Back in the US, back to the grind of online poker

I arrived back in California from my European trip on May 21st. This was about 20 days later than planned due to a death in my family.

I am back playing online at Full Tilt and Pokerstars and the big change is I am winning some SNG tournaments and building a small bankroll. It is a bit of a grind because I have a lot of distractions right now. I am playing for 1-2 hours in the morning and 1-2 hours in the afternoon or evening. It took me a good few days to recover from jetlag and start sleeping properly again.

I have found a groove 4 tabling the $10-$30 SNG tournaments (typically 2 Full Tilt and 2 Pokerstars) concurrently. I can play 9 seaters, 18 seaters or 45 seaters and the games are normally over within 2 hours. The only challenging thing for me is where I have 4 games all down to short play on the final table at the same time. The action is moving pretty quick and its hard to keep up with the bets while giving it some thought. I have found if I play 6-7 games in the 2 hour sessions I normally will cash in 2-3 of them making $80-$120 profit. Not much but at least its mostly positive cashflow. I say mostly because I occassionally have a session where I bubble a lot and do not make any cash finishes and this really hurts my average.

I am still trying to figure out which games to play in to make a living. It seems a number of pros grind out the cash games and a number of pros play big tournaments only. I have read some pros started with SNGs (like me) but eventually moved to big tournaments and do not play SNGs any more.

My plan for the next 3 months:

- build my online bankroll
- determine which games to play to make consistent profit / cashflow
- restart playing torunaments at my local casinos
- enter at least 1 event at the WSOP in Las Vegas

Why enter the WSOP and am I ready? - I will write more about that a little bit later.