It is hard. Not hard like my grandfather had it down the mine, but still hard. Keeping every plate spinning and knowing which one to catch first is a real test.
I play mid stakes for a living. I also stream my grind. Above all I am a father and a husband. Those two roles sit at the top of the list. Poker can be played at almost any hour, so the working day can bend around home life. There are ways to use that flexibility well. This is how I do it.
Summer is for study and longer hours at home
My wife is the steady income and the person who keeps our small family organised. I fit the poker around that. She teaches and our daughter is still in school, so from late July they both get six weeks off.
Prize pools tend to shrink in summer. People want daylight and fresh air. Poker happens indoors, so fewer players show up. That is a good moment to put family first and cut volume. I start later so I can play monsters with my daughter or sit longer at the table with both of them.
Once family time is locked in, the smaller pools make extra study more useful than extra tables. I spend those months on PKOs and mixed games. The WSOP is done by then and most of my volume is online.
The online calendar now leans hard toward knockout events, mystery bounties and PKOs. Rooms such as BCPoker put a lot of that format on the slate. Mixed games are still new to me and I enjoy them. Year on year WSOP numbers hint that mixed events are growing. They are a fresh puzzle, they are fun, and the tables I have sat have been friendly.
If the format scares you, sit down anyway. People will walk you through the basics. If you get decent at it you have another way to get paid besides Texas holdem. Bracelet fields of a few hundred are kinder than fields of a few thousand. Smaller fields also mean less swing.
When the weather turns the volume goes up
When summer ends and school starts again I flip the plan. Study drops. Online volume rises.
Cold months send people indoors. Recreational players come back from the beach to the felt. Prize pools swell and I try to play as much as I can. That also means fewer monster games with Adeline.
That pattern holds until spring, when two live festivals come into view, the Irish Poker Open and the WSOP. The Irish Open has a mixed game menu I like. The holdem at both stops still needs work, especially standard MTTs without knockouts. PKOs and mystery bounties are less common live.
Through the year I still travel to mid sized live festivals and I still stream the online grind. Mains in the few hundred runner range, often around the €1,000 mark, sit in a useful spot. Fields of 350 to 450 swing less than the giant WSOP day ones. Soft mid sized fields are good for the roll. I like having both large and medium fields in the mix.
Your life will not look like mine. You may have a day job, more children, or none. The useful part is the calendar idea. Watch when pools shrink and grow, then decide whether study, volume or family gets the next block of hours. Online knockout schedules on sites such as BCPoker make that choice easier to plan week by week.
