A day in the life of a small stakes pro...

[Nate_Dogg]

For all you guys making a living (or supplementing one) by multitabling the small stakes games, what is a normal day for you. i.e. How many hours do you play? When is the best time to play? What are the times to avoid? How do you pick tables?

As an aspiring semi-pro I'd really like to know some of these things. Thanks for the help.

[StacysMom]

i am a senior in college, strive to put in 2 hours a day, generally in the evenings, but more on weekends. as for tabel selection, i generllay look for high average pots but also use PT to identify fish, if i see all tags at my table i move on.

[Exsubmariner]

I do not consider myself a professional or semi pro. I am nowhere near the league of the $15/30 27 tablers making $10,000 an hour. I have been playing for profit now for a short time (cannot be counted in years). I spend about 4-5 hours a night multi-tabling micro limit. I play about 7000 hands a week. My bankroll lives and dies by swings. One thing that I have learned is that you cannot make projections that are short term and you cannot count on the income being there before you have it. If you are looking for supplemental income, working part time at a video store or pizza delivery (although not Papa Johns I hear they treat their employees poorly) would be more reliable and probably comparable to what you really make. My .02 for what they are worth.

[golFUR]

I had been considering how to share my recent experiences, as I have no question, a response seems good. /images/graemlins/smile.gif

I have a full-time job which allows me complete freedom online. I can play from work about 7 of the 8 hours I am there, if I choose. My evenings are entirely free, so, theoretically there is nothing stopping me from playing 12+ hours a day without real difficulty. I don't though. Or, at least, not often.

As to why this has been on my mind - I've recently repeated the same run three times and am now going for a fourth. It was not a run I planned or designed ahead of time, it was more a result of long experience on this one site and something I only noticed in retrospect. What I did was turn $50-$100 into $600-$2400, three times, the same way each time. Each time I cashed out the bulk and repeated the process. Each time it took about a week and a half to three weeks.

My personal formula has been along the lines of:
1) Play 5.50 SnGs until my $100 is around $200 or so.
2) Take my $200 or so over to the .10-.25 Omaha hi tables ($25 max) and play those along with the .25-.50 ($50 max) until my bank is $300-$400.
3) From here I move to 1/2 HE and begin playing the $10+1 tourns. So far, I've won a tournament and cashed a few more each time I've done this, so the bank can grow fast at this point.
4) I'll play limit holdem from here until I cash out, with occassional ventures in NL ring, just for fun. The goal being to get to my favorite limit tables, the 2/4 and 3/6, with close to the proper bank for playing them. I'll generally venture in a bit early, around 200 big bets, because I am familiar with the players and tables.
5) Cash out a few hundred or thousand, start over with $100.

This works for me for a few reasons. I used to play SnGs nearly exclusively and got pretty good at them. My personal expectation is (regardless of how realistic others might think it) to money nearly ever time and to get 1st nearly ever time. I don't, but I expect to /images/graemlins/smile.gif and I come close enough. I don't 'enjoy' them the way I used to though, so I just play the easiest ones for a quick boost to my bank. The other steps are more just acknowledgements of my preferences and abilities. I don't play 1/2 or 2/4 Omaha. The pots are bigger but the players are tougher, it takes so much longer and the risk of getting cleaned out is much higher. I don't play lower limit holdem because I don't like the variance. I found my favorite size tables in my favorite games and planned a route through them that made it easiest for me to earn a little extra cash.

What you had in mind?

[Rudbaeck]

Evenings US time. Especially Friday and Saturday. Weekend afternoons. Your prime 'work hours' have to coincide with others prima leisure time. No way around it.

Morning/early day US time is horrible imho.

Right now I play 10-30 hours a week, depending on how much the university has piled on. If I were to do it full time I'd probably settle for a 30 hour work week, with another 10 or so hours reading the relevant forums here. 8-tabling I find to be alot like my job as a programmer was the last two weeks before a release. Except off course that I can quit for the day when tired instead of working 10 more hours...

You'll see many pros and semipros here that have a 10-15 hour work week, but imho this is the peak of online poker, and you should take all the advantage of it that you can.

I don't think online poker will die as the doomsday prophets are foretelling on a daily basis in this forum, but I think it will never be quite as lucrative as last year and this year.