In my last blog, I talked about leaving my corporate job to become a poker content creator. But you still may be wondering: “What does a typical day (or week) look like making poker content?”
To help peek behind that curtain, I’m going to take you through my most recent week on the grind.
Sunday: The featured online poker day, for good reason
Sunday is traditionally the biggest day for online poker each week, as it includes most of the week’s most significant tournament guarantees across all online poker sites. The regulated Michigan online poker sites are no different.
Each site has its featured weekly tournament on Sunday. For BetMGM Poker, that is a $215 buy-in event with a guaranteed prize pool of $40,000. At PokerStars, its flagship Sunday tournament is the $100 buy-in Sunday Special with a guaranteed prize pool of $35,000.
The weekends are also great days for cash games, so I started up my Sunday poker session at noon with four cash games tables. I generally play stakes of $2/$5 with a $500 max buy-in, and $1/$2 with a $200 buy-in. I played for four hours and booked a profit of $505.
From there, I’d take a two-hour break and fire my Twitch stream back up at 6 p.m. I would play tournaments until about 2:30 a.m., but it was worth it. There were some deep runs, including in the major Sunday tournament on each site.
I finished seventh in the $215 buy-in on BetMGM for $1,600, and 66th place in the $100 Sunday Special on PokerStars for $177.
For the day, I played 20 tournament entries and finished with a profit of $1,168.
Monday-Wednesday: The weekly online poker grind
I woke up later than I normally would on Monday after a long poker night, but I still started up my session at noon. I had another successful day in four hours of play, ending with a profit of $1,106. Then from 4-7 p.m. I would work on editing videos for my YouTube channel.
I was hoping to continue the momentum with another big win starting at noon on Tuesday. Although it would end up being another profit in four hours of play, I wouldn’t consider my $11 in winnings to be a “big day.” After the session, I worked on editing YouTube videos for an hour.
Later that night, I jumped on a Zoom call from 9-10:30 p.m. with my friend and professional poker player Dominic Choma to discuss hands from the past week. Talking poker with him has been a major help to my game.
Dom is an incredible player (much better than me) and has always been willing to help me. I can’t even begin to thank him enough. Having a friend you have known since fifth grade who is a great poker player has its perks!
On to Wednesday, where again, I was hoping to keep my winning streak going. Starting my session at noon, I would get off to a hot start. I was up over $1,300.
But unfortunately, after some mistakes and a tough run of cards, I would end the day down $467 after four hours. Then it was back to the YouTube editing grind for an hour.
Thursday-Saturday: The departures from my poker routine
In typical weeks, I’ll also stream for at least four hours on Thursdays and Fridays. But my schedule was a little different this week. At times when I fall behind on editing vlogs, I’ll take a day to get caught up on things. So on Thursday, I worked on editing videos from 11:30 a.m.-7:30 p.m. (Yes, eight hours!)
It’s a lot of time to spend on editing videos, but I was able to get all caught up on the backlog of work, so it was great to check that off my to-do list.
Friday would be a day off from poker and content altogether, leading into the $300 buy-in event at Motor City Casino in Detroit on Saturday.
Most of my play is online these days, but I’d been hearing about this monthly tournament at Motor City for a while now. The $300 buy-in has a guaranteed prize pool of $100,000.
The turnout would crush the guarantee. There were more than 550 entries and more than $140,000 was in the prize pool! The tournament started at 12:15 p.m.
Unfortunately, I was knocked out at 7 p.m. with around 110 players remaining. I still had a great time, though. Despite not making it into the money, I was able to meet fellow Michigan-based Twitch streamer “DrDadPoker,” as well as many people who have been supportive of my poker channels over the past year.
When tallying up my results on the week, I had a profit of just over $2,000 on the tables.
I generally play more hours in a week online than my 24.5 for this week, but I had to dedicate more hours than normal to video editing, as well as the Motor City tournament. I’m happy with the results and hope to close out 2021 strong!
You can follow David’s poker journey on his social media accounts under the handle “DavidKayePoker.” David is on YouTube, Twitch, Twitter and Instagram.
