Because the readership on a forum is bound to be larger here than on my blog (I mean, come on, who wants to visit anything other than pokerroad anyway), I’ve decided to blog about my latest hairbrained idea here. So here goes.

I’ve reached a point in my “poker career” where I really need to figure out whether I’m going to do this for a living or whether its just going to be a hobby for a while longer. Some of this comes from the fact that as a graduate student I exist on stipends, loans, and grants, and such things tend to dry up in the summer when there is no school. As such, barring getting an internship somewhere (computer programming companies are rather soulness down here, and my lack of a journalism background potentially cripples my chances of a PR internship), I need to figure out if poker can be a solid income. So after crunching a lot of numbers…I’ve determined that if I can get a bankroll of $10000 by the end of May, I can probably presume that I can get through the summer making about as much money per hour as any internship would provide, and reassess after then. I tried starting this plan in the beginning of Feburary, but a whole host of issues from the mundane to the “YOU ARE NOT PREPARED” variety left me with little more than I started with at the end of the month, with no where near as much playtime as I had initially expected.

So…here was the plan I had:

  • Starting yesterday, I have a goal of how much money I should hope to make by the end of the week. I can’t (or at least will try not to) look at my cashier or my session/graph on HEM. This goal is of course not set in stone, I have to account for the runbad possibilities, but it sets up a good benchmark in order for me to expect to accomplish my goal by the end of May.
  • I have a rigid BR management system that will have me focusing on limit cash games for quite a while, then when I get enough money I can take shots at small buy-in MTTs (the exception being the “Lessons with the Bear” tourney which, while slighly outside my bankroll, is has too much of an extra incentive to pass up)
  • That BR system and goal list might be released if anyone is interested in my BR scheme, but needless to say it has me reaching the $5/$10 level roughly when I’ll need it to maintain a 1.5 BB/100 winrate and still meet my weekly goals.
  • As the title suggests, I’m hoping to get from $1000 to $10000 in 3 months, not exactly the easiest task since I have to start at 100FL for the first little while.

The second part of this challenge is increasing my “presence” within the poker community. I don’t mean you’ll see my face plastered all over the place, my goal is to get a large amount of that continuing education through my peers that I think I’m lacking right now (I am the shark amongst my friends…which I know is just like saying I’m the biggest fish in my pond.) Here’s what I hope to do on that end:

  • Read up on some of the strategy in the library of poker books I have, and some of the strategy posts on 2+2.
  • Get really active in the strategy and hand forums on Pokerroad…mostly because its a friendlier community than 2+2
  • Try to apply what I’m learned by trying to teach it back. This is partially covered by the activity in the forums, but if people are interested in getting a group together to talk about poker (like through a skype conference or whatever) maybe that can be set up.
  • Use my poker podcast (check the link in my sig!) as a sort of audio blog of this challenge, bringing up points I’ve found important along the journey as well as key concepts that I think growing players might overlook.
  • Finally…update the forum post on the PR forums and the cross-post on my blog.

Ideally I won’t come off looking like a total moron, but that’s the risk I’m clearly going to take by posting this in a public place. I’ll be playing on Pokerstars (no rakeback I know but hopefully at some point the FPPs will add up to get me some bonuses + stellar rewards) so if you want to play me I’ll be on the 100FL tables until proven otherwise.

Wish me luck!
Spartan