Stephen Groom Music Producer? Poker Pro? Sports Bettor? Tune in next post to find out

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