Stephen Groom Taking a shot at becoming a Poker Pro

2011 wrap-up and looking forwards into 2012

Here we are at the top of 2011 and for the last 4 months I've been considering myself a "Professional Poker Player".  My risk-of-ruin had been pretty high from the outset and already once I have recovered from being pretty close to busto.  For this reason I am very happy that for now at least, I have managed to survive in this game.

The poker is the main talking point of this blog nowadays and what 95% of the content will be about in the future but as it is a pretty fun and important part of the year I can put that to one side for a few paragraphs.

2011 has been a very good year for me all in all and for once as I reflect I am happy with most if not all of the choices and decisions that I have made.  I am now 21, I have a BA degree with 2:2 hons, I have a new car and flat, a good circle of friends with similar interests, a new job (some might not call it that yet) which so far has been very rewarding and I have a better quality of life than I can ever remember having.

2012 for me is going to be about next-steps.  Taking everything that I have now and making a conscious effort to improve on what I would call a good solid foundation which I worked towards in the latter half of 2011.  I have already decided on a few achievable and measurable goals for what to achieve in the next 12 months and this post should hopefully allow me to revisit them and see how I am doing at achieving them and sticking to the famously useless New Year's resolutions.

What I want to achieve in 2012

• Play around 700,000 cash game hands on Sky Poker at stakes no lower than £0.20/£0.40 over 11 months
• Spend a full month of poker playing MTTs and play at least 600 individual tournaments
• Make £18,000 total profit (inc: bonuses) from Sky Poker
• Move up a limit on sky and be a consistent winning regular at £0.50/£1.00 on Sky
• Get onto Team Sky Pro
• Have a regular fortnightly home game
• Travel around playing a small, select sample of live poker games inc: bimonthly long-weekend trips to Nottingham for the deepstack festival
• Increase my bankroll enough to be comfortable playing £2/£5 live cash games
• Buy/adopt a Staffy dog
• Have at least one holiday abroad
• Increase the amount of socialising that I do in my spare time

I will use this list throughout the year to check back and report on how I am doing with my achievements.  I expect that I will probably review my progress quarterly.

As well as all of the positive things which I'd like to achieve and improve upon in 2012, there are ofcourse the negatives which ought to be addressed too.  This part is usually tougher:

2012 New Year's Resolutions

• Gambling
  I'm not sure of the best way to address or measure this but I certainly want to reduce or totally stop indulging in -EV gambling (casino games, fruit machines, slots, bookies etc).  This hasn't been a major problem for me but I have definitely spent/wasted/lost more money than I would like to have over the last few years. I think getting in control of this while I still play small will help me to stay away from such games when I have the ability to punt away large amounts of potentially life changing money.  I will start by saying that for the foreseeable I will totally stop all of the above activities.
• Health and Fitness
  This is a must-have on everyone's list but all jokes aside it will be very important for me this year given my working situation.  My diet could actually be far worse and I know a great many people who spend 6+hours a day in their home office who have far far worse diets than I do.  I don't overindulge on takeaways, I don't sit all night and munch on convenience-food and unhealthy snacks either.  I always have at least breakfast, one big meal and some smaller in-between meal snacks per day.  Now obviously this isn't ideal and I should be aiming to have breakfast + 2 meals per day but I find it tough when I am awake at night to be motivated to make a big meal at 4am.  I also have problems motivating myself to cook for just one person.  If there was someone else around I know for sure that I would eat more consistently and also cook better meals with more variety.  That is the thing which I would like to improve on more than anything else.  Quality of my meals.  I often find myself digging around the freezer for a quick 20-minutes and done meal to throw in the oven but really this isn't very satisfying or healthy.  There is nothing better than having your own home-cooked steak dinner but as I mentioned earlier it is tough to justify the expense and effort when eating alone.

  In terms of exercise I made a small start earlier in the year when Ben and I chose to start jogging.  Our laziness and Ben's injured foot means that this didn't last very long.  I will keep this up and maybe have a view to joining a Gym, swimming pool or some kind of sport to keep me busy.  In addition to this, if all goes to plan and I get my puppy (yaaaay), 3 walks a day will ensure I don't become heavier than my age in 2012.

I have now basically typed myself out so to all readers, friends, opponents etc I hope you had a very good Christmas and hope you have a Happy New Year!

Stephen
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Blog when you’re winning…

So as always seems to happen with peoples blogs (especially mine for some reason) I have managed to let between 3 and 4 weeks pass since my last post.  The reason?  I can only assume that it's because I've been losing a tonne.  From my high point at the end of November I am currently still stuck over £1k on Sky and overall it has been pretty tough.  Somebody commented to me that I seemed to be pretty stressed out and introvert at the peak of my losses (I was losing close to £2k about a week ago) and looking back I guess they were right.  These are the biggest losses I've ever incurred on my own money lifetime and to say that it didn't have a bad effect on my emotional state and personality would be a pretty big lie.

So yeah.. Where did it all go wrong?  November was my biggest winning month since leaving work and second biggest winner lifetime.  As I remember I had gotten pretty complacent and lazy towards the end of the month and when December rolled around I don't think that my head was in the right place.  By the 7th day in December I had lost all of the money in my sky account, loaded up another £1k and taken out my anger over at betfair casino losing a pretty hefty sum of money playing casino games (predominantly blackjack) which I don't mention in the quoted losses above /\.  That money I guess is expenditure, but it is very wasteful and changed my mind about table games very quickly.  I will definitely have something about that in my new year's resolutions/goals post in about a fortnight.

For all the bad it has done, my massive downswing at the beginning of this month has had it's benefits too however.  It has once again shown me how cruel poker can be and I have learned that emotionally I am not as close to being ready to deal with this as I once thought I was.  It has also taught me the importance of volume, planning, discipline and motivation.  At the beginning of the month I decided that I would aim to make around 16,000 sky poker points (£625).  This would have been equivalent to around 106 hours of 6tabling 50nl.  By day 13 of this month my target has now become a far greater 24,000 points (£1,250) and already by the end of the 13th I had made 11,652 (78 hours of play 6tabling 50nl).  Coupled with the fact that at my low-point this month I spent a few days playing 20nl and moved all the way back up through the limits playing 20, 30, 40 and now back to 50nl it is a pretty impressive feat.

At this point in time on an average day I am playing 8 tables of 50nl and playing between 6 and 8 hours per day.  Assuming a 20 day working month this should net me between 24,000 (£1,250) and 32,000 (£1,875) points per month.  If you then add to this the money made in-game this should lead to me having a very comfortable lifestyle next year at 50nl.  This is before we even discuss plans for moving up.

So in 2012 I will be making at the very least £15k from rakeback alone.  This solid foundation allows me to speculate that I should easily cash out over £20k from Sky Poker next year and allow me some kind of perspective for planning my year out in terms of profit and savings goals, moving up and potentially recruiting and mentoring micro-stakes horses as my roll allows.

I am going to take a leaf out of my friend Jon Lundy's book next year who showed me a very interesting structured plan for how he was going to spend his time in 2012.  No more staying up till 9am drinking and then sleeping in until 8pm the following day and missing grind.  I mentioned at the start of this process that this is a job first and foremost.  A person who treats his job with as much respect as most grinders treat theirs will have a very unrewarding and mediocre career and I need to do my best to keep some perspective.

My next planned blog will be around the 29th-31st detailing my plans for next year, new years resolutions and targets as well as my findings from 4 full months as a pro.  Please as ever leave a comment below if you enjoyed this read and have anything for me to discuss next time.

Cheers
Stephen

Back to 50nl

I don't believe that I mentioned in too much detail how my life and financial sitiation was, mostly because it isn't in my best interests to tell everybody on the internet just how much money I do or don't have in my poker and bank accounts.  Let it just be said that two weeks ago when I started playing on my own money I was in a fairly unpleasant situation financially and if I were to have gotten off to a bad start in poker I would have been in a lot of trouble financially very quickly.  I was very close to going back to work and had even taken steps to begin searching for and applying for jobs.

Happily though, the exact opposite has happened and I am now quite confident and comfortable with my professional status and my financial sitatuion.  This is entirely due to a huuuuuge heater which I have been on over the last fortnight since I started to play on my own money and I have managed to cash out enough money to keep me very comfortable for the forseeable and give me what I consider an acceptably low risk of ruin.  Exact amounts will be kept for those who it concerns but 14 days ago when I started to grind again I considered that I needed to have a very successful November in order to continue to play poker professionally.  Now though, if I break even for the entirety of November I will still be in pretty good shape.  A losing month however is still not a good prospect.  I have a sizeable bankroll for 50nl but I still don't have my three months life expenses quite yet.

I don't really know what else there is to say on the matter now.  My quality of life is still really high and I am very happy with my work/play balance.  I am spending a fairly high amount of time relative to most socialising, eating out and going out with friends and this is the main reason why I like the idea of continuing to be a professional poker player so much.  The one thing which has bugged me a little bit recently is when for whatever reason somebody asks me in a formal environment what I do for a living.  I still haven't decided what my go-to answer is going to be to this question but when I don't see it coming I am having a real hard time thinking of an answer.  I wonder if other pro gamblers have had an issue with this but here is the process I have.  For example, my GP asked me "so what do you do?".  My immediate thought was "What DO I do?".  To say I am a pro gambler is likely to lead to loads of awkard questions from people who don't understand the principles of the thing.  My friend and fellow pro Martin and I had a discussion yesterday about the people who ask about gambling and say "So do you win every time you play", "Can you teach me your system", "If I give you (£10|£20|£50|£100) will you double it for me?" and from that I concluded that it is probably best to not discuss the idea with people unfamiliar with poker.  So for the moment my go-to has been to say that I am unemployed.

Now, for me being unemployed is a negative thing.  Somebody tells me that I am unemployed and I immediately jump to stereotypes which have grown within me as I have been growing up and it is not something which I want people to think of me.  When I say that I am unemployed but show up in a nice car, with nice clothes wearing my watch I don't want people to judge me so I think I need to come up with something new to say to people.  An approach which some people use is to be very vague, or avoid the topic but I think that this makes you seem untrustworthy or a little odd in some way.  If you ask someone you have recently met "What do you do for your living?" and they answer "This and that" or quickly change the topic then what is your opinion going to be of them.

I kind of wish that last month I had luckboxed a place on to Team Sky Pro because then it is very easy to answer the question.  "What do you do for your living Stephen?" answer: "Oh, I'm a team sky poker player".  That rolls off the tongue alot better than "I'm a pro poker player" in my opinion.  So basically I need to think a little more about how I am going to approach the subject in the future or luckbox my way on to Team Sky Pro in November.  I know which I'd rather do.

Hmmmm.  This blog seems a little rambly and chatotic so I will end it now before I get onto a nother odd tangent.  As always, thanks for reading and this time I hope there can be some discussion about /\ in the comments below.
Cheers
Stephen
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Welcome to unemployment!

After a huge amount of debating and nine months of excuses, today I finally did it.  I quit my job.  This was not a decision which I have taken lightly and I have came to the conclusion that it is the best choice for me in the short and medium term.  I haven't quite decided how this will play out in the long term (10 years +) as I have only lived for 21 years before today.  I have definately given some consideration however to what my prospects and options are for the future if I consider grinding for any longer than this.  I have also gave thought to how having a period of time, however long it is, grinding and then quitting would create obstacles which I will face in trying to go back to work.  The specific thought processes and decisions I have come to are way beyond the scope of this blog but lets just say that I believe that I will be much better off financially and personally within the next 5 years if I am going to grind for 120 hours per month and continue to make as much, and manage my money as well as I have in the last month.

So quitting work was a pretty big decision and aswell as the "where do I go from here" thought process I considered what I wanted to achieve in life.  From a very young age it was apprent that I did not like being told what to do.  After I left school I always envisioned myself as someone who would either be running some kind of small business or in charge of a small operation within a larger one.  I was never content being on the bottom rung of a heirarchy and was always more concerned with long term prospects in a role and would never be the type of person to get stuck in a dead end job.  Going pro as a poker player in my opinion has a lot in common with running a business.   I don't have to answer to anybody and I am completely in charge and accountable for my own success or faliure.  I can dictate the amount of time, effort and energy that I put into it and I will recieve a reward back from it which is proportional to what I put in.  In a standard 9-5 go nowhere dead-end job I can work as hard as I like, or as little as I like (within reason) and still recieve the same paycheque at the end of a month.  I really like the idea of this level of responsibility.

I also have prospects too.  I don't know many situations where people start a job at an entry-level and are given the opportunity to earn, or negotiate a future payrise, a future plan, a development strategy or anything else so quickly.  I have worked for my backer for around 2 months or even slightly less.  He and I are already discussing what we are going to do in terms of moving up limits in the near future.  Theoretically by moving up from 50nl to 100nl there is twice as much money to be made.  Now I know this isn't the case but moving up to 100nl and winning will mean a huge jump in my £/hr winrate.  This is something which would have taken months playing on my own money and another reason why being staked is so good.  I am not alone in this too.  A friend of mine called Simon is also staked for cash games and has moved up limits rediculously quickly in comparison to what he would if he was moving up with his winnings.

So.. Poker...
I didn't achieve my other goal for this week which was to play 31 hours on sky.  This was probably an overambitious goal as I knew that I was going to Nottingham for the weekend.  I played less than half what I intended to and netted around 14 hours on sky this week.  This week was a pretty unique one in this respect though because I had alot going on which I ranked above my poker playing commitment.  My backer Ben passed his driving test and I took two days off to help him go and buy a car.  This accounts for about 12 hours of poker missed but I think that it was the correct choice and I enjoyed the time out of the house and doing things which I normally wouldn't.  In addition to this a friend of mine is going away to university this week so I did my best to spend some time with her before she left.  This, again I do not regret and would make the same decision over and over.  Then there is the amount of live poker which I have played in this period which while not part of my goals, is still money earned and a good opportunity to socialise as well as play.  Two birds with one stone.  I played 11 hours of live cash games and netted a fairly good chunk of £££ in that time and all of this in addition to the 4 or 5 hours which I was in the SPT final tournament.

The SPT final was pretty uneventful and I won't discuss it as I don't think hand histories or strategy discussion has a place in this blog post.  It was a £220 pull-up (lol) and I sold 50% of my action to 3 different people meaning that I was at risk for £110.  I took a fairly early bath in the game and was out in level 4 100/200/25 when I lose AK vs 99 and QQ vs KK both for pretty big pots within three hands of eachother.

Overall despite not meeting my volume goal, I am pretty stoked about how this week has went as I achieved my far more important goal for the month of convincing myself that I could resign from my job and doing so.

I will try to keep the frequency of these blogs to around 1 per week and for all of the results-hungry people I will probably post a graph or something just as irrelevant next week.

Thanks for reading and please leave a comment below if you liked this and my last few posts!
Stephen