It's coming up on summer job season again. As usual I don't really have any prospects going into this thing...I really don't want to work at the mall again (sorry, Alex). I'm sure I will end up with some type of "paycheck" employment this summer, and hopefully it will pay more than Eddie Bauer did. I think over the entire summer of 2004 I earned about $800 at a rate of $7/hour at my job. Needless to say I didn't get a lot of hours. I think most of my hours occurred on a weeklong spree of over-night shifts which required me to stay in the store from 10 PM thru 8 AM and keep an eye on the construction guys who were remodling the place. That was a sweet gig, there. No customers, minimal manual labor, and they even had a TV in the office. Wow, that was sweet, I don't think I appreciated it as much then. Oh well.
I am confident that if I devoted my full attention to it that I could earn a very nice income over the summer by playing online poker at a very minimal amount of risk/capital. As it stands now I maintain a separate poker bankroll from my rent/living expenses fund, and I am pretty damn sure that I could easily outdo $7/hr just by playing multiple $1/2 games for a few hours each day. Last summer I was making about $70/hr playing short handed $10/$20 tables and $20/$40 ring games (tight-weak my ass, LOL). However, like any business, playing poker as a form of income requires a lot of patience, discipline and attention. These are things that I did not necessarily take into too much consideration a year ago. This is something which I am sure in part led to some of the self-destruction in the month of September. Historically the only way I've kept track of how I'm doing at poker is how much money I have at the moment (poker, afterall is my sole form of "income"). This is not a good system because it fails to shed attention on some of the reasons why the bankroll is going up/down. If I were ever to tackle poker as a real job it would require a lot more book keeping and analysis of weekly/monthly (etc) outcomes. Really my best conclusion in terms of poker's potential for income in my "career" career is that it will have to be an extracurricular form of income, side money. The way I see it, one can grind out a very meager living at poker, but striking it real big requires quite a lot of risk. Maybe I'm tight-weak after all, but that's not an uncommon trait for we engineering types.
