... And so it begins anew!

I titled my first post ever in this journal, about 15 months ago, ... And So It Begins. I said late last year that there was a big plan coming in January. I'm a month behind, so I wanted to at least say what it was all about:

I hope to be a professional poker player ten years from now.

I do know many people who turned pro much more quickly than this. But, they are mostly young and just out of college or have dropped out (a move, BTW, that I think is a bad one). For me, who has an existing career that I must focus on, I need a good amount of time to adjust to a new lifestyle. Effectively, it will be more of an early retirement more than turning pro.

I've paid close attention to "Should I turn Pro?" advice that has been written by existing pros, such as Daniel Negreanu and Mark Gregorich. I am particularly interested in Mark's points, because he's a middle limit grinder like I would be; I don't expect to be a top pro in the game.

One key point in Gregorich's recent column on this subject is the following: If you can succeed in poker, can't you do better financially elsewhere?. Of all the items I've read about turning pro, this is the most compelling. You have to be sure that being a pro is going to provide a better life than some other career would. To me, this means that I have to work on my poker game so that my hourly rate, ten years from now, matches the hourly rate I'm receiving from my regular job (nine years and ten months from now).

I want to do this because I love poker. I mean, poker is as important to me as doing computer science was when I picked that as my first career. That's an indication to me that it is a reasonable goal to pursue it professionally.

Another point is that I would like to flip-flop hobby/job in my life again. Computer science, programming and Free Software development was my hobby for many years. It became more and more of a job as I got older. My interest in doing it with high enthusiasm waned as it became just a day-to-day job. I realize that as poker becomes less of a hobby and more of a job, I'll begin to feel as I do about computer science now. Poker will slowly become something that I love to do, but not something that I want to do every waking moment I'm not busy with something else. The nice side-effect that I hope to gain, then, is that computer science will again become a serious hobby while poker pays the bills. Indeed, I want to do some serious Free Software development in my 40s while I play poker for a living.

So that's the big news. There's lots of planning to do. By the end of February, I expect to have a basic, extremely rough ten-year outline and a detailed plan for the first six months of 2006. Hopefully, in early February 2016, I'll post here that I've quit my job to play poker exclusively.