Playing Poker?

If you go all the way back to my very first post on here more than 7 years ago one of the things I mention as a goal is to use the blog as a way to track stats on playing poker to see if it was feasible for me to do it to make money. But it pretty much never comes up after that. Why? What went wrong, and do those issues persist today?

Well, it isn't that I tried and failed. I didn't lose tons of money playing poker, or anything of the sort. Really, I didn't even try at all. Looking back, I think there were two primary reasons that kept that little experiment from even getting off the ground: World of Warcraft and bankroll concerns.

World of Warcraft was a big time sink for me back in 2006. I was probably logged in 16 hours a day, though not actually playing a good chunk of that time. I would be logged in while working on a second computer, but just to run an auction house mod or chat with Byung. Beyond that I was raiding 6 nights a week, and running dungeons with my roommates, and watching them raid, and PvPing. There was so much stuff to do, and I wanted to do it all. Part of me actually misses that now... But the idea that I would be able to work, and play World of Warcraft as much as I wanted, and learn to play poker at the same time? Not enough time in a day. Something had to give, and that something wasn't going to be WoW and it couldn't be work for the second reason.

That second reason is that, frankly, I was fairly poor. I had enough money to pay rent and eat. I had internet access. I could pay a WoW subscription. Don't get me wrong, I was happy. I had enough money to do what I wanted, assuming what I wanted was to barely pay my bills and play WoW. I still had ~$20k in student loan debt floating around that needed to be dealt with. I couldn't have just quit my job to try something else for a while as doing so would have meant I couldn't eat. And probably I would have just spent that time playing WoW anyway! But even if I'd wanted to play poker for reasonable stakes I couldn't have found the money to get started.

Do those two problems persist now? Not really. I'm not playing WoW or any similar game right now. I'm playing plenty of games, but they all need smaller chunks of time. Two hours for a Blood Bowl game, 45 minutes for a League of Legends game. I could sit down and play a ton of a Final Fantasy game, but even if I did that for two or three days straight it would end in short order. Time is really not a problem. Money isn't really, either. I have no debt right now, and I have enough money saved up to pay living expenses for a while.

It certainly feels like a fine time to do some more reading and research at the very least. Experiment a bit at super low levels and see what's going on. Because when it comes right down to it, I'd like to think I'm pretty good at games, and at working out the right play in a similar situation, and at spending a lot of time doing the same thing over and over. I don't think I have the sort of tilt issues that cause the big problems. Not to say I don't flip out sometimes, but that I think I know when it happens. I just want to run away when I get into that sort of state, and that's actually a fine thing to do. You can't lose money when you're huddled in a corner!