Reporting Back

In my last post I promised to have a bit of a think about employment options. I have and I've decided that working sucks. It's much more boring than playing poker. I do however have a stable income at the moment, although it probably wont be too stable if they discover I'm blogging at work! I'm just working through a temping agency at the moment doing a mixture of office admin and data entry; it's mindnumbing.

I guestimated that I could earn somewhere between £10-15 per hour two-tabling at the $1-2 NL tables on stars. This job is paying just over £7 but at least it's garunteed. This way I wont continually be having to skim off the top of my bankroll to pay the bills, which means that anything I make from playing in the evening can go to building the roll, whcih can then provide something to fall back on if I decide to go back just to playing poker at any point and/or allow me to move up to higer stakes.

As for getting a proper job...

The idea of getting a proper job was not one that had been forced to cross my mind untill recently and even now it's being viewed with serious scepticism.

I first started thinking about careers in my second year of university. I wasn't particularly enjoying my degree subject (Biochemistry) and thought a lot about changing to medicine (for trans-pond readers it's worth pointing out that you can study medicine over here as an undergraduate degree). In the end I decided to stick with Biochemistry and then do medicine as a second degree.

This was all before I discovered poker. Poker came along about half way through my thrid year and about 3 months before my first lot of serious exams. It completely distroyed my (already flagging) motivation to study and pretty much took over my life. This continued until the end of my course and I consequently ended up with a 2:ii. I'd also been convinced for a large part of this time that I'd be a sufficiently well rounded poker player by the end of my degree that I wouldn't need to worry about getting a job unless I suddenly decided that I wanted one, although the nearer I got to the end of my degree the closer I came to realising that this was more than a little unrealistic. However, my plan was that I'd spend the summer building up enough of a bankroll so that I'd be able to play for a living until I'd given some thought to what I really wanted to do. I figured that the summer was enough time to build up a healthy role and that if I failed to do so then it would be very clear that I wasn't destined to be a poker player. I had a fairly cushy summer job lined up in oxford working on an American Summer school. I'd done it over previous Summers and it had provided pleanty of poker playing time. However, I failed to take into account the amount of time that would be taken up with planning a wedding and finding somewhere to live in London. As it turned out I didn't get to play more than a few hours a week hence arriving here in London with as weedy a bankroll as I had at the start of the Summer.

I've ommitted one fairly major career consideration that I've been mulling over for almost as long as I've been thinking about medicine. I'm not entirely sure why I've never blogged about it. Some of it has to do with the fact that it would make quite an interesting blog, but would probably have to be kept anonymous. The other reason is that I've never been sure that anything would come of it (or still will). I'm still not sure if it belongs here, but with any luck I'll know one way or the other reltively soon.

Well I'd better get back to some more data entry. Mmmmm.