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

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