Treating my poker like a business

I wanted to blog about my recent experience reading Dusty's (somewhat) new book entitled "Treat Your Poker Like a Business." I am sure that in the great sea of positive reviews mine is just a drop in the bucket, but I am going to give one anyways since it has had a transformative effect on how I view my time spent playing and working on my poker business.

One aspect that the book made me think of is setting profitability targets in $$/hr. As a result I have started to schedule a 20hr "work week" complete with time-card (excel spreadsheet) where I plan my week, and account for my money making endeavors.

Since I envision making money from several different sources, its not realistic to just break my time down into play and study, however, Dusty did make me think of something that hearkens back to my day job. Essentially there are tasks that we have to do at work that we bill as Admin time or Marketing. Each of these things is actually counted against a metric we are judged on called Utilization. Essentially Utilization is the metric that they use to see if we are in pursuit of things that make the firm money or cost it money through having to pay us without us being engaged in money making behavior (billing).

A lot of the things that I see as Admin and Marketing for my poker business are essentially things that take away from my bottom line in the short term. However, there is some upside. If I market myself by writing a blog and get students, or have a business meeting on a new money making endeavor, I am in the long run hopefully increasing my bottom line.

Admin basically allows me to assess my profitability and get some legal requirements (like taxes etc) done so that my business can run but there is not much upside so I am going to try to minimize that aspect of my poker business as possible since its not really adding to my bottom line. I guess I can see why at work they ask us to spend as little time on admin duties as possible.

Anyways I highly recommend Dusty's book since I think it may help you to view your poker playing from a completely new light.

Good luck at the tables
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