Cash game pros - lifestyle (and numbers) questions

[tagtastic]

- How many hours of cash game play do you guys (and gals) try to log every week ?

I avg about 20hrs a week, but it's very polarized to like 10 or 40hrs/wk. This is because I tend to play a ton when I'm not doing well, and quit easily when I'm up. Not recommended, but I think it's pretty common.

- How has playing cash games affected your sleeping cycles ? How has it affected the social aspect of your life?

I sleep from like 5am to 2pm (give or take two hours) usually - but honestly this is pretty close to my ideal sleep schedule (I was doing this in college long before I got into poker). The biggest problem I have w/ playing pro online is that I don't get an automatic, in town group of friends like many people do at their jobs.

- How do you guys pay yourself? Do you do a fix amount of $ per week ? Do you tell yourselves '' i will withdraw X$ when my bankroll reaches X$ ''

I withdraw whenever I have more than enough to play the stakes I want to. Make sure you have a large cushion in your bank account. A bad day/week/month should never affect your ability to pay your bills, etc for a fairly long period of time.

[dagreez]

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- How many hours of cash game play do you guys (and gals) try to log every week ?

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about eight hours a day devoted to playing/posting/watching vids

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- How has playing cash games affected your sleeping cycles ? How has it affected the social aspect of your life?

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at first i just played whenever i wanted so my sleeping cycle got all screwy and social life things got out of whack because of that. things like missing phone calls cause im sleeping at weird times or playing instead of going out which sucks. it's similar to an opportunity cost. devote your time to what you care about. if all you care about is making money then that's what type of person you'll be. on the other side if you go out every night that's who you'll be too, balance is important imo.

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- What kind of $ / hour are some of you maintaining ? (please mention stake and # of tables played)

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this is a tough question to answer specifically because if you're at a stage where you are really taking off in your understanding and making fewer and fewer mistakes while also opening up your game in the right spots and continuing to learn your winrate will be growing and you may move up stakes where you then may go through another learning curve period where your win rate fluctuates while you adjust etc., so it will vary and one general rate won't really tell you much.

But as a basic guideline, if you're not making around $200-$400 an hour net, playing, for example, like 4 tables of 1/2 or 2/4 you're probably still at a stage where you're plugging a lot of leaks rather than implementing your style, if that makes sense.

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- How do you guys pay yourself? Do you do a fix amount of $ per week ? Do you tell yourselves '' i will withdraw X$ when my bankroll reaches X$ ''

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this is more difficult when you don't feel comfortable about sustaining a winrate. when you're confident that you can win and feel that it's just a matter of time you can plan out expenses a little better which is why some people advocate like 100 buy ins for a level. that seems rele high to me but it's just a big safety net really. basically what i'm saying is that if you're a winning player you'll be smart enough to find a mix of taking money out that will not jeopardize you're roll and that you can sustain yourself on.

gl and if you have any more questions or want to bs on AIM about hands or whatever give 'chalupahpuhol' a shout. hollerrrrr.

[HustlerLA]

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But as a basic guideline, if you're not making around $200-$400 an hour net , playing, for example, like 4 tables of 1/2 or 2/4 you're probably still at a stage where you're plugging a lot of leaks rather than implementing your style, if that makes sense.

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typo , i assume. 4tabling 2/4 at 5ptbb/100 would be $160/hr.

[Phase2]

Canada For-The-Win !

[jfish]

- How many hours of cash game play do you guys (and gals) try to log every week ?

about 30hrs a week average sounds right.

- How has playing cash games affected your sleeping cycles ? How has it affected the social aspect of your life?

my sleeping cycles have always been a bit weird ever since high school. i just focus better at night when there arent many distractions around and i am not tired, it might be weird but i dont give a [censored].

i feel like it has definitely affected my social life. its hard to relate to your college friends when you are making a lot of money and dont really have any commitments, its very unusual to say the least. i try to hang out with friends from time to time, but i feel like i just get along better with poker players who can relate to my own situation.

- What kind of $ / hour are some of you maintaining ? (please mention stake and # of tables played)

~$4-500 3 tabling.

- How do you guys pay yourself? Do you do a fix amount of $ per week ? Do you tell yourselves '' i will withdraw X$ when my bankroll reaches X$ ''

my bankroll = all my money.

[TheMetetron]

I feel incredibly old-school coming up on my 4th year of playing poker for a living. I also am starting to feel old as well. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

Anyway, I'll answer your questions.

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- How many hours of cash game play do you guys (and gals) try to log every week ?

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Target is ideally 25. Reality is more like 20.

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- How has playing cash games affected your sleeping cycles ? How has it affected the social aspect of your life?

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It affects my sleeping schedule way more than it should. I try to go to bed by midnight and wake up around 8-9 AM. I've been good about it for about the last week, but I can go weeks at a time being completely screwed up and I tend to play horrible poker when I do.

As far as social life, I don't think it has negatively affected me at all, though perhaps when I first started it was hard to get over the "wow I'm losing so much money by not working right now" thing. That passed fairly quickly though.

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- What kind of $ / hour are some of you maintaining ? (please mention stake and # of tables played)

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Hard to say given I play higher now then I did a few months ago (therefore sample size is small). Over the last quarter million hands or so at $2/4-$5/10 I was making around $400/hr. Playing $5/10-$25/50 like I do now, it seems to be more like double that at around $700-800/hr. This is 4-8 tabling.

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- How do you guys pay yourself? Do you do a fix amount of $ per week ? Do you tell yourselves '' i will withdraw X$ when my bankroll reaches X$ ''

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I have to do wire transfers for the most part to get my money off so I usually only do it once a month to keep fees down. I take off everything beyond 20-30 buy-ins and keep a few thousand for expenses, put money I'll need for taxes into my segregated account for that, and invest the rest in my SEP-IRA and taxable mutual funds.

[Phase2]

Thank you for all the responses!

As for all of you who are saying to wait before going pro, a bit too late for that. I was playing part time for the last year, and was able to clear a decent profit. Only thing is i couldnt play nearly as much as I wanted to, due to the girlfriend and job. Now that i got rid of those 2 dead-weights (hehe) I get to play much more. It just never seemed to make sens for me to need to go to bed after a winning session of 400-1000$ in a night, even though i was playing solid poker against donkeys, because i needed sleep to go to my 8hour day job that made me 110$...

I am giving it a shot for this winter, and i have absolutely LOVED the last 2months!! Reading all these posts (and some on 2plus2 where i posted the same thing) has really given me some hope. I woke up early this morning and i just couldnt sleep anymore because I was too excited to get on the virtual felt (and obv i get rewarded with some sick sick -var coolers lol; however on the positive side it did not affect my play negatively and it did not put me on tilt at all, so im happy about that!)


And to all of you worried about me and my BJ problem, I positive that is in the past and will not resurface. I realize the cost now (which is like 2months of intense pokering to recopu my losses on top of paying for my living expenses ..)

[DerekJCEX]

--- How many hours of cash game play do you guys (and gals) try to log every week ?

30-50

---How has playing cash games affected your sleeping cycles?

i sleep too much and wake up later and later every day cuz i dont have to wake up

---How has it affected the social aspect of your life?

i wake up in time to pregame

---How do you guys pay yourself?

i like to withdraw as much as possible while slowly building my roll

im gonna try to start getting up at like 1:00 pm consistently and also start going to the gym. i would also like to have some sort or loose playing schedule instead of just waking up and playing all day/night once the coffee wakes me up. somethin like 4-6 hours/day 5-7 days a week.

[cts]

these days i'm on a pretty normal sleep schedule, have been seeing my friends at college a ton, have had a few girlfriends this semester, and am spending a little less time on poker. my game has been much better lately because of it i think, and i'm enjoying life more than ever. i've gone through phases where i didn't play at all (usually after a huge downswing) as well as phases where i played nonstop severely hurting my social life, it's definitely important to find a happy medium and i'm getting much better at this.

that said, the past few months i've still averaged probably 40k hands which is a lot considering most of the time i'm just sitting around waiting for action. also i've been focusing on making my money work better for me and other nonplaying poker ventures (cardrunners etc).

i used to just cash out whenever i needed money in my bank account, with the occasional big cashout when i just had way too much online and wanted to put it in esavings or index funds. but lately i've changed this and have been cashing out more frequently just because it makes me feel a little safer about life in general i guess considering most of my friends are graduating right now and are getting ready to hit the real world.

i also reenrolled in school and am starting classes up next semester. it's going to take me three more semesters to get my degree i think, meh, we'll see if i make it

[soon2b]

play 100k hands at 1/2, report back.