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...