Going "Pro"

After debating the plausibility of it for months, I decided to stop going into the office and taking a salary, supporting myself entirely on poker winnings. I'm a little nervous, but more excited than anything else. I'm comfortable rolled with about 50 BI, my monthly expenses are minimal, and I've got the ability to support myself without poker for about 12 months. With these fallbacks in place, I'm not worried about downswings (especially playing like the nit I am).

Of course, as soon as I made my last post (about how I look at poker as just another job to grind out, not looking to improve), I suddenly found myslef reading 2p2 more, concentrating more on tables and wanting to improve my game. Go figure. I've started loosening up a little more with mixed results, and I don't expect my game to change drastically. I'm just going to try to gradually change from an acceptable winrate to a better and better winrate. Sounds simple enough, right?

I started half-and-halfing NL100 and NL 200 today. NL200 didn't make me as nervous as I would have expected...I just played my game, adjusted very minutely, and ran like God. Gameplay doesn't seem to be too much different up there, and doubling my winrate was very nice. Today was my first day breaking $1k; I ended up making about $1,400in just under 6 hrs of play. Hell of a way to start things off...pity it's probably not sustainable. But I got my money in good almost every time, had a good feel for the action and people's ranges, and I'm generally pretty confortable with my play up there. Of course, this is over the gigantic sample size of 1,600 hands, so obviously I need to see a lot more hands before I can accurately assess the level. I'm optimistic though, and I'll see if I can maintain my optimism after the inevitable downswing.

More to follow...I'm sure I'll use this blog more in the future to brag about upswings/bitch about downswings.