Going Pro on $500

Some months ago I decided to embark on my latest poker challenge (I have been called a challenge obsessive in the past) of trying to play online poker games for a living starting with as little as $500. This figure may surprise a lot of people but I felt that it was enough to give me a decent shot at it.

After 75,000 hands playing NL50 full-ring and playing a minimum of six tables and as many as ten, I managed to earn $25/hour. This was without using my trusted Poker Office which has served me in good stead over the past eighteen months. My aim was to show that anyone could do this and that they didn’t need large starting capital.

Now ten buy-ins is not a very big bankroll so at the start I began cautiously. I shunned marginal situations and thin value bets and protected my bankroll as much as possible. In fact I got to know the games so well that I even folded KK twice pre-flop and was correct to do so. In both instances the other two players that were in the hand held AA and QQ and AA and the other KK respectively.

With a combination of solid careful play, sign up bonuses and rakeback I managed to reach a level where I could have made $1000/week if I chose to work a 40 hour working week. That equates to $50,000/year if you give yourself two weeks off a year. I found that the NL50 ($0.25-$0.50) level was high enough to be able to make some decent money but was low enough to present me with enough weak players to be able to obtain value.

This level is also low enough and the initial buy-in small enough to make it achievable for the vast majority of poker players. Now I will not go as far as to say that the process of earning $50,000 in a year is easy or straightforward because it isn’t and saying otherwise would be wrong.

At the end of the day I am a very experienced online poker player but that can be hugely offset by the fact that I spewed lots of money through not properly respecting the level and the small amounts of money that I was playing for compared to my usual size game. So it is perfectly possible that anyone could take what I did and move it on substantially just by being more disciplined.

It is amazing to think that someone could make a living at poker starting with so little money. There are several factors that need to be in place for this to work. The first one is the easiest and that is to have $500 as a starting bankroll. But even that can be worked around as you could start with less and work your way up to $500. That is the easy part, the next part is still easy but is one that many people neglect and that is to take advantage of sign-up bonuses or rakeback.

These bonuses when added every month form a significant chunk of your earning power and it also allows you to relax more whilst playing poker as you will then be under less pressure to force certain situations at the poker table. The hard part is having a technically proficient game and for that I recommend joining a good coaching site or reading something like the Harrington on Hold’em cash game series which deals specifically with full-ring cash games and how to play poker in general.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

Popularity: 1% [?]

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.