Steve’s Terrible Table

Ok so it’s a little early for New Years resolutions. I’m not saying that any of these are 100% what I am going to concentrate on either during the new year. I do however think it is crucial to my development as a player to set goals for myself. If I am going to take my poker playing seriously in 2010 and play as a professional I need to meet certain criteria. These benchmarks serve more as a guide for what I think I will need to be able to do in order to not just fade away when this becomes my full time job. Otherwise I will find myself working alongside my buddies at Starbucks wondering how I fell short, my own version of Kinish’s Truck.

The plan is as follows:

1) Grow the online MTT BR to at least $15K for MTTs only. That should give me enough to play in the mid to high stakes MTTs on a weekly basis. I won’t be looking to play in the $1K Monday as a regular MTT but the $55-$109 level should be attainable. Assuming I can have a 60% ROI in those games, at the rate I play MTTs, that could be a way to generate close to $2K/week on average. Again, we all know it’s not that simple and in the short term things can get bad thanks to our old friend variance. Even still, if that’s an annual average I’m already making $90K or so a year (assuming time off for holidays).

2) Grow the online cash game BR to $16K+. That gives me 40 buy ins at the $400 buy in level and the ability to take some shots in some bigger games. Now one thing I’ve noticed in the small amount of time I have been grinding and from talking to some higher stakes players: online cash games are 10000000000x harder than live cash at comparable buy ins. This is a no brainer statement at first but I never really understood how much tougher the games would get. I’m starting to rethink how I plan on pulling this off and I think what I need to start doing is playing more mixed game cash when the buy ins get a little bigger for me because it seems as though the money will be much easier to get there than it will be in just straight NLHE.

3) Grow the live poker BR to $25K+. This is more with the idea in my head that I will eventually want to play the WSOP and other WPT events on a regular basis. In order to do that I’m going to need to bulk up the BR to account for the variance of live tournament poker. Cash games I’m thinking about heading back over to the FLHE tables and trying again the mixed games live as well. I feel like there will be some serious money to be made in those areas and it will be easier earning it than it would be trying to grind out 5/10NLHE, plus it’s more fun to play many games imho.

By the end of 2010 I would like to hit these goals. I think it’s not only very possible, but I can reasonably expect results like this from myself. With that said this adventure goes on the shelf for the time being, now my eyes are set on December for the big closing out of 2009.