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I see a lot of tips on the internet but I'm wondering what are the key tips to success that helped you guys when you made your transition from an enthusiast to a fulltime pro? And what helped you maintain?
I'd look at this
thread, which contains years of advice to people who asked your question. This advice was good, free, and mostly ignored.
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I know the 6 months of expenses + 40bi thing but online poker being what it is nowadays
This is only true for strong winning players. Are you already a strong winner with a decent track record at the stakes you want to play as a pro?
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i feel my ambition to succeed is stronger than anyones
Everyone
feels that way.
Here's the real secret, most of the people who are successful and use this as an explanation are fooling themselves. Consider survivorship bias anytime someone my age tries to explain our success to you based on "wanting it more". For every microsoft (name your rags to riches startup) where people put in 100 hour weeks and became zillionaires, there were 99 other places where everyone worked just as hard, and the place went broke. You have to have more going for you than wanting it. Luck helps.
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and i feel i already have a solid edge over most micro stakes players
You have to crush micros players to beat the rake. The biggest villain is the drop. Being the 3rd best player at the table might only make you a breakeven player. If you've studied and worked on your game, you could be much better that most players and still not a favorite to make much money.
Here are the serious tips:
- Being a pro comes from winning so much at poker that it isn't worth your time doing anything else. It could be that you can't make much elsewhere and just playing poker is super fun, so the bar is pretty low. However, you have to currently beat the stakes you plan to play.
- Ideally, you're playing high enough that you could move down and still pay your bills at a limit or two lower than you plan to play. If you need to win at NL200 to pay your bills, going pro at NL200 means you get a job your first downswing. Whatever limit you need to make your nut, your regular limit has to be higher.
- In the long run, going to school can provide you with a lifetime of nearly variance free income. That's a big opportunity. Passing on that opportunity to "get good enough to play poker for a living, and then playing poker" can have a huge cost.
- Whatever you do, don't half-ass school, get little or no value of education, and go broke/in debt trying to play poker on the side. The plan of playing poker on the side seems horrible, especially if you have to play a ton of hours to kind of pay bills + tuition. If you crush mid/high stakes and you can live large based on a few hours of play, ignore all the advice above.