real rounders

is anyone out there making regular money playing poker? by that i mean making say a wage each day or two and calling it a day? or do most making cash from the game win a big tourney then survive off the winnings until the next one?

For those making regular money, can you share your experiences in how you achieve it? such as a regular cash game, or entering a few sit and goes a day?

and a bankroll question - is it bet to set a time limit before calling it quits or a target amount before pulling up stumps?

just interesting to know if there's anyone out there living on this game (aside from the high profile pro's of course)

cheers

Well I'm not who you're looking for, I'm making college spending money, but that's about it. The answer is not to set a money target though. That shows a fundamental logical flaw in variance. Say you want to make X dollars per day. Some days you'll make less than X, some days you'll make more than X. To play until you reach X means that to maintain that rate you can never make less than X per day.

If I did it for a living I would treat it as a regular job with more flexibility. I put in my 40 (or however many) hours per week.

thans for the reply. as far as the shutting up shop concept goes i perhaps should have explained better.

what I meant to ask was if some punters did happen to reach a certain mark early in playing, do they keep playing or savour the win and sit back and watch.

i personally don't agree with the concept and agree with you, but there are some people who set targets and when they reach them thats it.

i mean, if you sit down with a cup of coffee and win two monster pots in the first two hands, and your target, do you play on?

I was more interested in hearing, though, if there are people out there treating it like a job, putting in the hours and (hopefully) making a wage.

Is there anyone? or is that just a fantasy we all have!

I'd like to get to that point one of these days. Nothing would be better than to sit arounda dn play poker all day and have no real obligation.

What I would probably do is this...

Example: Let's say my daily goal is $100. If I hit a couple of big pots and pass that mark early, I'd take $100 off the table, and keep playing until whatever the surplus was, is either gone, or I don't feel like playing anymore.

Anybody who plays poker for a living will play on. Winning two gigantic pots is nothing more than positive variance, and it won't last.

You cannot set your goals in terms of profit (at least not in profit/day -- profit/month is okay). One day, It may take you only 10 minutes to make x amount of profit, but the next day it may take you 20 hours.

Therefore, you need to set your goals in terms of how many hands you want to play. Your long-term winrate is somewhat consistent, so by playing a certain amount of hands every month, you'll get close to your expected average wage.

I'm going to have to disagree here. Sure it sounds great to the casual poker player, but imagine getting up every day, and having to play poker every day just like a job. And when you play that much, how are you going to handle the inevitable down swings? The mental strain from playing for a living is tremendous. You cannot quit when you go on tilt, and that cuts into your wages (or you can quit for a few hours or the day and that cuts into your wages).

Reminds me of the quote from the movie "Rounders". The main character says something like "that guy hasn't had to work in 10 years", referring to Kanish (probably spelled wrong, but you can sound it out). Worm replies with "you don't call what he does work?".

Sure there's stress in all jobs, but what happens when you finish your poker for the day, go home to be with your family, and are down a few thousand dollars on the day? To play poker for a living you have to have amazing discipline and be really mentally tough. Can you sleep at night knowing you lost the kind of money you inevitably will lose due to negative variance knowing that the next morning you have to get up and do it all again?

Now that said, if you really are that good and you really can handle the mental strain, it does sound really good, you can work whenever you want, no one's going to stop your hours from being 1am to 10am. Although you don't get extra for overtime, if you need more, you can just work more, and if you don't need a lot you can have more free time.

If you play for a living, you don't tilt. Why would you?
Anybody who plays for a living has tons of data proving that their profit graph is pointing UP, UP, UP. So they know that even if they're on a downswing they'll turn it around.

You don't sweat the beats. You only make sure to put in as many hands as necessary. It's all about the long run.

Nothing at all happens. It's a day, who cares about a day?
In a regular job, you get paid once per month. In poker, it makes sense to look at your stats on a monthly basis as well. Day-by-day results don't matter.

If you have confidence in your own game then none of this poses any threat. As long as you have a positive winrate, all you have to do is play enough hands.

Maybe it's just me, but no matter how good I was I don't know how I would handle losing something like a thousand bucks in a day, even if I know that if I keep playing that will even out in the long run. Maybe it's more of a confidence thing than a mental strain, I just know that if I went on a cold run and it was that much money (money that if I don't start winning again I'd have to find another job), I may start to wonder if I wasn't starting to do something wrong, and those thoughts would probably make me play worse.

I also remember reading something in "Ace on the River" about how he found it tough to be with his family when all he was really thinking about was what went wrong when he hit a cold run. I seem to remember that you play if not for a living, very high stakes and make very good money, so I'll trust you on that one. Let's just say that I've got quite a ways to go in the mental department, even if I can get good enough to win enough hourly that theoretically I could be making a living off the game. But I've got neither, so I guess I'd better keep up the back-up plan of college and getting a normal job and all that.

This all boils down to bank roll management and discipline... if you sit down and lose a grand and it affects your play..... fulltime poker is not for you. Playing poker fulltime successfully is very much like being a good day trader or a Salesperson who pays for leads...... sometimes your up sometimes your down but in the end I make my neccesary nut.......because I know if I play my best game and I'm always on and patient..... even when I lose a few or more sessions I know in the end I'll be ahead.

Good Luck

This is really just a mental thing. About two weeks back, I lost $2,000 for the first time in a single day, and it upset me very much. But I never tilted, and I was back to break-even in just a few days.
If you play for a living, you'll get used to this quickly. And since you will always stick with a specific limit and have lots of buy-ins, you don't have much to worry about.

Personally, I'm still moving up the limits, so when I go on a losing streak it can be pretty tough on me. But once you've "settled" on a limit, these kinds of things shouldn't bother you much. If you have 50 buy-ins and you lose 10, you'll still be in great shape.

I agree with you in that a lot of it happens mentally. For one thing, you should not look at the absolute value of the money in front of you if you play mid to high stakes. Try to look at it as "chips".

For another thing, you have to have your game together enough to never start doubting yourself. This is where software like Pokertracker comes in handy. If you have 300,000 hands in your database and you're a consistent winner, then that should give you enough confidence and proof that you must be doing something right.

Still, take everything I say with a grain of salt. I don't play for a living (yet), so this is all based on my own observations.

If you want to make, say, $500 a day, and quit playing each time you hit that, you will be setting an upper cap but no lower limit. The variance bug would eat you alive if you did that. I have been doing mostly OK by playing a set amount each day that is somewhat regulated by the Full Tilt Poker Ironman promotion since I need 50 points almost every day. I usually quit when I make that amount because I have a life outside of poker right now.

If someone, especially a professional who wins two monster pots early, is gonna say that this is a "good game" that he/she can dominate and will continue to play in order to extract money from the table. I never leave a table, online or live, if I feel/know that I can do well against that particular batch of players. Example was when I was playing micro-limit ring game on PokerRoom and doubled my buy-in within 15 minutes of 'sitting' at the table. Yeah, it was a pittance compared to the levels that pros and high-rollers play on, but I felt that I can continue to play winning poker so stayed for a couple of more hours. I didn't go that much higher than where I was, but still just a little bit higher.

Now, I'm no professional or anywhere close to being at that level, I just play to learn and understand the game better, since I have to finish up my final year of university and the vast majority of my income is going towards tuition. I'd like to be able to play live for a living, but that won't happen anytime soon. Ideally and practically, over the next couple of years, I'd like to be playing at a level where I'd be playing and winning spending money for everyday activities and use my income from my day-job to save up for business school.

A very good, NONfiction books on this subject is "Hunting Fish, the search for America's worst poker players" by Jay Greenspan. After reading that book, I realized I wasn't cut out to be a professional player in cash games. I wondered if I could make as a tourney player, but my sharkscope says fish, so I think not. I'll enjoy it as a hobby and hope to get better.

Yep....

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