[holdem2000]

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I'll be bluntly honest, whatever answers I was going to get here I would have played at a minimum $2-$4 NL or PLO. so that means a little over 50 buy-ins for me at present, plus some savings as backup. I do think it's essential now that I put in plenty of hands a week.

A poster earlier derided my suggestion of playing about 6300 hands a week as not enough for a full-time online pro. I didn't think it was that bad but taking on board his criticism I'd be real interested to hear what people would think would be a realistic amount of hands to be playing a week, i.e. I don't intend to be playing poker every hour of the day - I've got a life too [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img], but at the same time I realise I need to put the hours in like any job, so what is a reasonable amount of hands to play a week?

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The suggestions of having 6 months living expenses set aside are the best things mentioned here of course. Other than that, the main thing you need to be working on for your game is getting better at multitabling. I'd recommend spending at least an hour each day that you work playing about 6 tables at much lower stakes (maybe .25/.50nl) until this becomes natural to you at your own stakes (do this in addition to the 35 hours a week you planned on, until you actually start playing more tables in your normal stakes). Once you're playing more tables for most of your working hours you'll probably want to cut down on your playing hours slightly since you'll find it a little more taxing.

BTW, amongst us full ring players it's not unheard of to play 150K+ hands in a month (MT ratio around 11+, it's much easier to do this playing full ring).