I made a decision some months ago that I would be playing poker just for the money mainly to persue other things in my life. It happened when I realized I was burning myself out a bit by playing too much. Most days I would wake up in the early afternoon and play online for a few hours, then head to a home game. By the time I got out, I could go to the local breakfast place and order a soupy frittata before bed. Trying to fit in workouts and any sort of a social life always resulted in failure. So if poker was the background, the 'job', then everything else could come first for most of my life. Looking at it in that respect meant that poker was a lot less interesting, and I ended up with the opposite problem: I didn't play enough from September thru December.

So over the course of January, I got back to playing the hours I needed to play. Everything worked well, I was better off on February first than I was on January first. Poker as "just a job" worked great, I didn't have to worry about it anymore! Poker was just my job. So why did I just recieve my latest amazon order with 3 poker books included? I can't get away from it, I'm afraid I'll be working to learn at poker for the forseeable future.

I've been playing poker for a living on and off for a few years now. I started way too soon, continued when it made no financial sense, took a waiting job to make things work, and left that job as soon as I could. The first time I made a reasonable decision about playing for a living was when I quit that last job. I have a proven winning style and am perfectly capable of making enough to support myself. There is one major problem: my winning-est style is short stacking. Short stacking is pretty boring, but one can't doubt it's effectiveness.

Here's the plan: I play my 50 hrs/month short stacking to pay the bills, etc. and I spend the rest of my online playing time working on tournaments or full stack poker. Since the home games generally interfere with my sleep and work out schedule, I'll play 2-3 games per week that wont run till 6 or 7am.

Hopefully this way I can either build up enough of a bankroll cushion that the increased variance of not short stacking wont matter, or I get good enough AND develop enough of a bankroll cushion that short stacking is no longer the best way to pay the bills. This op thread will be about the lessons learned, ups and downs, and hopefully for me to receive advice from you, yes YOU.