Week 1 as a professional poker player
Well 7 days into my quest to see if I have the ability to be a full-time cash game grinder and the experience has been everything that I expected and much more.
My goals for this first week were to play 30 hours of 6max cash online and to play the required amount to be on target to make sky's Priority Club which provides a 25% increase in rakeback as well as a few other benefits.
The first goal (hours played) was fallen short of by around 5 hours due to having stayed with family for the last 4 days and being unable to play 6 hours per day. I have still played 25 hours on sky this week and achieved this not by playing 6 hours a day for 5 days but by starting out that way and then playing atleast 2 hours for the last 4 days as I have been staying with family. I still believe that I will be better off playing 5x 6hour days with two days away from sky poker and will endeavour to do it this way next week.
Sky's priority club was always going to be difficult to achieve with a slow start to the month due to working full time. So far I have to earn another 2,500 "poker points" and I have 3 full days to do it. At an hourly rate of 110points/hr though it seems asthough I will come very cloes to my target but ultimately fall short. It has however given me a good idea however of the level of VIP and rakeback which I should be able to achieve next month and this is very useful knowledge to have gained. If I manage to make priority club next month then it will have a significant impact on my hourly winrate.
So... Hourly winrates. I don't really want to talk about these as I believe that it is still early days for determining what my average £/hr rate will be. I am excited to say however that after 24hrs and 40 minutes that it is far higher (even after splitting with my backer) than I was achieving at work. I have estimated that in this time I have played around 10,000 hands and this is a conservative estimate. 10,000 hands however is a very small sample for cash game varience to work it'sself out so I speculate that my hourly rate will continue to fluctuate wildly over the coming weeks.
I started this week in a significant amount of makeup (money I had lost already which had to be won back before cashing any money out) so I haven't done too great financially this week. Despite having been ~17 buy-ins in makeup at the start of this week I have still managed to cash out a sum of money which I can comfortably live from. My financial gain over the next 3 weeks is expected to be alot better due to me at the current time being only 2 buy-ins in makeup.
Clearing 17 buyins of 50nl makeup (£850) was helped by having winning live sessions at both 500nl and 200nl which I spent around 6 hours playing.
So overall I am finding that being a professional cash game grinder is definately a long-term moneymaker if I am willing to put in the effort. I have been fairly lazy this week but this is duer to family commitments which I had already planned. Had it not been for these I think that I could have smashed my targets and made more money than I could ever hope to earn in 1 week while on holiday from work. I am no further to deciding that this is for me yet but I have definately concluded that there is a pretty big chance that it is. I have enjoyed my sessions every time I have played and satisfaction in my opinion will be very important in deciding whether or not I decide to try this long-term.
Grinding has also enabled me to do a lot more as predicted in my last blog post and I can 100% confirm that my lifestyle has improved over the last 7 days.
Off I go to do some bank-holiday grinding to make up for my laziness last week. I will post my next blog update on the 5th September at the latest.
Cheers
Stephen
My grinding plans outlined
Towards the end of my last blog I explained that I was going to take a month away from work in an effort to see if it will be possible to make a living playing cash games on Sky Poker. I will not repeat again my reasons for doing this but if you haven't yet read it I would suggest reading "Could I succeed as a professional poker player" posted just under a week ago.
My plan is to play at least 120 hours in the next 4 weeks on my 50nl stake at Sky Poker. As well as the 120 online hours I would speculate that I will play around 20 hours of live cash game poker under the stake at limits from 50nl to 500nl although I am not making this a goal as it will just happen as a by product of my trip to Nottingham.
I also have a trip to Dusk till Dawn Nottingham planned for the Sky Poker Tour Grnad Final which is a £220 two-day tournament. Ben and I will be staying in Nottingham for the whole weekend whether or not we make day 2 of the tournament as the cash game action at DTD on a festival weekend is very good and I imagine that there will be some very good very deep £1/2 Hold'em games due to the club's £50 minimum/no maximum table limits. We will also be meeting up with a few other friends so it promises to be a very fun weekend.
So yeah. Obviously if I'm playing 50nl it is a little crazy to play a £220 freezeout tourney completely on my own money so I will be selling as much of my own action as I can. Ideally I'd like to sell around 50% but I am definately playing the tournament regardless of how much of my own action I have. If you are interested in buying a % for the game I am selling 10% shares of myself with no markup. This means that for £22 you will get 10% of any prize money won. If you are interested in buying a % please contact me via facebook, msn, skype or leave a comment on this blog. Sold out
So the grinding.... I intend to play 30 hours a week for the next 4 weeks. I intend to spread this across 5 days and leave myself 2 days off per week to socialise, travel, excercise or whatever. My experience tells me that Fridays and Saturdays have the best games on sky so I intend to play these days every week (except the SPT weekend). Suprisingly sundays suffer from low traffic and poor games on Sky Poker. Everybody else is off work on Sundays too which should mean that I can do fun stuff and go places on Sundays which I have been unable to do while working nightshifts. The reasons above are enough so that will be making Sunday one of my days off each week. It makes sense that if I have Sunday off that I should have a day connected to it off too. As the games on Saturdays are so good I will start by chosing Monday. So the plan is to grind Tuesday to Saturday and have Sunday and Monday away from poker to unwind.
Obviously playing 5 days a week I need to play 6 hours per day to achieve this. Traffic on Sky Poker is good in the evening and dies off almost totally at around 3am. IMO the softest games occur between midnight (when the regs to to bed) and 3am (when the games are just too quiet and there is often only 1 or 2 shorthanded tables) I have to make a compromise here in terms of game selection and working hours hours. I could work 8pm-2am every night but this means that I will probably not sleep until 4am some days and this would effectively just be nightshift and definately negatively effect my social life. The alternative is to work 6pm-12pm when and go to bed straight after. I think that taking a 1hr break in the middle of this session will drastically improve my concentration levels and thus improve the way I play. This changes the times to 5pm-12pm or 6pm-1am.
Working in the evenings will enable me to do things which most people take for granted but I have had problems with due to working unsociable hours. Things such as going food shopping, visiting the bank, hoovering, calling my ISP/phone company and an array of other things which you would not understand until you have tried working nightshift. The one drawback of this is that the majority of midweek socialising is done in the evenings. Going out for food, visiting the cinema and going to the pub are all things which people do during the working week to keep them sane. It may be the case that I miss out on things like this by working 5pm-12pm each day but there is nothing stopping me making plans in the evening and changing my working pattern so that I work 12pm-7pm that day.
Working two 3 hour sessions each day with a 1hr food break will allow me to achieve my minimum 30hours per week. This is my table time and in addition to this I plan to spend some time (at least 5 hours per week) watching training videos and discussing theories with my friends in skype. This former will be done during the daytime on days where I have nothing else to do. A rainy day where most other unemployed people are sat at home watching antiques, cookery and talkshows on TV provides me a good opportunity to log in to deucescracked or twoplustwo and work on my game before I start my session in the evening.
On days such as the above there is nothing stopping me working more than 6 hours either. If I find myself with nothing to do during the day and I have already watched enough training videos there is nothing stopping me starting early and making my first session 5 hours, or doing 3x 3hr sessions or otherwise. It will be my intention to forget these overtime sessions as the month goes on and not offset them by working less the following day.
I will be logging all of my sessions in Poker Journal for iPhone and as the month goes on I will post some screenshots and reports. I will post my first report 7 days into the grind on the 29th of August. This will allow me to keep track of whether or not I am meeting my targets.
Thanks for reading, please leave a comment if you found this post useful or interesting.
Stephen
Could I succeed as a professional Poker player?
A friend of mine asked me the other day "Why don't you update your blog any more? I used to enjoy reading it.". My response was somewhat dismissive: "I don't have anything to blog about". This was around a week ago and since then I have realised that alot of stuff has happened in my life in the last three months which would have been great content for this blog had I been motivated enough to create it.
In the last ten weeks I have had a great time and done a massive amount of cool and fun stuff which I can't remember in enough detail to blog about. The two most memorable events that occured during this period was Graduation and my trip to Gibraltar.
Graduation was an extremely uneventful day in it'sself. The thing that makes it so special is that I am the first person to my knowledge on the paternal side of my family to have ever achieved a degree. This is a feat that I am extremely proud of and I imagine gave my parents and one remaining grandparent great pride. So much so that the difficult history between my mother and her ex-mother-in-law was put aside and we all shared a celebratory meal and drink together afterwards. This meal may seem insignificant to most but it was pretty major for me.
After this was the trip to Gibraltar. This was pretty incredible thanks in part to the two people who I flew over with. My friend Scotty Hocking and his travel-buddy Jennifer Waugh. We had a really amazing time and despite going over there to meet up with Marc Mulhern, we didn't spend much time with him at all. The highlight of the trip to gibraltar was when Scotty, Jenny and I befriended a local man Damian Holmes who worked for the gibraltarian's answer to the wildlife trust (basically he fed monkeys and drove around in a pick-up cleaning monkey poo) and spent the day with him adventuring up and down the rock and we had some pretty amazing experiences thanks to him.
My trip to Gibraltar has led me to the conclusion that I definately need to travel more. I was always envious of Scotty (and Jenny too after getting to know her) about the amount of travelling they did and this has proven to be justified by the amazing experience that I had getting out to Europe to see some new stuff and meet new people. The fact is that you don't even need to spend that much money or go a million miles away to have a great time travelling. You just need to do it!
Over the next few years I will definately make it an aim to travel more and I have plans to have atleast one more trip back to Gibraltar or Spain before the year is out. I will also be sure to get around the UK alot more for some road-trips or semi-spontanious trips to different cities or areas of the country with friends. On that note: If anyone is interested in going somewhere any time (I'll specify why it can be any-time later) in the near future let me know. I'm almost definitely in!
Aside from all of the fun cool stuff which I have enjoyed recently, the only thing which now is consistently dissapointing or below my expectation is my working life. Since Gibraltar I have been working 40 hour weeks in the same old poker dealer's job at Aspers in Newcastle. After only a few weeks of full time work I have decided that I have no intention of staying here. I had already decided over a year ago that it was a stop-gap job but the realisation that I have been here for around twenty months leads me to believe that I am becoming trapped here.
The only thing which stopped me from upping and leaving 6 weeks ago or so was the dismissal of my immediate boss, the resignation of my close friend but superior James and the overall lack of staff. This led me to believe that there would be a more senior position to be come available in the near future but this seems to be taking longer than I had hoped and I am merely staying here hoping that it does with no proof or promises of such a promotion. For a number of different reasons I have came to the conclusion that even if such a position existed, and I was considered for the role that I would not take the job. The casino industry is not one in which I would like to work any longer for a few key reasons. The first and most important being the salary, and lack of prospects or higher-roles to aim for. The other less important but still vital ones are the unsociable hours, being immersed in unpleasent negative-edge gambling the taboo of casino gambling and the scores of unpleasant characters who frequent the place.
With the above in mind, I've finally decided to put into action what I promised myself as early as January into action: Quit my job after graduating my degree. So here it is... Some cobbled together plan about how I'm actually going to escape the unrewarding grind that is my job. Over the past two months I have briefly searched for jobs, amended my CV and applied for a few different vancies with little or no success. I have a telephone interview on Monday for a bank-teller job which I've applied for on the basis of it being daytime-hours, more professional more reliable and higher paying. The issue with this job is that I'm not 100% confident that I will stick it out. Like, atleast I actually enjoy the work I do at aspers. Yeah I hate the place, the customers, the management and 95% of things about the job but I enjoy the work. I think my resentment of this role is more due to the repetition and lack of any sort of challenge or purpose which results from doing the same thing for twenty months. In a bank I don't know if I'd like the work I was doing, or envisage myself doing it when weighed up against my only other alternative:
Going Pro
I haven't mentioned Poker in this blog so far and that is completely intentional. I haven't been accurately tracking my results or devising pretty brag-posts as I was in the past few months as it really isn't important. The people who I expect to read this blog really don't need to know how much I'm winning or losing in any particular month (a rediculously small sample any way) nor should they get to know. The most important thing is that I am aware of how much money I am making, that I am making the correct choices and that I am doing as well as I could be. My new-year's resolution of having an overall profitable 2011 across all forms of poker is going to be difficult not to achieve as I am playing so much better than I ever have. So much so that it is embarrasing and a little scary when I think about how bad I was playing in the past.
Since the beginning of June I have been playing 6max cash on Sky Poker. I was talked into this by my friends Ben Dixon and James Howard who play in the same games at the 100nl level. The month started with me playing 20nl on sky and I very quickly (within about 2 weeks) had a 4 figure account balance and enough money to be playing 50nl. I found the move up to 50nl very tough and stupidly refused to drop down as my account balance dwindled and risk of ruin increased. The month of June ended with me being about breakeven in total but I had created and developed a pretty-solid ABC TAG 6max game that was definately beating 50nl. July came and I played a lot less poker. I was working more and more hours, playing live more and didn't find the time or motivation to play on sky. This changed when I jokingly mentioned to Ben (who has a few horses playing for him) that he should back me to play.
"I've been thinking about this for a little while" he replied to my suprise and a staking deal starting at 50nl on Sky was discussed.
I am going to withold the details of the staking deal and the exact amounts of money won but so far it is going pretty good. I am winning since that day at a rate that I am more than satisfied with and am confident that it is sustainable. The stake also affords me the opportunity to play in live cash games far higher than I have ever been rolled to play in "if the games are good". Sure enough I've played as high as 500nl live and for once live cash game poker seems a venture worth the time rather than a less-than-minimum wage passtime.
Over the last 3 months then I have played a huge amount of cash game poker and while that in it's self is a good thing, the work that is going into my game over that time period has meant that I am better than I have ever been. I am more aware now than I have ever been about what I am doing on a table, why I am doing it, the objectives and pitfalls of lines and actions I am taking and general poker theory. This is something which you never consider as a bad player, but even a simple thing such as a fundamental question "why am I betting here?" will improve a person's poker game and betting strategy to no end. I am still very low down on the Texas Hold'em learning curve but higher than I have ever been. And at least now I am on a path where I am getting better with each day. I am pretty confident that I am beating 50nl at a winrate enough to make a living from. I do not have a sample size to prove or disprove this however so this leads me on to my plan.....
Quitting Work 
I have already speculated that I have the ability to make "enough money to make a living" by playing poker professionally. Unfortunately however I don't have the evidence to back this up. For this reason I intend to spend 1 full month playing poker full-time (at least 120 hours of table time) to see if it is a viable medium-term plan. With this in mind I have taken 27 days off of work starting on the 22nd of August during which time I will be playing as if I was a professional. This has come after a long time of saying that I would try it and the realisation that this is the best and probably only point in my life when I am offered the opportunity to do so.
The reasons:
- Money: Currently I work a close to minimum wage job in which I am earning ~£6.50/hr. I believe that I can make more than this grinding cash games
- Commuting: Despite the fact that I earn £6.50/hr I can take into account the £5 per day for fuel, £5 per day parking and £5 per day food so in reality my wages are £300 than the figure on my wage slips
- My Circumstances: I am single, live on my own and have a very good personal situation with my own flat and very few outgoings
- Commitments: I have no commitments and no ties besides work. This means that if it doesn't work out that I just need to go and find some other low-paying job and I will be back in the very same situation. Nothing gained and nothing lost.
- Lifestyle: I belive (and this is the only point which I am definately unsure of) that my lifestyle will be better and more sociable if I am working for myself grinding than it is currently working for my current company achieving nothing and doing the same tasks day in and day out without reward. There will be no greater good if I am playing poker but it is a similar repetitive task done with no reason other than to make money. Why not do it on my own terms in my own choice of surroundings?
- Freedom: This is something that is not to be overestimated as I will still be required to play for atleast 30 hours per week and do training for between 5 and 10 hours in order to be full-time. I will however have alot more choice of when I actually work and how long the sessions are within reason. I will obviously have times when I must play because the quality of the games is so good but I also have the choice of which 2 days off per week I take and I can make plans to do things or go places with little or no notice required.
So I have outlined my plans for my month away from work and if it succeeds, I will hand in my notice and continue grinding indefinately. If it does not work out the first month then I simply go back to work at Aspers and consider doing soemthing different in the future. If it takes longer until I realise that it isn't working out then I will re-evaluate my options but I have already come to the realisation that work won't be too hard to find. I am not even sure myself why I am in the same job that I have been in for the last twenty months.
This blog over the next month or so will be updated with my experiences and feelings as I get further into my routine as a professional poker player. Hopefully it will allow myself to reflect in a very honest way and seek the opinions of others or encourage others to attempt the same feat. I will try my best to update the blog atleast weekly throughout the next 6 months as it would be very dishonest of me to chose to no longer update the blog or be open and honest if things aren't going well. I want to be able to read these blogs and reflect in the future to come to a conclusion as to whether or not this was the correct choice.
My adventure starts on the 22nd of this month and I will probably post another blog entry before then with my thoughts and a more detailed plan for how I will go about this grind.
Thanks for reading
Stephen Groom
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