I have been doing a lot of poker reading but not very much playing. I haven’t been to the casino in about 3 months and have only played 1500 hands on PStars since July.

That is about 7 hours worth of playing. I am up currently by a good margin, about 5bb/100 but still I think that a lot of that is luck. I have made a bunch of REALLY bad plays in those 1500 but lucked out on a lot of them. Now that the fall is here I think that I should be able to get a few more hours in and that means a huge number of hands…..I hope.

I would like to be able to build up my bank roll to the point where I can play the 5/10 limit 6-max at PStars without too much worry. That is my goal for the Winter of 2008. I think that it is at that limit that I will start to be making the real money, or at least have the potential to.

I think that I will be posting some more interesting articles and links to poker blogs and such in the next coming months as I start to study the game more in-depth.

Like I have mentioned before I have been playing some online poker in my spare time, and when I am getting bored.  Anyway, lately I have been doing pretty good, I invested in some tracking software and it has already paid for itself. 

So yesterday I sat down and figured out the hourly rate I have made playing poker for the last month, and I was surprised to see that it was higher than my effective hourly rate for all of my online business.  Hmm I thought to myself, if I just played poker then I would be able to buy that new computer that I want sooner.

That is when the guy on the other should spoke up and said, “Yes, but remember there is nothing passive about playing poker, online or otherwise.  You can’t go home and read a book AND make money, you actually have to be doing something.”

This is very true, and where the title comes from.  Sure I could decide to just play poker in my free time and spend NO time on my other endeavors, or I could even sell my remaining online real-estate, however I will never have a nice passive income when I stop playing.  The sites and services that I am spending my time on now are gaining speed, and on top of that they are making me money, as little as it may be, while I am at work, sleeping, etc.  That is something that I can’t say about poker.  If I go on vacation I make no money except for the money that my sites pull in via Adsense and affiliate offers. 

So my conclusion to that little internal conversation was this, keep doing what I am doing.  So I will continue to maintain and build my sites and if the mood strikes I will fire up the poker, or set up a home game (that I can’t seem to win, but that is another post)

I have been playing poker for a while there and have always picked up the second SuperSystem every time I went into Chapters.  However I had a good poker weekend last weekend so I decided to use my winnings and buy the $50 book.  I must say so far I am impressed.  I have read a couple poker books with tips and tricks but this is much better.  It tells you what you should do and then tells you why.  I was getting sick of people saying, “okay you can play these hands in this position, these in that etc…”.  Also it is written by a number of people, ones that are the best at a specific type or style of poker.

Right now I am bedtime reading the Jennifer Harman section on Limit Poker, as this is the type that I like playing online.  It is very good, she doesn’t spend a lot of time on the beginner stuff which is good since I am pretty much past beginner now. 

One thing that I notice is missing from this book, and every other poker book that I have read, is that there is limited information on tells.  They are always telling you to watch for tells and try to read the players but they never tell you specific things to look for.  There must be a book out there for this, but all of the general poker books that I have read so far are no good.  If I find one I will let you know.