Sometimes I wonder what I was thinking, quitting my job and attempting to play poker for a living. Looking at it logically, it was a really stupid thing to do.

I had no sample size of games that proved I was a winning player. I pretty much quit my job and thought to myself, “Well time to learn how to play poker. Hopefully I’m good at it.”

What I did right: Saved a year of living expenses and kept a separate bankroll for poker. What I did wrong: Dove in with little proof that I was a winning player and tried to play a game that I had no experience with (that would be 6-max cash games).

This entire year is pretty much an ongoing experiment for me as I work to prove to myself that I can make money playing online poker. At the start of the year, my only goal for 2011 was to play 4,000 MTTs. For some of you out there, this is a laughably easy task. I have personally barely played 4k tournaments in my lifetime, though, so it would be a good accomplishment for me.

To figure out the minimum I hope to earn playing poker this year, I used a 20% ROI and an average buy-in of $30. If I play 4k games, I should profit $24k. Hopefully my actual ROI is better than 20% (which I think it is) or I just run hot so that I make much more than that :D

For what it’s worth, though, 4k is such a small yearly sample size that I could very well make less than my projected number. When you play such few games, you run the risk of being controlled by variance. To help solve this problem in the future, I am going to start working on my multi-tabling skills (which are currently quite terrible) so that I can eventually play higher volume.

Last week I played two days:

# of MTTs: 54

Average buy-in: $29.87

Hours: 11

Net result: -$1,187.14

Here are the numbers overall for the month of May:

# MTTs: 342

Average buy-in: $32.58

Hours: 91.50

Net result: +$1,863.78 (including rakeback and bonuses)

Someone commented in my last post and suggested that I keep a running tally of my overall profits/losses. I probably won’t do this every entry, but once a month seems good. So far this year:

# online MTTs: 1161

Net profit (including live games, rakeback, and bonuses): +$11,368.61

I am well behind pace for 4k tournaments this year, but it should be easy to catch up. Once I’m back from Vegas in July, the goal will be to play four days per week and 35 tourneys per day. I shouldn’t be going out of town as much for the second half of 2011, which will make it easier to get some decent volume in.  

I’m getting married next Sunday, so I’ll be taking a short break from everything poker, including this blog. I should be back with an update the week of June 12th. Thanks for reading and see you in a couple of weeks :)