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June 12, 2004
One Year Of Playing Poker For A Living
I just realized that it has now been over a year since I quit my job at The Home Depot to play poker for a living. I was working 25-30 hours a week there at $11 per hour, for a net income of about $15,000 (pre tax) annually. I am not sure exactly how much I made because I didn’t keep records of my live play the first few months (which was most of my play) but I can estimate my expenditures and know about how much my bankroll grew during that time. So I am positive that the net sum was either 6 figures or very close to it, meaning that I made more in one year than I would have in 6-7 years of working at The Home Depot.
When I first quit my job I had saved up a bankroll of about $5,000. I started playing live and immediately lost a few thousand, which forced me to move down to playing $5/$10 in real life. Then at some point I discovered Party Poker and began playing $3/$6 and $33 Single Tables on there. I played quite a few hours and over the first 2 months I covered my expenses and grew my bankroll to back over $5k. A few times during that period I would take a shot at playing a few $5/$10 games but each time I hit a bad streak and lost my way back down to $3/$6, at which point I promptly rebuilt my bankroll. This was trying to my confidence, but I knew that it was simply short term results working against me and I kept at it. Then came my lucky break.
Just around the time I quit my job my friend Keith had the kind of run you only hear about. One day he had a few hundred in his PokerStars account, and since he had a job he decided he didn’t care about it and was going to either lose it or make some serious money. So he went and bought in at $30/$60 with only a few hundred (which is the bankroll equivalent of Russian roulette), went on a rush, and a month later had won over $30k. To me and my friends this was somewhat like winning the lottery. So Keith started playing quite often (eventually quitting his job to do so) and he and I would run some of the tournaments on Party Poker. At that time they had a nightly $55 NL tourney, and a $109 Limit one once a week, and that was as big as the stakes got. Now they have a $162 tournament (or above) every night and numerous $109’s. Oh how the times have changed.
So anyway my big break came when in one week Keith won me about $5k. He won a $55 NL and got second (and should have won if not for an incredible run of bad beats when heads up) in a $109 limit in back to back tournaments, both with about a $5k prize. He also picked one off for $10k a few weeks later when splitting with my friend John. What a run that was for him. Anyway now my bankroll was over $10k, which may as well have been a million as far as I was concerned, and I could move back into what I thought was more profitable, the $10/$20 games at the Vegas Nights around Akron. I also took a trip to Atlantic City which didn’t go well, but only shrunk my bankroll by about $1,000, most of which was expenses. So I began playing full time at the games around town for a month or 2 and was making a little, though not much. Because you see so many less hands per hour in real life your bad swings last a lot longer (in terms of time) though they are for the same dollar amounts. You are just as likely to lose $2k playing $10/$20 online as you are in real life, but you are much more likely to lose over a month in real life than you are online, assuming that you are a winning player.
Then one day I went to a house game and had a big loss playing $10/$20 in a 5 handed game. I had thought that I played very well, but simply took a good number of bad beats, and it got me thinking about short handed play. A few people I had met before (who were friends of John) had been playing short handed online full time for a few years and making six figures annually at it. In fact you can now see these people playing in the $100/$200 games on Stars almost every single day. Though I won’t divulge their screen names here, they are players who are often talked about on 2+2 and RGP and are well known to anyone who plays bigger limits online. So I decided to give 6 max a shot.
At that time I had worked my initial $250 Party Poker buy-in to over about $5k so I figured Id take one or 2 thousand and give the $10/$20 6 max a shot. This was in early October and for a few days I won every time I sat down and ended up about $5k ahead. It was at this point that I started to realize what incredibly high fluctuation the game must have, and at the same time that it must be incredibly profitable. So I immediately quit playing it, afraid to lose that much back which in hindsight was probably a very intelligent thing to do. I decided to move down to $5/$10 6 max where the games were probably easier and learn the game more while building my bankroll. So I played that game for the next couple months and managed to win a little over $15k. I was on top of the world.
Then after a couple hundred hours of beating that game for over $70 an hour I decided to take a shot at the $10/$20 games. I started out losing a little which I think was due to a combination of the games being radically different and a little bad luck. I wasn’t down much though and wasn’t too dismayed so I kept at it and in no time had the game figured out and was beating the hell out of it. At $5/$10 the games were very passive, but the games were almost insanely aggressive at $10/$20. Luckily many hours of playing against the 1 maniac who seems to be at every $5/$10 table had prepared me a good deal for what I was to encounter, because even though the players were aggressive they were far from good. So for the first month or so I ended up making over $125 an hour.
It was at that point that tournaments began to explode on Party. At first they had the Sunday $215, which was offering first place prizes of $50,000 or more. Then they added one on Saturday, then one on Friday. Then came the weekday $162 buy-ins, and before you knew it every day of the week had a tournament with first place prizes bigger than my entire bankroll. When you are first starting out and playing $3/$6 games making $25 per hour a $215 buy in seems like a lot of money. When you are making over $100 an hour it is peanuts. So I launched headlong into tournaments, playing every $215 I had the time for and every semifinal and super satellite for the Party Poker Million, which I was desperate to play in. The big weekday tournaments (which are now just $162 buy in regular multis) originally came from their $162 super satellites, which they would run once or twice a week. After a while the boat was apparently oversold so they switched to just paying out $9k prizes instead of cruises, and then eventually made them into just normal tournaments.
So I began playing many tournaments and I had little success at first. I seemed to money enough to break even in regular tournaments, but I had spent quite a bit on satellites with nothing to show for it. However during the very last set of semifinals I managed to win my way into the cruise (after spending almost $2k in satellites). At this point I still spent most of my time playing $10/$20 6 max and only played a few tournaments each week. Then a few weeks before the cruise I caught another big break. I had gone to sleep one Sunday morning (the last day of February) around 11 a.m. and as such didn’t have any intention of waking up to play in the $215 tournament at 4 p.m. However at about 3:30 my friend John called and told my girlfriend to wake me up, which she did, and he told me there were already 1700 people registered for the tournament. Normally 1500 was a big turnout and there was still a half hour left to register, so this one was bound to be much bigger than usual. Knowing I would be unable to go back to sleep anyway I decided to play in it with him, and it ended up having something like 1997 people in it, which is a record I still have not seen bested. Back then Party Poker was still experiencing massive growing pains and the tournament spent at least a couple hours on pause waiting for the servers to be fixed. The whole wile I had an average stack and was desperately hoping that the servers would go down so I could receive a couple thousand (they payout people when the server fails, which had happened to me a few times before) and go back to sleep. Fortunately for me that didn’t happen, since 10 hours later I had taken 4th and was $24k richer. I had to give $12k to my friend, but still it was a hell of a boost to the bankroll.
I went on the cruise in March and didn’t win anything in the tournament (I had started my blog before this so my trip report and the report of my $24k win are in here somewhere) which was pretty much uneventful. I came home and resumed life as usual. I wanted to start playing tournaments pretty much full time, but unfortunately there just aren’t enough big buy in tournaments online to really make this possible, and I haven’t got the bankroll yet to play all the major events around the country, so I kept on playing ring games part time and tournaments part time, which I still do to this day.
Since then I have won a few tournaments. I took down a $109 NL on Party for $8500, and a $200 limit at the Mirage for $5k. I have done pretty well in live action as well, mostly playing $20/$40 and $30/$60 limit hold’em, and a little bit of live no limit hold'em in AC. Hold’em is the only game with which I am extremely comfortable, but fortunately due to its recent popularity explosion you really aren’t missing out on much (if anything) by being unable to play the other games. The suckers want to play hold'em and I want to play with the suckers. It seems though that you really can’t find hold'em only games above the $100/$200 level so at some point I do hope to become proficient in Seven Stud, Stud 8, Omaha, Omaha 8, Deuce To Seven Lowball, Razz, etc. If I am going to be playing the white chip games eventually (which is my ultimate aim) I am going to have to learn those games. I still feel that even though I have improved so much at hold'em in the past year I have plenty more to learn about this fascinating game. Right now I am learning to better play no limit and tournaments (and no limit tournaments), as well as improving my limit game. I am playing a lot of single table tournaments, a lot of multi table tournaments, and a lot of short handed limit games. My bankroll has stayed pretty static over the last couple months due to a pretty bad run which has caused me to win very little more than my expenses, but I am optimistic about it as I feel I have been playing well.
The only thing I am unsure of after my first year of play is my expenditures. I won somewhere around $100k and only managed to save about $25k of it, making my current bankroll about $30k. Don’t get me wrong, I am more than safe with $30k, but where did the rest go. I guess quite a bit went to travel, as in one year I have been to Vegas 3 times, California/Mexico once (for the cruise), Atlantic City twice, Tunica once, Florida once (non poker). So that’s probably $10k in travel expenses right there, not counting food. I bought way too many toys (laptop, mp3 player, Bose headphones, new suit, lots of clothing, new monitor, upgrades for my PC, furniture, home theater system, digital camera, and that’s just off the top of my head) which probably adds up to $10k. I did give away about $14k splitting (though I gained $5k). I paid off the vast majority of my debts (and am about to pay the rest) and probably had about $20-25k in normal living expenses (and another large amount eating out, since I have expensive taste in food) so I guess when you add all of that up the math works out correctly.
I think that in the next year I will try to keep a tighter rein on my expenses. I am probably going to spend a couple thousand on this new move, but then I am done buying toys for quite some time. I am going to buy a large screen TV for about $1200 which I can hook my computer up to, that way I can sit in my new recliner and play online. I think we may also buy a loveseat together since the new space necessitates a little more furniture, and a few other things that will all add up to maybe $700 each. Plus I have to pay rent at the new place one month before we move in, so there is another $500 for my half of it. After that though there really aren’t that many toys that I even want that I don’t have, and I won’t have any new expenses until the lease on my car runs up in November, so I should be able to take those few months to increase the old bankroll. I am also going to cut back on travel a bit, since I seem to make more just staying home playing online. I still will need to get out to a casino every now and then for a big tournament to escape that grinding feeling you get playing online full time, but for the most part I am going to just try to run up my roll to where I can play the $100/$200 games on Stars.
Well that pretty much sums up year one. These are simply the results, and in the next post I will give you something much more important. So stay tuned.
Posted by themaroon at June 12, 2004 7:26 AM
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Comments
Hiya im not sure if this mail will ever get to the recipient, but im a soldier who is burnt out and the only thing really going for em is his Ukraine stripper gal and texas holdem if you could give me a few words of wisdom with trying to start poker for a living i would appreciate it..thnx for ye time
Dusty
Posted by: dusty at April 20, 2006 4:20 PM
wish it would happen for me. I love the game
Posted by: sue at August 9, 2006 2:52 AM
Hey. I know you wrote that article/blog back in 2004, but hopefully you come across this comment and reply to it.
My question is: Since posting that article in 2004, have you continued to make what you said you were expecting to make by playing poker online? In other words, 2 years later have you found yourself still making > 6-figures playing online?
I ask because I want to do the same (obviously), he he, and want to know the success rate of making that much money 3 years in a row.
I've been playing a few months... Actually, I've been reading/learning about poker a heck of a lot more than actually playing it, ha ha. I have it all figured out... Now I just have to get good at it.
Thanks! =0)
Posted by: Raph at December 19, 2006 1:46 PM