How do u plan your poker?

Some random thoughts: I'm also in college and use poker as my "part time job." Going to school full time makes it sorta hard to play but I get anywhere from 8-20 hours in a week and playing low limits has me usually bringing home a little over 150 dollars a week. I cash out every week (except when I have crappy weeks) for 100 dollars which I put towards bills. Over Christmas break I plan on playing quite a bit in my 5 off weeks both live and online shooting for close to 30 hours a week and seeing how I do.

For planning poker I have a friend who plays full time and is successful at it. He has a college degree but makes more playing poker and he loves it so he has been just playing for almost a year now. He's not rich by any means and you probably won't see him on TV anytime soon, but he does play full time and make money which is more than a lot of people can say.

He logs his poker hours every day, keeps track of his time played and starting and ending pay. He has over 6 filled notebooks and then he puts these in folders by month so he can see how he did in the month of October. One thing I believe he has added to really take the "edge" off playing online full time is he has added live games to his time. He goes to the nearby brick and mortar and gets some hours in and he just got in a fairly high stakes cash game with some buddies. I think it is hard to overlook how different playing live "feels" than playin online. I'm a very social person and I love the atmosphere of playing live and it truly feels different than playing online but your still "playing poker." I think mixing in live play with his usual online regiment has helped keep my friends passion varied and increased his knowledge and skill. I know it has for me!

[Isura]

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Over Christmas break I plan on playing quite a bit in my 5 off weeks both live and online shooting for close to 30 hours a week and seeing how I do.

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5 week vacation? WTF is the name of your school? [img]/images/graemlins/shocked.gif[/img]

[beavens]

i got a month off in between semesters at college (Virginia Tech)

It's not that unreal...a lot of colleges have that long off. It's Kansas State however. I was always under the impression that almost every college got close to a month off...but maybe I'm wrong on that

[saxhoe]

so noone seems to cash out $1000 a month which I was hoping to do... I figured if I make 8 PTBB/100 it would take like 2-3 hours/day 4-tabling 0,5-1 do be able to do that. Is this just a naive dream of mine???

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so noone seems to cash out $1000 a month which I was hoping to do... I figured if I make 8 PTBB/100 it would take like 2-3 hours/day 4-tabling 0,5-1 do be able to do that. Is this just a naive dream of mine???

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This sounds perfectly reasonable.

[Mercman572]

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so noone seems to cash out $1000 a month which I was hoping to do... I figured if I make 8 PTBB/100 it would take like 2-3 hours/day 4-tabling 0,5-1 do be able to do that. Is this just a naive dream of mine???

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8PTBB is very unlikely. If you can do it for 25K+ hands you should be playing at higher levels. why don't you get really good, build a bankroll so that eventually you can take out much more than that a month?

[Go_Blue88]

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so noone seems to cash out $1000 a month which I was hoping to do... I figured if I make 8 PTBB/100 it would take like 2-3 hours/day 4-tabling 0,5-1 do be able to do that. Is this just a naive dream of mine???

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I 3 tabled NL100 for about 6 months and I'd start with a bankroll of 2200 and about every month I cashed out back down to this amount. I think I averaged about 1500 a month and played maybe 30 hours a week with a lot of that time coming on weekends. Obviously variance played a big factor, so that's just an average.

Edited to add what I mean by variance being a factor--for example, one month i made 3-4 grand and in another i made a little under a grand.

[jsnipes28]

I just play whenever i can which is anywhere from 8-15 hours a week 4 tabling. I go to school full-time and play football so i have a lot of time constraints, but i plan on upping my hours as soon as the season ends. (Shameless plug for those that live in the northeast. Williams v. Amherst 12p.m. on NESN. CHeer on a fellow 2+2er #28 for Williams.)

I try to play 15-20 absolute hours a week playing 2-6 tables of NL100 on Party. I exercise extremely good game selection and only sit at tables with known fish or acceptable table averages in VPIP/PFR for my tastes.

One of the most important parts of being skilled at playing poker for profit is exercising good game selection, with bankroll management being very important as well.