Thinking Ahead

When you play online poker, vast swathes of your time are polluted by utter boredom. The game can be extremely interesting, but the day in/day out grind can really start pressing on you. That weight is what turns a lot of players to tilt, or to moving down where they make less money, or even driving them so far as to quit.

My plot to alleviate this is to move around a lot. I'm going to buy a nice car, stick most my belongings into storage, and drive somewhere I haven't been before. Look for a flat to rent, learn some of the language, learn the city, meet the people who live there, meet the people who're passing through. Vague plan:

April 11th to April 18th - Monte Carlo
April 30th - Last day of work
May 28th? - Vegas, WSOP, 2 months
July 16th? - Back to UK, buy nice car
September - Somewhere warm for the winter (Portugal?)
January - Someplace else warm for the rest of the winter (South France?)
May - Someplace random in Europe (Estonia?)

Sounds expensive? Well, my fixed costs for living in London are upwards of £1,000 per month, and that's before doing anything fun. I frequently spend more than £2,000 per month, which may give you some insight into just how much beer I drink. My savings are plentiful, but I hope to be averaging around $10,000 per month (tax free) from poker. HOPE.

That average isn't spectacularly ambitious. I don't want to get too into the technical side of poker much for this blog, but if you play $200 NL at about 800 hands per hour, you should be looking at around $100/hour.

Right now I spend a bit over 50 hours a week working or commuting. I plan to spend 20 hours a week playing poker (plus 10 studying poker), so expect to be hitting $8,000 per month. However, I plan on being able to play $400 NL by then, so my average should be quite a bit higher.

That's the hope anyway. Winning can become very insidious - you have a good month and you expect to run that well forever. I won't. I will have losing months, I will have hugely frustrating breakeven months. I will pay rent one month with my rakeback cheque. I just hope these're the months I'm sitting in the Portugese sunshine...

A Tip

Cash games in Dublin, during one of the largest tournaments of the year. It's a €1/€2 NLHE game, but as usual some people are taking it very seriously indeed.

Drunk player to my left: Expensive clothes, carefully shaved stubble and the dilated pupils of the totally wasted. He plays like a typical live player, but is keeping himself to himself. Eventually, he manages to get all-in badly in a three way pot where he wins a side pot but loses the main (I'll spare you the details).

He spends the next five minutes swearing, ranting and complaining about the state of the universe. But then, on the next hand, he decides he got shortchanged. He decides that the side pot was only a third the size it should've been. The dealer was completely correct: I make sure I always know the pot size in live games, as should've stubble-guy. Half the table backs her up, explaining what happened. Unfortunately, he just refuses to understand.

He starts swearing at the dealer - fucking bitch, stupid whore, blahblahblah, doesn't she know who he is? She calls the floorman over, who says it's too late and the dealer was right anyway, please shut up, thank you, goodbye. The dealer says nothing but "I correctly awarded the pot sir", but he just will not shut up.

I'm sure you've all crossed paths with dicks in the poker world, but this guy was in a league of his own. He just wouldn't shut up, was getting more and more offensive and more and more agressive. The floor didn't help the dealer a bit, though the rest of the table is telling him to shut up by now.

As soon as play finally resumes, I end up trap/stacking him - again, I'll spare you the details - but he's lost control and he got it all in with not a lot of anything.

He's getting up to leave and is shouting at the dealer saying he should've had more money in and he'd never have lost the hand if it wasn't for her, and how it's unfair that he was born with a tiny penis (my memory is hazy, perhaps that's just what he meant to say). I ask the dealer what he started the hand with, I take those chips out of my pile, I look up to him... And then I tip the dealer his entire stack.

He leaves, seething. Fortunately for my health, I haven't run across him since...

One Post Blog

I have elevated myself above the teeming masses of literally a million blogs by making a second post! No longer need I fear polluting the internet with a one post blog! No longer will future generations hoping to gain insight to my life have to seive and re-seive through one entry! No longer will you all refresh my blog in vain! (I have had three unique visitors so far, so am justified to say "all")

Most good blogs have a theme, a direction to their posts. I haven't thought things through very well though, so I'm just going to post at random and hope it ends up interesting anyway.

April 30th is my last day at PokerStars - the EPT season ends in the middle of that month in Monte Carlo, and it'd be very hard for whoever takes over my job to take over from me mid-season. This has the enormously unfortunate side effect of me having to spend a week in Monte Carlo, and probably a few days in Warsaw in mid March. It's a hard life, it really is.

I was planning to explain what I'm going to be doing over the next few months - I have a plan, honestly - but I got distracted by Monte Carlo.

Have you ever paid €26 for a cheeseburger? €20 for a bottle of beer? Had to persuade the doorman that you are sufficiently well dressed for the nightclub whilst wearing your best (ok, only) suit? Welcome to Monte Carlo. At the Dusk Til Dawn closing party - think ropey pole dancers and a drunken Bill Chen without a shirt on - I managed to order a €180 round.

Me to boss: "Er... Do you reckon I can expense this?"
Boss (slurring): "Of course! More champagne!"

Receipt goes into suit. Suit goes into wardrobe. Nine months later, office christmas party, suit leaves wardrobe. Fish out receipt, thinking it'd be nice to have an unexpected extra €180 next month. Receipt faded entirely to white, just a blank piece of paper. goddamnit

Idiot

I don't want this to come across as boasting, I want to explain how stupid I can be. I'm 28 and don't have any useful qualifications. I have a grand job title and am likely to take home £sixty grand this year, doing a remarkable facsimilie of what I'd be doing for free anyway. I guess you could say I'm the expert knowledge - knowledge for the marketing department of an online poker company. Marketing people typically don't spend their week nights playing a thousand hands of online poker, or posting on 2 + 2, or reading a poker website: Fortunately for their karma, I do it for them.

Sounds good? Sounds fun? Sounds like the kind of thing you can tell a girl at a bar? Except for the bit about 2 + 2, obviously? Well, I quit last week.

I quit last week but don't have a job go to. I quit last week and am going to sit at home at my computer all the time. I quit last week and I'm going to spend the next few months playing online poker.

The thing is, to play poker for a living, you need to have a lot of money online - say, $15k. You need to know you can beat the games for a good amount - perhaps $100 per hour, at the least. You need to have a long track record of doing just that. And most importantly, you need to be sure you can play it through thick and thin, through the agonising grind, through the sometimes endless stretches of pure frustration.

And I dunno if I can do much of that anymore. So I'm going to write a blog to tell you how it's going. As Tommy Angelo says, "It is not possible to find out if you have what it takes to make your living playing poker, except by quitting your job"