Biloxi, which was kind of half-assing it. It was somewhere where I could play but still close enough to home. I didn't go for optimal poker value.
4. WEED - I was a huge pothead, often called it a day early to go home and get high, thus cutting into my hours. Eventually I made the even worse decision to start playing high. Disastrous results.
I can foresee myself continuing to struggle with #1 a little, but 2, 3, and 4 are absolutely corrected going forward. I've also written a very detailed poker "constitution" for myself with specific guidelines, BRM rules and milestones, goals, etc.
The biggest problem is that my life/poker roll is far from comfortable, so if things get off to a brutal start I might have to pick up part time work early on.