Goals for the rest of 2010

I just wanted to put in a little update with how I've been playing, and what my goals are for the rest of this year. I'm at the point in my poker career were I need to decide if I want to continue being a recreational player with decent results, or if I want to become a poker player. It is so easy to have a lackadaisical mindset when we are thinking about or playing poker, but this is the exact opposite of what we should have if we want to become successful.

Poker is a beautiful thing. What other job can you have where you can play (not work), whenever you want, from the comfort of your own home, and make more than almost all hourly jobs? Not to mention if you are an MTT pro and you bink a $25,000 first place, or if you are a 1/2NL cash grinder making over 30k a year in rakeback + bonuses and your winrate. I don't want people to know this but if you work hard, poker could easily make you over 50k a year. That isn't a ton, not enough to raise a family on, but once you reach that point in your career, you are playing higher and higher stakes. Going from making 10k a year to making 50k in a year is a huge jump. But jumping from 50k to 100k isn't huge.

I've always been passionate about playing poker. I quit my job for a few months to play 1-3 NL live and did pretty well for myself. I've played well over 1 million hands playing micro cash games, and almost 7,000 sng's. I can't stand going into work and making 14$ an hour (if I get tipped well), when I can sit at home and make double that whenever I want. Maybe I can't support myself fully from poker, there is nothing that says I can't try. And that is what I'm going to do.

Last month I palyed almost 50k hands of fullring and made ~$850 at 25nl. Took 3 shots at 50nl and dropped 5bi's running 4 bi's below EV. This month I'm going to go back to grinding the 90 mans. I've proven to myself that I can beat cash, and thats all I wanted to accomplish last month. I'm going to grind the sng's until the games get bad, then transition to cash. I honestly believe that I could beat 100nl much easier than I could beat the 25nl games. People are much worse at poker, and much harder to assign them ranges.

Either way, my goal is to become a poker pro by the end of 2011. To accomplish this I'm going to need to be playing the 6s, 13s, and 26s. I'd like to start the year rolled enough to mix 6s and 13s so I'd like to make $3,000 between now and Dec. 31st. I don't like having goals based on monetary values because there is a little variance involved in sng's o:) So my real goal for myself is to play 2,000 games between now and December 31st. That is a lot of playing, but most of the month of December I'll be out of school, and I've got a good class schedule that allows me to play long hours when I don't have class.

Next year, I'm going pro.

Luckbox