Results for week of 2/26 to 3/3--Work Hours

POKER HOURS
Administrative   6.25
Study                   8.50
Play                    20.00
                          --------
                           34.75

That's the most time that I've put in in one week so far this year, so I'm pretty happy with it.

I'm slowly but surely arranging things so that I can get my hours in.  My goals haven't changed--30 hours a week playing, 10 hours for study, and whatever time I need for administative tasks, for a minimum of 40 hours every week.

I've occasionally been doing other things besides poker on the side, so that I can put a little money into the business (mostly for office supplies) without touching my bankroll  But that's over now.  My wife's been bugging me to concentrate on poker so that it can really take off.  I'm finally taking her advice, and I'm excited about that.

As the saying goes, poker is a volume game, meaning that to make money, and more specifically, to make the "long run" come sooner so that variance evens out, you have to put in the time.  Poker isn't the lottery.  When you buy a ticket you wait for your ship to come in, even though you're more likely to die during a one-mile drive than you are to win the lottery.  Poker is a job, and like most jobs, those who do the hard work are the ones most likely to be rewarded, which goes back to one of my favorite sayings:

"I know a lot of millionaries.  I don't know anyone who got rich working 40 hours a week."--Dave Ramsey.

I've put in more adminstrative hours than I expected, but that's because I've complety overhauled my recordkeeping, based around what I call my Comprehensive Poker Spreadsheet (PCS).  On this worksheet I can see all of my results by the week, month or year, all the way down to every individual online or live tournament.

The CPS also includes sections for live tournaments, other poker income (such as bonus and rakeback), as well as tracking my business expenses, online bankroll, and live bankroll.  Many of those sections feed into other sections, while some parts of the worksheet stand alone, so the design was complicated. I'm still tweaking it, but it's close to doing what I want it to do. And should they inquire, the IRS will love my recorkeeping.  They deal with bad recordkeeping all the time.  I know of one farmer who threw all his receipts for corn sales during the year in a big paper bag.  When I was working for my uncle's accounting firm, I was the one that totaled all of those receipts.

I have one interesting problem with managing my time.  I work best when I work on one thing at a time.  For example, playing tournaments for a few hours, then studying for at least an hour, or solving an administrative problem with my CPS.  But that's not possible for now.

Americas Cardroom is growing quickly.  Just a month ago, the number of players online in the evening topped out at around 3,000 players, now it's over 8,000--but that's still only one or two large MTTs on PokerStars!  There still aren't a lot of good game choices in the off-peak hours, so I often wind up doing something like studying flash cards or doing admin work for 20 minutes while I wait for a tournament to start.

My apreadsheet work is complicated, and I like to spend the time to think about a problems and immerse myself in it, so that I can juggle all thing things I'm trying to do, and make it work.  But when I'm waiting for a tournament to fill up I don't want to get involved in any non-poker activiites, because it would be too easy to get distraced.  So, I stay in the office and study, do administrative work, or try to find something else useful that I can do in short periods of time.

I wind up studying for 10 minutes, playing a SNG or a longer tournament, then 15 minutes of administrative work, then back to another tournament.  That's not how I work best, but for now, it's the best that I can do.

There is a solution--playing across multiple sites, specifically, by adding a Euro-facing site (mostly European players, and possibly denominated in Euros) and play tournaments that run during American off-peak hours.  Those Americans players that haven't left the country are doing that.  But I'm not going to do that until I win enough on Americas Cardroom to allow me to move some of that money to a Euro site without drawing down my ACR bankroll too much.

There is usually a fee charged for each withdrawl from a poker site, for example, a withdrawl from Americans Cardroom onto a debit card carries a $3 fee, so obviously it would be best to make just one withdrawl to get money to put on a Euro site.  And in general, withdrawing from a site no more than once a month is the way to go.