Going Pro and August So Far

I've read countless articles and sections of books talking about "going pro." Almost everyone who's played poker seriously and doesn't love their job has at least thought about playing for a living. All of these writings talk about how much money you need to have in reserve (a ton), what kind of sample size you need to figure out how much you can expect to make at a given game (you need to play every day for the rest of your life and you'll have a close approximation), how you need to take it seriously and treat it like a business, and how you need to pay your taxes (really). But, I've only seen one person mention what I think is the most important thing of all - you better LOVE to play. When you have a 9 to 5, you better be dreaming about getting into a poker game the second you get off. If it hasn't had a negative effect on your performance at work, you don't love it enough. You should want to play so much that if you had a fight with your wife about how much you play, you'd storm out and go to the casino. Of course these aren't healthy behaviors, I wouldn't recommend acting this way and as soon as I started playing for a living this kind of thing stopped happening :) The point is if you only kind of like to play, you'll never be able to make yourself do it when you've had three losing days in a row or its a sunny Saturday and you're friends are going to the beach.

Another thing which they don't mention which I think is huge is having a supportive spouse. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten totally killed in a game and felt like total shit on the drive home (or usually the walk down stairs now). But, when I tell Jen what happened and she gives me a hug I always feel fine again. I don't know how some of these guys can come home to nothing but the TV and get themselves right again. If I say "I lost $2,000 today" she says "are you ok" when plenty of wives would say "You lost how much? Oh no, how could you do that?" which would only make things worse. I think it's because she's been through it all before with the amounts of money gradually increasing. When I started if I lost $100 I'd almost be in tears. Now if win or lose $100 it's a break even day and it takes a few four digit losing days in a row to get me upset. By the same token winning has lost a little of it's luster. I remeber when I had a running count of the number of days I'd won over $1,000 (it's probably at around 75 now) and it was huge deal every time I did. Now I've got a running count on $10,000 days (5) and I'm hoping one day I'll be able to say "I won $10,000 today" and hear in response simply "Oh that's nice."

So far in my quest to play 1,000 single table tournaments in August I've played 352 and won $3,010. I'm a little behind schedule both in terms of tournaments played and my $10 per tournament goal. I've won 8 out of the 13 days that I've played which is also a little lower than I'd expect in the long run (something like 75% is more normal). The main reason I haven't been blogging is I've been trying to stay focused on working as much as possible. In the past the main benefit of my job has been working whenever I wanted and not working much. I'm trying to shift my thinking and focus to the point where my main job benefit is making a lot of money.