Time for me to lower my expectations. I know my average monthly profit has dropped 60% the last three months! grrrrrrr!

Before the online poker boom, I enjoyed traveling to California and Vegas where I would take $1,000 or $2,000 and play in small to mid limit games, and in general I won more than I lost. I never really had a dedicated roll because I didn’t play regularly, but I studied, took the game seriously, and enjoyed playing whenever I could.

Once I got married the notion of taking a grand or two for gambling out of the checking account was horrifying for my wife who did not gamble. So after winning $100 at a home tournament a little over a year ago, I took that money and built it up online, bit by bit. I’ve had some ups and downs, but I now have a $1,000 roll and play $50 NL cash games regularly. The wife doesn’t mind, as I have never taken money out of our pockets to fund my poker.

I still play live when I can, but 2006 was a brutal year for me live (I actually had the chance to shake hands with Ed this summer at the Wynn in the middle of one of my biggest losses — don’t worry, Ed, I don’t blame you ). A combination of mistakes, variance, and plain old bad luck led me to lose on every trip we took last year. I’d sit in a $1-$2 $200 buy-in NL game and recognize that I was technically playing outside of my $1,000 or so roll, but I wasn’t worried. If the unfortunate happened and I dropped $100, $200, $400… I’d get back home, drop limits if I had to, and just build it back up online for the next trip. Again, the Mrs. didn’t mind as I never once took money out of our pockets to play.

And now… Besides the fact that one of my favorite things to do is to home and spend an hour or two playing the game I love, I also loved being able to play live on a dedicated roll. But reading Ed’s article solidified much of what I’ve been thinking lately. The worst case scenario is that if online poker dries up, I’m basically back to square one with getting to play live when I got the chance on a limited roll. What I have to remember is that square one was not that bad of a place to be.

The poker boom is really just hitting Britain, we have a a number of new Poker tournaments starting this year and our government is fully behind the industry.
I have not noriced any decline of fish on any of the sites I play on and the banking is easy as there is no need for accounts on third parties like netteler.

I may be an optimist but if this is a decline then I am happy enough as I am making a few hundred dollars each month for a hobby which I enjoy.

Peter
My Blog

Of course I won’t be able to fund it on any kind of regular basis after I retire, so I would have to become a winning player for it to work. If all the fish leave then that will be considerably harder to do! Let’s hope that doesn’t happen…

http://code.google.com/p/pokerspot/source

Thread about it here.