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

Week 2 as a professional poker player

Swings and Swongs....

Well, this past week has been pretty amazing for me results wise and everything else has been pretty good also.  I ended last week out of makeup and I was pretty happy to be able to come home and potentially be able to earn some money straight away.  Upon getting back from my long weekend spent with family I decided that it would be worth my time and effort to put in two marathon days at the end of last month in order to reach sky's Priority Club.  This meant that across Tuesday the 30th and Wednesday the 31st of August I played 17 hours of poker in total.  I also played more tables than usual during this time and made my goal by earning just over 10,000 sky poker points.

When I spoke to my backer about attempting to achieve sky priority status despite being so far behind the pace his reply was "It's impossible".  I felt very good and very positive to have achieved sky priority status and meet one of my goals for the month of August when I had feared (and basically submitted to) the fact that I wouldn't.  I believe that it is very important to continue to set goals for the short, medium and long term as it would be very boring and difficult to be motivated to work without feeling like I was achieving something.

While I did very well on Tuesday and Wednesday for volume, financially this period included my worst day on sky poker ever.  On Tuesday of last week I had a total loss for the day of 13 buy-ins.  A £££ amount of £-651.  This felt awful.  I can 100% admit that atleast some of the money was lost due to me playing bad due to tilting, stress, tiredness or whatever.  I mean c'mon.  Can you imagine how you would feel if you were losing 2 weeks wages in 2 hours or less.  I can 100% confirm that being stuck this amount of money in a session affected my mindset.  I was constantly doing all sorts of suboptimal stuff which I wouldn't usually do influenced by knowing how much money I was losing.  Realistically though, I must have ran pretty shit and been hideously unlucky to lose that amount.  But the nature of the game for me that day meant that once I  started losing money due to losing flips, getting coolered and running bad I compounded the problem by playing worse.

So... He lost all of his money.  He's broke.  He has failled.  He will be back to work within the month now.  Well, actually no.  I continued to play my target volume and play through the downswing and now I am back on track winning alllllll the money.  This brings me to another interesting little charm which poker and basically all games of chance have which will take some getting used to.  When you are losing, you feel like shit.  It is unavoidable.  You feel that you must be playing bad.  You must be doing something wrong.  You will never win again.  You've fucked up.  etc etc.  These are all of the feeling that I had after my big losing day.  Somehow though, after this bad day I went on to win back all of the money plus a substancial amount more to finish the week way ahead of any target or expectation which I had set for myself.  Now I feel great.  I feel motivated.  I feel like I am indestructable.  I must be playing good.  I will be able to win allllll the time. etc etc.  Basically just the exact opposite of how you feel when you are losing bags of money.

It will be important for me to get used to these emotions and not let it affect my game, my ego, my confidence or anything else.  It has became clear to me quite early (possibly to my benefit) that huge money swings and torturing varience will be a frequent and expected feature of grinding cash games.  The way I view it is like this.  I am playing these games solely to make money.  I make money by following a process of logical deductions which allow me to make the correct decisions and the ones which will make me the most money over the long run.  The results of any action, street, hand, session, day or week aren't important in the slightest and the only thing that matters is I make these decisions correctly and consistently.

If I could be disciplined enough to think this way all of the time then I believe that it would lead to a state of tiltlessness which will allow me to make the most money I potentially can.  Obviously we humans are emotional, conscious creatures and to approach something so robotically would be impossible.  The closer I get to this state the better though.  It will allow me to distance myself from any money swings which I encounter and let me play optimally always.

My one goal for this week was simple.  To play enough hours to be on target to achieve a total playing time on Sky Poker by week 4 of 120 hours.  Obviously my intention was to make money in doing so but that probably should go without saying.  I achieved this goal quite comfortably and have played a total of 31 hours and 45minutes the past week.  My running total since I started this series of blogs is 58 hours and 45 minutes of play on sky which means that I am close to my target of 60 hours but not quite there.  I aim to rectify this by setting my goal for next week to play at least 31 hours again. Oh and yes.  I did make a profit.

I delibrately said that I would keep my winrate and winnings out of this blog and despite recieving feedback that people want to hear these figures and see some pretty graphs I am not going to break the trend in this week either.  What I will say however is that I have made way in excess of what I thought I would and what I thought was possible.  I am very close to my target figure for the entire month and we are only half way there in terms of time.

This means that it looks very likely that I will be withdrawing myself from conventional salaried employment this month and I have set myself a deadline to know the answer for definite by my next weekly blog update.  I have now also set myself a personal goal to achieve my desired months winnings by the end of week 3.  Achieving this will make the decision making process alot easier.

I was asked to do a few paragraphs about my lifestyle and the effects that playing poker full time has had on other aspects of my life.  Words fail me for something specific to write but I can completely say that two weeks in I have never felt happier about my financial, employment and future security than I do now.  This is a tough thing to measure however as if I had have had a £651 losing day prior to writing this blog then this whole paragraph would be completely different.

The one other thing which I am very happy about relating to my lifestyle is my freedom.  Too much freedom will be a very bad thing for me while trying to maintain motivation and professionalism so I do not offer myself too much.  I do however have more freedom now than I have ever had in a different working or studying situation.  For example.  If I was irresponsible enough to do so, I could say to myself tomorrow that I am taking two days off to return to Gibraltar.  Now obviously this will have an affect on me financially because I lose two day's earning while travelling.  But realistically I could probably sleep on a friend's sofa, take a laptop and play 3 hours+ per day and still make a decent wage while out there.  I believe that that type of freedom will have an amazing impact on my quality of life.

Thanks for reading and I hope you are back around about the same time next week for my next blog.  Oh... about that.  It will most likely be posted on Monday the 12th due to me being in Nottingham for the Sky Poker Tour final on the 10th and 11th.
Cheers
Stephen