[bigloser2448]

I've been trying to figure out over the past few weeks if poker is really going to be profitable and could ever become a source of supplimental income for me. What I mean by that is I don't expect to ever become a Poker Pro pulling down Darin's kind of money or more. I'd be happy if I could get to a point of making $20 or $30 an hour and putting in 10 or 20 hours a week. Now even as I typed that last question, I can think of some of your reactions. "BigL, you just started playing 6 months ago, what do you expect?". "BigL, that's a pretty ambitous goal, you'd better get up to $100NL or higher and run good if you expect that kind of WinRate".

I guess if those two (suspected) reactions are acceptable ones, and I'm starting to think they are, then maybe poker isn't the best way for me to make extra money; even though it is something I love doing & that's almost as important as the money.

I read something from a poker book recently about SnG's that went something like this, "If someone is smart enough to win even just 50% of all the SnG's he played in, then he could probably make a lot more money doing something else". Now the author was actually saying that to suggest that muli-tabling could be a way to profit if you have a fairly high winning % in SnG's. But the main point sticks out in my head. Forget SnG's for a minute & let's just think of Cash Games... How much of a winrate can I expect even if I could get to $100NL and run at an adequate pace? Or if I expended that much focus and drive towards something else, could I make more money doing that?

Sevens posted what I consider a pretty impressive graph for June where he played almost 27,500 hands ($25NL I think, 7's correct me if I'm wrong) and brought in $210. Like I said, the graph was pretty impressive as it just went up and up and up without any significant downswings. Doing the math, even if those hands were all played 4-tabling, that's boils down to about 69 hours of playing @ 100 hands/hour per table (which is probably high). So for 69 hours of work the pay was a little more than $3/hour.

I hope Sevens knows I didn't post that to belittle his performance 'cause I don't think I could match it. All I'm saying is I'd like to think if I tried hard at learning something for 6 months that I should expect to make more than $3/hour at it.

I guess I'm reaching a turning point here. Yogi Berra once said, "If you come across a fork in the road, take it". I think as far as poker goes, I have several potential forks I could take:
*Multi-Table SnG's
*Multi-Table Cash Games
*Cash games with a mix of MTTs (more or less what I've been doing with little or no profit )
*Play for fun whenever
*Give it up altogether and put in an application at The Home Depot

I'd love to hear what you guys think. Are any of you (other than Darin) making what you'd consider good money and more than what you would make if you tried just as hard doing something else less volatile.