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Zankas poker-journal

Posted: Fri Aug 02, 2019 2:51 pm
by Zanka
Started a journal 2 or so years ago, was not ready then, but lets start over today.


Income:
Work: 1.1k
Poker: 200-2k depending on different factors, mostly effort and short term luck.

Expenses:
Housing: 540
Food: 300
Loan: 200 (minimum payment)
Phone: 90 (for 2 ppl, will reduce to 20 asap.)
Gas: 100
Car insurance and tax: 90
Car fund: 50
Pet: 100
Kids: 130
Other: 150 (bikerepairs, gifts, clothes, cinema, dating etc)

Total: 1750


I have a total of 400 in my bank (not counting budget for august)
I have some on my poker acc but it fluctuates a lot and are totaly seperate from my other accounts and are not concidered real money until they end up in my bank.
Also have around 35k in eq in my home but not counting that as for now.

Bad loans: 400
0% interest loans: 1800

Current Goals:
- Pay of loans asap to get my budget down to 1500.
- Trim my expenses a little bit more (phones and use car less) to get my budget to 1400.
- Fix bike on my own (tomorrow).
- Focus on increasing income (poker).
- Never use my car unless I have to get out of town.
- Organize my home (put up shelves and get stuff into boxes)
- Streamline food (planning, shopping, cooking).

I want to get to some sort of Semi-ER and only play poker but I will think about more about that as I go along. My first milestone will be to pay of 2.2k in loans and then look forward.

I have a very good set up right now where I work 6x20h shifts a month and the rest of the time I can play poker whenever I want. I have a family of some kind so I am spending a lot of time with them and my dog but I hope to be able to play 100+h/m and hopefully end up closer to the 2k side of extra income rather than 200.

Wish me luck.

Re: Zankas poker-journal

Posted: Fri Aug 02, 2019 9:02 pm
by theanimal
Welcome back. How'd you get into poker and are you cash flow positive with that (on average)?

Best of luck.

Re: Zankas poker-journal

Posted: Sat Aug 03, 2019 9:14 am
by Zanka
theanimal wrote:
Fri Aug 02, 2019 9:02 pm
Welcome back. How'd you get into poker and are you cash flow positive with that (on average)?

Best of luck.
Thank you!:)

I got into it bc a lot of friends started playing and I got hooked pretty quickly and saw a "way out" of my horrible day job that I had at the moment. Played fully professionaly for 6-7 years or so and then started working. Some pretty bad stuff going down in my life and I had no space to focus on something as hard as playing poker for a living.

Yes I have an rough hourly at 15$/h (tax free where I live) at the moment, but have not done much studying in years so hopefully I will be able to ramp that up a fair bit, hopefully dubble over a 6-8month period. Poker is a super-complex thing to get good at and it requires a wide range of skills to handle longterm.

Re: Zankas poker-journal

Posted: Sat Aug 03, 2019 9:22 am
by Zanka
Ok so my father wanted gave me his bike bc he wanted a new one. It needed some work, wich I have never done, but after some internet searched I successfully changed:
- Rear casette
- Chain
- Fenders
It took me about 3 hours to figure everything out and get trough probably 5+ years of mud that had collected on everything. Cost: 30 for tools. 40 for new gear. Also I bought backs to hang of the bike so I can go by the store on my way home from work, price: 25$.

More good news related to this is that in a couple of months a grocery store will open 2km from my home, yiiippie! :)

And I am putting up shelves in my home as we speak.

Re: Zankas poker-journal

Posted: Sun Aug 04, 2019 6:56 am
by Zanka
Todays shopping with kid+trailer went very well. Found out that my cardio is in a pretty bad shape but feeling very good overall. Biked 6km yesterday and 10km today. I think I want to come up with a $/10km that I am saving by taking the bike instead of my car, I do not care if it 100% accurate but just to motivate me a little bit.

So car uses .6 liter fuel per 10km.
Fuel right now is 1.6$/liter
1.6$*0.6= .96$
So lets say 1$/10km in just fuel.
Then there is reparation costs, and looking at my numbers it has been 50% of the fuelcost over the last year, but then I am not factoring in eventualy needing new tires, and the older it gets the more maintenance it will need etc. But I am going to estimate it at another 1$/10km. Then the car is slowly losing value, albeit an old car but lets say .5$.

There are prob more things to take into consideration but ill be happy earning 2.5$/10km.


Almost saved 4$ this weekend by not taking the car. Winning!

Re: Zankas poker-journal

Posted: Mon Aug 05, 2019 1:58 am
by Financial Nordic
Very interesting. I'll follow this.. Good luck!

Re: Zankas poker-journal

Posted: Mon Aug 05, 2019 8:02 am
by Zanka
Ok so my car broke down and it will prob cost too much to repair it. The car is worth maybe.. 2k and repairs will be 5-800. I know some other stuff needs to be repaired soon also, so that will come up to maybe 200 more. In theory, I really need a car since I have kids that need to go places. But I might take a few months without one and see how it goes. My budget would go down from 1750 to 1510 (without adding for taking the train and bus from time to time instead of the car).

Good news is: I just fixed the bike and I have a trailer to haul kids and food etc. My gf has a car I can borrow on occasion.

Well, other than that, I will play and work a lot this week, hopefully 25h poker and 40h work, and then go on a hike for 3 days. After that, I will 100% focus on getting my finances up to a level where I do not have to stress so much about it. Right now it is a little nagging feeling in the back of my head at most times.

If I ditch the car (-240), and change my phone-plan (-70), I will be down to a fairly low spending level. If Im able to pay of my debt in the following months (maybe I can get a few 100 for the car) I will be in an even better situation (-200) and only have a budget of 1240/month. I think this will be my main focus the following months.
Also, I do not think I can afford to have 150/m going to "random stuff". Ill try to look into what is going on there.
And I might be able to trim food down maybe 50 or so.

This is so much fun (minus the stress I am having right now).

Re: Zankas poker-journal

Posted: Mon Aug 05, 2019 9:38 am
by Gilberto de Piento
What is wrong with the car? Does it make any sense to try to fix it the way you did with the bike?

It does sound like it might work out well for you to get rid of it though.

Re: Zankas poker-journal

Posted: Mon Aug 05, 2019 10:04 am
by Zanka
Yeah I have had a friend look at it, he is very good with cars and he did not have time to fix it. I need to take out the gearbox (wich apparently isnt done easily) to fix a problem with the clutch... But I am going to talk to another guy I know and see what he says about it. Ill think about it for a couple of days and do some research about it. Thanks for the reply :)

Re: Zankas poker-journal

Posted: Tue Aug 06, 2019 1:55 pm
by Zanka
Ok so since having some well needed vacation during the summer I am now back on the grind for one week before taking a few days off to go hiking/hunting for mushrooms. But from next friday Ill be back full time.
This week so far:

Monday:
Hours played: 4.5
Result: -60

Tuesday: Hours played: 4
Result: +100

It has felt better than I expected and I have been playing well but made some mistakes that I would not do if I were fully immersed in playing. It usually takes a little bit of time to get used to the rhytm and the fast pace of playing after taking a break. Most importantly tho: It has been pretty fun!

I will try to do weekly and monthly posts about how many hours Ive played and how much Im winning/losing.

Re: Zankas poker-journal

Posted: Wed Aug 07, 2019 10:26 am
by Zanka
Nothing new on the car-situation yet, but will figure it out before the week is over.

Played today and felt very good, took it easy in the morning and felt fresh when I sat down to play.

Wednesday:
Hours: 4
Result: +290

Amazing results today, have not won this much in a day in a long time. I still regard it as 15$/h tho because in such a few number of hands it is so much variance involved. For example I got in 3 situations where the pot was around 80 and I had 55-57%% of winning, and won all three. It can be a bit hard to keep both feet on the ground on days like these but Im trying to stay humble to the fact that for the last 350h I have played, my winrate have been 15$/h.


One of my goals is to streamline everything that has to do with food. My current budget is 300 for 1 adult and 2 kids, but I belive that I can get that down a bit with better planning.
So far I have decided to have 3 basic meals that follows these criteria:
1.Ingredients can be stored for at least a few weeks.
2. One meal should max be 2$.
3. Healthy.
4. Easy to cook.
5. Taste good.

These 3 meals is what I will eat when alone, and then let the kids come up with meals they like and Ill try to scew those to follow the same criteria but adding more fresh greens etc.

For breakfast Im eating oatmeal with home made jams and milk. Cost is like, 0.2$ or so per meal. Kids eat yoghurt or home made bread.
If I follow this I will get food down a fair bit and also afford to eat something special with the kids on weekends.
The next thing to think about is to get to the store like once a week and stock up on everything so I always have enough food at home. If I procrastinate on shopping I have noticed that I buy fastfood more often.

Re: Zankas poker-journal

Posted: Wed Aug 07, 2019 11:04 am
by just
I find it very fascinating that you can make money playing poker online.

Who do you reckon you're up against? Is it mainly other people trying to make a living from it or people who play recreationally and don't mind losing money? I thought the popularity of online poker peaked some years ago, so I would imagine that the easy money is gone if it's the better players who stick at it. That is merely my perception - there is probably a constant flow of new players?

How long did you play/study before you started making money consistently?

Re: Zankas poker-journal

Posted: Wed Aug 07, 2019 11:36 am
by Zanka
Yeah it is not very common i guess :)

So a decent % of players I play against are pros or at least part time- pros. Since I play fairly often I run into the same players on a regular basis. Also it does not take long (5 min or so) to see if a player is at least decent. Yeah poker was big 10+ years ago, and that is when I got in to it. It was way way easier then and you could make very good money without being perticualary professional in your approach. Since then a lot have happened and now you need to do a ton of work to play higher limits and make the big money.

I think I played for a couple of months before I started wining, but I had some friends to learn from and also have paid a ton for coaching by top level players and that has helped me so much. In my 20s I was a mess in a lot of ways and could not handle it very well tbh, I made decent money, but burned out on a regular basis and had huge mental crises from a ton of trauma in my childhood. Now that I am a bit older and wiser I believe I can be way more consistent even tho I make less in terms of $ now. We will see how it goes, but I feel very confident at the moment :)

Thanks for your reply, feel free to ask away :)

Re: Zankas poker-journal

Posted: Wed Aug 07, 2019 7:16 pm
by ether
How common is cheating with online poker, aka everyone is on skype and sharing hands except for the mark. I feel like there is no way to stop this, is that true?

Re: Zankas poker-journal

Posted: Wed Aug 07, 2019 9:28 pm
by Gilberto de Piento
Only slightly related, this episode of planet money on poker is interesting. Apparently players will hedge their risk by buying into each other's purses. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019 ... 90-all-in

Re: Zankas poker-journal

Posted: Thu Aug 08, 2019 1:03 am
by Zanka
@ether My guess is that it is pretty common, sharing trough skype is probably one of the ways people do it. If you are a good player you would probably start suspecting it pretty quickly tho. The biggest problem right now is that there are bots that can beat pretty high limits and there is very hard to enforce laws (mostly due to most countries not having any laws against it). Sites are pretty good at detecting things like this nowadays, mainly trough statistic tools and things like tracking mouse behaviour. But it is a pretty big problem, and it worries me to some extent. If it would be unplayable I guess I can start to play live so Ill be fine.

@Gilberto Yeah so lets say you are buying in to a game with 1000$, if it is a tournament, you would need to have at least 200-300x that amount to withstand the variance (for cash games it might be enough with 100x). In tournaments, what makes you money is to come in one of the top 3 places usually, and it takes a lot of luck to get there even if you are a world class player. This makes people buy a stake in one another and it is actually pretty standard. 99% of people do not do this to cheat but to be able to handle the swings that are inherit in the game.

Playing poker is a certainly not for everyone and it takes a lot of streetsmart to handle everything going on, but it is getting better in terms of regulating the sites etc. 10-15 years ago there were very little done to prevent cheating from the sites and several of them even have closed shop and run with the players deposited money etc, that is not happening anymore fortunately.

Re: Zankas poker-journal

Posted: Thu Aug 08, 2019 9:30 am
by bottlerocks
redacted

Re: Zankas poker-journal

Posted: Thu Aug 08, 2019 10:07 am
by Zanka
@botterlocks yeah live circuit is probably the most profitable to do if you are able to travel and live cheap. Yeah a lot of people sell action with a premium but I would be very selective about doing that, most players are a lot less profitable than it seems. Glad you have a friend that is successfull, it is great to have that kind of investment opportunity if one are able to handle the insane variance :)


Today was a meh day, I were a bit unfocused but the games were so good I played anyway.

Thursday:
Hours: 3
Result: 0

Ended up breaking even which Im very happy with.

Started a list on staples to always have home, to be able to smooth out the process of shopping. Great.

Re: Zankas poker-journal

Posted: Thu Aug 15, 2019 3:46 pm
by Zanka
Ok so I have had an amazing week or so, have not played poker but went on a really nice hike with gf. Spent two nights out, each in different cabins and it was so relaxing to cook over open fire and just hang out in the wild. I live in a small town and just outside it (15min by car) there is a natures reserve with great hiking tracks and cabins you can stay in for free. I feel so lucky.
Will try to post some pics tomorrow.

Today I played poker.
Hours: 1
Result: -45

Not much to say about it.


Other than that, I swtiched my phone plan and it now saves me 70/m, have put up some shelves in my appartment and am currently biking everywhere.

Peace out.

Re: Zankas poker-journal

Posted: Sat Aug 17, 2019 1:40 am
by Zanka
This month I have learned a couple of things:

1) I need to take care of myself and do more of the things I love to do.
2) The things I love to do are either free or, I am already paying for it (my dog for example)
3) I can accomplish goals if I really want to. This month I have done all but one (paying of 400 bad debt), and it is still some time left to work with.
4) If I just put my head down and play poker, I will win a significant amount of money every month.

Now that I am taking the bike everywhere I am planning my days way better. I am also finding out that I miss some things (friends that live outside of town and easy access to hiking). But I am also finding out that I love biking and that I do no have that many places I want to go, most things are close to home. Also, huge thing is that GF is starting to come aboard on this journey. She has some bigger hangups that makes it a little bit hard to talk about economics, but she is taking big steps forward and Im very impressed.


Poker Friday:
Hours: 1
Results: +10