All of my material results are from online cash games, so I've added a summary table and graph below. Here's what happened during 2008:

· For the first two months I played 1.5/3 to 2.5/5 for about 30 hours a month, in addition to having a regular job. I resigned at the end of January based on results from the whole of 2007. I had about a $10k bankroll and about two months' wages as savings, including the final payment from work which would cover living costs through March. That's not enough money to reliably turn professional with, but I figured that I didn't like the job anyway and if the first month was disastrous I'd figure out the career change that I ought to have made anyway.

· My old job paid about £2250/month net, so my plan was to make at least $5000/month playing $2/$4 over 20k-30k hands. (The dollar was about 50p then, and my winrate suggested an EV of $8k-$10k over that many hands)

· My job finished at the end of Feb, and luckily I had a good month part-time - a $7k win added about a month's savings and brought my bankroll up to $10k. 25 buy-ins and 3 months behind feels MUCH better than 20buy-ins and 2 months.

· On the 3rd March, my first day playing poker full time, I realised how depressed and bored I'd been in normal jobs when I bounced out of bed at 8am, happy. For the previous 3 years I'd dragged myself into work and counted down the minutes from 10am to 5pm feeling overpoweringly tired from the boredom however early I had gone to bed the night before.

· First week was worrying - started with a 10-buyin downswing. I'm sure I ran badly, but there must have been something to the change in the psychology of having to win something by month-end. I took a few days off then (fairly-) calmly kept playing and turned it around for a $10k month. Approximately 20 hours/week worked at almost £100/hour was looking good. Also started running in the mornings and gradually increased from being unable to jog 500m to completing 5k (slowly). That health-benefit never would have happened alongside a normal job.

· April was much the same as March - another $10k means my roll was nearing $20k after taking out the $10k expenses so far. I should also mention that my routine is to play about 4 or 5 1 hour sessions between 10am and 6pm. I had no intention of doing MORE hours than a normal job, or even as many (what would be the point in that?). Making sure I was done by 6pm meant socialising was absolutely no different than in the traditional job, so that took care of a few often-mentioned potential downsides.

· May started well and my bankroll became sufficient for 5/10. Took the shot with a few buy-ins and ran badly, finished the month having earned only the $5k I needed to withdraw.

· June was a horrible grind. Ran well-below expectation and couldn't get myself in any situations in which I could win at showdown for the first 3 weeks. Still, kept playing and managed $5k. £35ph was still much better than real work.

· July started well and I got back up to the roll for 5/10. Took the shot and ran well this time. Managed a $26,500 month in about 22 hours/week. £160ph is a lot more satisfying than £20ph!

· Hardly played in August and was on holiday in France for 2 weeks. Resumed grinding 2/4-5/10 in September and October, and with my bankroll over $40k I took some shots at 10/20. Ran terrible during those shots, something like 7-buyins below expectation over 1000 hands, still haven't played too much at those levels.

· Hannah and I put down the deposit on the flat we bought at the end of October - it's a 2 double-bedroom new-build in Zone 1 near Bank. I didn't use my bankroll but did use nearly all other savings, so shots at 10/20 until year-end were only taken with very conservative table-selection.

· After not playing many hands in October and November I decided to try to reinstate some work-ethic and played 30k hands in December. Even won a little at 10/20 and finished with an $18k month including almost exactly $100k for the last 6 months. An overall average of about £100ph for 62.5 hours/month equalling £100,000 for the year...





I've also discovered the additional benefits of this job that are rare or non-existent in normal work. Firstly, of course, there's about $13k of rakeback. Then there's the benefit of being perceived to be a high-value paying customer at the poker sites. As a VIP at Ladbrokes they have sent Hannah and I to; the poker at Killarney; a box on the finish line at Royal Ascot; a box at a North-London football match; a poker-weekend at a local Hilton hotel; and to their Poker Million live-final Party. And that's without mentioning the increased happiness, time to work on fitness, reduction in stress caused by dead-end careers, etc, etc!

So in conclusion, 2008 has been a great year and I'm very happy to have taken the decision to quit real-work and play full time, and I'd recommend the same to anyone else. I'll do another summary at the end of February because that will be the end of 12 months playing full time. I expect that I will be looking at that a bit more technically - sort of management-accounting for my own plans/targets for the next year.

My target for the last quarter-or-so of 2008 was to win $100k in the last 6 months, and I just made it at the end of this afternoon courtesy of a $4500 win today! Graph is below, I'm off to the pub now and will be giving myself the next 2 days off to make sure I don't lose a little of it back and ruin the novelty! I'll post again either tomorrow or Wednesday with some sort of summary of the whole year...

Only a 3-day week unfortunately but I'm up $6k so far. I'm only $4.5k away from my target $100k since 1st July, but it could still go either way with only 3 "working days" left until new year.

I started playing Party Poker with just a £2k deposit while I took a look around, and that's now up to £5.5k. I was going to deposit more to jump to 5/10 but I think I'd feel good about it if I kept the balance in the bank and tried to run this up at 3/6. Giving away some money-EV for satisfaction/contentment-EV but I think it's a fair trade. Although it will make it harder to bring in that last $4.5; could really depend on whether decent 5/10 games run on Ladbrokes next week. Here's the month so far:

Hannah and I are getting the train up to Nottingham this evening. We are staying with her parents until Sunday evening, with a possible visit to mine if the transport across to Derbyshire is possible/reasonable.

Yesterday I took a look around our local gym with a view to joining in the New Year. It really disappoints me to be so predictable but I do think it's a good idea. I've never been a member of a gym while playing poker full time, and starting Mon/Wed/Fri with a workout and Sauna sounds like the sort of thing I really ought to be doing.

I'm planning on doing a starting strength style program during the week, probably this one:

Practical Programming Novice Program:

Monday
3x5 Squat
3x5 Bench press / Press (Alternating)
Chin-ups: 3 sets to failure or add weight if completing more than 15 reps

Wednesday
3x5 Squat
3x5 Press / Bench Press (Alternating)
1x5 Deadlift

Friday
3x5 Squat
3x5 Bench Press / Press (Alternating)
Pull-ups: 3 sets to failure or add weight if completing more than 15 reps

And then going to classes on some evenings with Hannah; whatever we feel like trying, probably cardio stuff or martial arts.

Another bad week, this time I'm down $738 in 9343 hands. I'm only ~$1500 behind expectation in all-in pots so I can't blame that, but I do feel like I have run into a few too many gutshot-floats that have hit with safe-looking cards, mid-pair calling from behind to catch up on a "blank" turn, and hands like 95s calling big 3bets to flop 2-pair against my overpairs. Here's the graph:

You can see that during the 2000-hand downswing in the middle I couldn't win without showdown and couldn't win at showdown either. Normally my game balances-out at about breakeven without showdown.

There haven't been many good games at Ladbrokes this week. Right now (18:00 Friday) there are no 4/8 games and only one 5/10 game, so this afternoon I have given Party Poker a go.

On the graph above, the last 2000 hands are at Party Poker 2/4; I won $800 while figuring out if I like the software and checking if the games were OK. There have certainly been plenty of games at 2/4-5/10 running all day. Today's games seemed soft enough, although they played differently to the Ladbrokes games: More over-aggressive maniacs as well as a similar number of 35/8s. I got AK in twice for 100bbs preflop against the same player 5-bet-shoving KQ and KT. I think that their new software is much better than their old software, and it's certainly better than Microgaming's dismal effort.

I was finding it quite difficult to tile tables as I was opening them - Party decided that 5 tables should be 3 across the top and 2 full-size across the bottom, instead of simply the same as 6 but with one missing. Hopefully it's just a case of getting used to the quirky challenges that software programmers like to give us instead of just developing something well.

Due to these poor last two weeks, I'm still $11k behind my target of $100k for the last 6 months of the year, but there is no reason why it shouldn't be possible to make up for that in the next 11 days.

I had a good start to this week but a disastrous finish. I played a total of 9000 hands but only won $982, even thought I was up $8k at one point.

In the end I think it was using a number of hands as a target that caused the problem. On Thursday I broke my rule of playing only 1-hour sessions. By the early evening, in retrospect, I pretty much couldn't think straight anymore and just continued to play really badly. At the time I'm sure I thought that I was OK and just running badly, but it really wasn't the case. My winnings-without-showdown were way up from playing more aggressively and going to showdown too much, and because I was going to showdown too much, my losses at showdowns were huge. In summary I had a $7000 downswing in 2000 hands on Thursday afternoon/evening and didn't play Friday:

I think it's potentially actually quite interesting how much of a difference it makes and how little I realise it at the time. Maybe I should try and test it at some point, perhaps with some internet IQ tests, I'd be tempted to bet that I'd do better if I was fresh but slightly drunk.

On a forum someone asked for advice about playing full-time and I replied with the text below. I thought it was worth reposting here since some readers may be interested:

"Work out how many hours you think you could play for and calculate how much you would expect to win in that time. And then HALF IT to account for playing less, table selecting and running worse than expected.

Then check that the amount you are looking it is TWICE what you need, because monthly results might run from 50% to 200% that amount.

At Laddies the easiest cash-game table selection is, unfortunately, to avoid Scandis and look for British players. I'd use 40x to 20x bankroll. It actually needs to be a bigger multiplier the lower your stakes are in relation to your monthly "wage". E.g. if you need $3k/month and breakeven, the withdrawal would be really bad for a $2/$4 $10k roll, but not so bad for a $40k $10/$20 roll, and you would still have reasonable stakes to drop down to if necessary."

I was still "on leave" on the 1st, so this was a 4-day week and so far I have played 5700 hands, another 300 this afternoon and I met my target of 1500 per day.

I have been running really well in all-in situations - beat AK with KJ heads up and dodged or hit a good few of the big-draw vs made hand on flop situations. So far I have won almost $5k but I should probably only have $2k - according to that measure of luck.

On the other hand I have run over-pairs into sets of fours at least 3 times for full stacks at 5/10 after getting decent amounts in pre-flop. Two were almost consecutive and against the same regular. He is often sitting waiting for games at 15/30-25/50 and I thought he played a tough competent style but it looks like I may have been mislead by appearances - of course there's no way he can profitably call 15%-20% of their stack off just to look to hit a set, and if he was planning to bluff his way out then his read of the situation was really, really terrible. It's possible that he plays much higher on other sites and wasn't taking 5/10 seriously, which is fine, but it still shows that there is a profitable spot to look for.

I bought Sky HD last week. I'm really impressed with the movies and I like the documentaries, but the sports looks pretty disappointing. Very little on any of the sports HD channels is actually in HD and unless you especially like bottom-of- the-table football matches there is rarely much worth watching. From comparing NFL with the premiership I'm also not sure that our source quality is as good as the Americans'. The Sky+ functionality is great, much better than the very-disappointing Panasonic DVDR/PVR I was using before.

Someone suggested to me that I add a summary of each month, so here it is:

In conclusion; not enough hands played - averaged less than 10 hours/week at the tables; ran a couple of thousand dollars below expectation in situations in which I was all-in; but the win-rate is still very respectable at around 75c/hand. I played my first thousand hands at $10/$20 and ran bad, but I think that table-selection was obvious and the decent players were mostly the same as at $5/$10, so moving up shouldn't be a problem longer-term.

Aside from poker, and to explain the lack of hands to some extent, I moved house over the first few weeks of the month. Over this last week Hannah has taken time off work, so I did as well except for an hour each on Wednesday and Thursday.

For December I am going to try to play 1500 hands per working day, at least for the 3 clear weeks before Christmas. I need to win $19k to clear $100k for the 6 months to the end of the year. To get that going I have a plan to sit at $2/$4 if the higher tables aren't running, rather than not playing. I'm hoping that this will get me back into the old rhythm of 300+ hands in each of 4-5 one-hour sessions a day.

I have played a few more hands of $10/$20 and continued to prove that moving up a level will never start of well for me. I'm just too unlucky for gambling. It's like the time I went to Vegas with work and decided that I ought to at least familiarize myself with a craps table. So I took $100, played $10 a bet for 10 losing bets and left without seeing anything happen except for the dealer dragging in my chips. This is why I can't ever enjoy roulette or blackjack; I'm just too unlucky! It's no fun at all to sit there handing your chips to the dealer while players that failed GSCE maths hit miracles all evening.

Here's my lifetime graph for $10/$20 so far. 892 hands, lost $10,904, all-in adjusted expectation for the period: $366 profit. So in less than my first 1000 hands, I am running 5 buy-ins below expectation. That's bad luck to the tune of -50bbs/100 for 10 periods. I was going to try to find out how many standard deviations from the mean that was, but don't have the tools/time right now. This site http://www.castrovalva.com/~la/winlose.htm , says that there is a 2.89% confidence I'm a winner given those numbers, so I guess the maths behind that means I'd fail the hypothesis test of winrate>0 at the 97% level., so this result must be well over 2 standard deviations from the mean, especially when I'm supposed to be playing 9bbs/100 not 0bbs/100.

This happened when I started $5/$10 as well and I'm sure the same happened at all other games or levels I started playing. It's like an initiation test to check I knew what I was getting in for; or a story in a bad film where someone is testing I have the confidence and will to be allowed to continue. Oh what it must be like to run hot when you move up.... Since only about 20 additional buy-ins are needed at each level, it's easy to see how the person that had the opposite luck to me could quickly have run up to 7 figures without even necessarily being a winner long term.

"Luckily" $4/$8 and $5/$10 have been good this month, so I only lost $1500 in total today and I'm, still up $12k for the month (but it "should be" $20k+)

Didn't get many hands in today but won a nice pot at $10/$20, which I was playing because of the guy playing a classic 70/13/4 style. Note the aggression factor though, he did play against c-bets as raise or fold, and followed through if he 3bet pre, so he was "kind of" tricky, and I think that some of the other regulars made some mistakes that helped him run up his 6 buy-in stack earlier on.

I lost $800 early when I raised his c-bet in a 3-bet pot - a situation I thought he would be folding a load of his range, but he shoved. So I was either wrong or just ran into a long-shot, but then got this one: (The turn is a Hellmuth-style instacall, btw, although you can probably infer that when you see his hand)

$10/$20 No Limit Holdem
6 players
Converted at weaktight.com


Stacks:

I'm now up to $13k for the month so $15k should be fine and I have a new, if not ambitious target for the end of the year. Although I started playing full time in March, I now feel like I didn't start PROPERLY until July when I had the roll for 5/10, so I often look at my graphs from that point. Here is it so far:

And means I'll be really happy once I get the extra $14k for $100k for the 6 months to year-end. That implies $200k annually after tax, equivalent to about £200k/year job in the city, at probably 1/3rd the hours. I haven't meant to spell that out (just ;) ) as a brag, but sometimes when the blogs I read are an order of magnitude higher than that I forget that it's actually a really great result, as was $5k/month last spring, when compared to a real job.

I've just been sat back a while thinking about how differently I consider "poker money" and "real-world money". Before I played poker I never had any interest in gambling, and would still be uncomfortable with the idea of putting £200 on red at roulette (I'd much, much, rather spend that £4.50 at the bar), but I am now fine with 5-bet shoving $2k with 88, even though it appears risky/crazy/maniacish/whatever, because I know that the logic and meta-game all workout out to something that isn't really a risk at all.

I think this has been a real development in my game in the last 5 months - thinking back though my strategy I can end up shocked to realise that some spots do make me look like a maniac crazy gambler. I didn't realise it got that way or that it happened at the time, and it's obviously a good thing, but the difference in the psychology compared with actual crazy-gambling play is huge. I'd like some imaginative metaphor like suddenly zooming out to being able to see the code in the Matrix, so micro-decisions that look risky are really insignificant certainties viewed simultaneously as a whole.

To go back to the example with the 5-bet shove of 88: It basically prevents a 4-bet bluff from ever showing a profit when compared with my 3-betting ranges. Even if my opponents realise this and only 4-bet-call TT+ the cost to me (range vs range remember) will be tiny because of the increase in successful 3-bet pots, if those tricky players ever lapse into 1 4-bet bluff again they'll give the cost right back. So rather than feeling like I'm a tilting maniac when my shove with 88 runs embarrassingly into AA (as it surely appears) I feel like I very boringly made the risk-insured conservative play! There are a few spots like that, I guess most involve draws on the flop, that are often the spot of forum questions because they look like tough decisions. I think you can tell the experienced players by the shallowest answers - its close so just bet-get-it-in and don't worry about it, because it will reflect well in other spots!

+$4300 in 1600 hands at the cash tables today means +$6100 for the month over 5600 hands, so on track for the target in my last post. I have been playing more heads up and today realised that is where all of this month's profit has come from. I have found that heads-up games help me concentrate, and that I am able to keep playing past 1 hour as long as I'm immersed in exploiting this single opponent. This also means that I can get some hands in at a couple of 6-max tables at the same time. I still find two or more heads-up games a little tough, because at the moment keeping track of the meta-game feels like such an active process.

I thought I'd be running above expectation after winning nice pots with JJ vs AK preflop and a set of 8s all-in against a flopped flush filling up on the river, but it turns out I have just regressed perfectly to the mean after an unlucky start to the month. It's really strange how accurately that has happened during my monthly results and for the whole year, given that it isn't actually what the maths would predict.

The crashing pound has now equated to around a 36% pay-rise since spring for players winning US dollars, which is nice J.