Poker Log - Day 1

I've toyed around with making money online as opposed to at a "real job" for a while now. I spend a lot of time reading about all different avenues of making money, everything from investing in stocks, to just setting and forgetting something in an index fund, to monetizing a blog (which I'm trying to do with Trackhound), etc. Well today, I finally decided to settle on playing poker online.

Obviously making money with poker isn't easy, it takes hours of dedicated practice to become SUPER good and make the big $$$. I'm hoping to put a solid effort into teaching myself the basic theory and practicing in "play money" games on PokerStars over the next couple of months and get to a point where I start making some consistent money by September. It's okay if I'm not raking in $40K every day, I'm just looking to make some pocket change that I can live off of for a little while in school. Extra fun money to add to what my parents give me monthly. I mean all my rent is pre-paid and I'll be getting money for grocery shopping, and I don't have too many bills, so why not?

My initial trial today has been pretty successful. I'm maybe a third of the way through the "Poker Beginners" tutorial on PokerStars' PokerSchoolOnline and I already turned $160P (to denote "play money") into $1,300P. I lost most of that being stupid, but I still came out ahead. 

To get into how I lost the money, I got emotional. Someone was pissing me off by placing ridiculous bets before the flop (like $500P+..). This would be fine for some games, but the table I was playing at only allowed you to start with $400P maximum. His wild bets weren't part of any grand strategy, he was just being an asshole and went broke because of it. I lost my money by going against him on one of his stupid bets. 

If I were to do that game over again, I wouldn't have gotten into the situation with that idiot guy in the first place. I'll be setting a few rules for myself, and one will be "If I break $1,000P, cash out and return to the table with $160P". I might lower that number as I play some more games and find out what my average "downhill" point is, but for now I'll leave it at that. I'll probably cash out once or twice a week. 

So yeah, that's a little bit about what's going on. I'll be keeping track of my stats via this blog.

Starting money: $1,000P (this is the default amount they give you when you start)

High: $1,300P

Ended with: $950P