This is long overdue. It's time to finally start a poker journal about becoming a professional poker player in China.

The purpose of this journal is threefold:
1: To provide an inspiration for those thinking of becoming a poker nomad
2: To motivate myself and others who have little or no support in their poker lives
3: To get feedback on my general plans, ideas, and strategies in my pursuit of success

Some background:

I have been living in China for about five years (from Minnesota), and started playing poker around a year and a half ago. At the beginning of this year I got a RIO Essential membership, and switched to a more aggressive poker schedule. I reduced my English teaching days to one and a half days a week, with the remaining time entirely for poker.

My games:

I play two games almost exclusively:
1. Live NLHE Cash
2. Online PLO Cash

My goals:

1. Move up to PLO200 Online and ￥10/￥20 RMB (about $1.50/$3 USD) Live
2. Earn $3000 (or ￥20000) a month playing poker
3. Destroy my biggest weaknesses

My challenges/weaknesses:

1. Zero external support, and many doubters in my personal life
2. Zero access to poker tracking software (none of the sites I can play allow trackers)
3. I generally struggle to get motivated to sit alone in my room all day playing poker on the Internet

My strengths:

1. I love learning. I learned Mandarin in a year, Cantonese in two years, and now poker
2. I have an outgoing personality that gets me into some of the best Live games you could conceive.
3. I have great patience and can play Live poker almost endlessly without getting bored or too results oriented.

My plan:

I am going to better use my time at home. Right now my study/play ratio is about 80:20. I study for hours a day, and can barely bring myself to play for more than an hour a day. I really enjoy studying, but this is probably a large weakness, since my goal is to be a professional poker player, not a professional poker professor.

Things are much better on the Live side. I currently play in a ￥1/￥2 RMB ($.15/.30) game which has earned me approximately ￥6000 RMB ($1000) a month for the last six months or so. The difficulty I have is being able to grow the bankroll, since I use my earnings to pay for life expenses. I would like to move up to a ￥5/￥10 RMB game so that I can build my bankroll faster.

My current liferoll sits at ￥55000 RMB. I can probably afford to drop to ￥30000 before I need to start teaching more English classes.

I will try to keep this journal entertaining, but I can't make any promises. I will also try to update this journal extremely frequently. I would like to post hand histories or graphs, but I am extremely limited in my poker sites, and none of them allow PT4 or HM2, so I don't even have those programs. That said, I'll do my best to share some interesting poker spots on the tables and off the tables in the poker life.

Lastly, a big shout out to Saulo for his epic journals which inspired me to finally start my own.

The best is yet to come!