I think after a decent amount of poker, I’ve come to a crossroad.  This game is a tough one, and if you don’t give it everything, you really can’t expect much back.  So while I’m grinding away a 9-5 job, I can’t really give as much attention to poker as is needed.  I probably play about 8-10 hours a week, which usually means I go through long downswings and upswings.  A lot of my free time, and even work time comes down to thinking about the game too.  Basically I feel like I’m putting in about all I can afford to, and it’s still not quite enough to get me where I want to get to.

The other night I was close to quitting.  I’m actually running OK lately, but still just the thought of another year of working full time while playing poker and it doesn’t sit well.  Something has to give.  Now obviously, if I played for a living, I could afford more time for poker that it needs.  Or maybe I just stop it now and call it quits.  So I got out trusty Excel.  I’ve done $/hr calculations before, and I’ve worked out that those were pretty unrealistic looking at it now.  They assumed glorious winrates, and long hours playing each day, things that I know better of now.  Realistically, I thought I could quit my job around NL100-NL200, but I think NL400 or crushing NL200 is about the time most could consider quitting decent day jobs.

So my mind took a slightly different turn.  I’ve noticed grinders talk about Supernova Elite before, but never gave it much attention.  Who wants to play poker 10 hours a day.  Well, now I look at it again, and did some numbers around it.  I’ve been playing up to 12 tables on odd occasions, and sure enough playing something like 16 tabling might get you there without all that many hours per week.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a huge grind, but certainly doable.  I’m not 100% convinced my numbers are accurate just yet, but I’ve set a few trial goals.

The basic premise is this.  While Pokerstars starts off a pretty average rakeback provider, they soon step it up if you are reaching Supernova Elite.  By the time you reach 1 million points in a year, you’ve made over $90K in bonus cash, a free package to a big live event, and entry to the WCOOP main event worth $5K.  The next year around it’s more like $115K in bonuses due to the extra FPP’s SNE’s make, and the same two bonuses if you reach 1 million points again.  As I said, my early indications are that you could work around 5-6 hours a day, 5 days a week if 16 tabling NL200.  By no means easy, but with that many bonuses, you just need to make a very small winrate to make poker a very profitable year.  Obviously, the downside is you could easily lose money playing that much poker.

So I have some goals set out for my current free time.  I want to push myself hard, because if I do 1 hour a day and then quit my job, I think it would be quite a difficult task come January.  So I plan to play 16+ tables over 2 hours each night.  This isn’t a tentative goal, it’s a do or die goal.  If I can’t do at least that, I have no hope in grinding that much next year.  I also have to profit.  My first few tests are going pretty badly, and I’m a long way from profit, but as we know poker is a very tough game to judge by too early.  All I can say is I definitely made more mistakes than usual, and my results are probably reflecting this as well as not running great.  I plan to keep mucking around with setups (HUD’s and TableNinja) for the rest of August and then Septermber and October it’s live.  I’ll set definite goals for the time when I go on holiday in late October, and by then variance should have sorted out my results too, and I can see exactly how things are going.

Wish me luck, I’ll let you know how it’s going.