My friend has been working at Safeway as a meat cutter for nearly 5 years. He's reached journeymen wages and has been fairly happy with this job. He got married last year and recently had a kid. Congrats for him, but the girl turned out nuts and he cut ties. He's now facing alimony and child support. He's looking at losing quite a bit of his paycheck so he thinks poker might be his big ticket.

He visiits the casinos out here in Oregon and has had minimal success. He's had huge winning days and equally brutal losses. He proposed the idea of quitting his job and moving to Vegas to play poker professionally.

I've played with him before and I didn't think he was anything more than a lag. Last night he came over and I transfered $100 into his Poker Stars account. He sat around until 4am playing on my computer. This morning I loaded up Poker Tracker and imported his hands. Below are his results from SnG's. Any advice for him?


Agression
3.83
3.56
11.5
Everything was a mini bet and raise.

Sounds like he needs a lot more experience to me. Instead of moving to vegas..why doesn't he put some money in online and see how that goes. an extra year shouldn't kill the guy.

He plays WAAAAAAAAAAAAY too many hands in the first 3 levels... I mean, 19% PFR when the blinds are SOOO low is basically just pissing money away, unless he's gettin buttloads of AA,KK,AK, or QQ...

I don't mind his level 4+ play... Raising a lot and playing aggressively when the blinds matter...

He seems like the typical uber-aggressive player who keeps pushing and pushing and pushing, winning a bunch of chips, until he walks into hands that will call him down a couple times, and then he's out...

Take this advice for what it's worth, as it's hard to read his play with not that many hands played... And, I'm also not nearly a master of analyzing players from their PT stats...

He plays the exact same way in ring games. He's been playing for 6 years, so he won't take my advice. His response to any advice is, "you know how long I've been playing poker? I played hold'em before you even heard about."

Believe it or not, I'm going to show him the responses in this thread. If he won't believe me, hopefully he will believe you guys. I just think his plans on moving to Vegas will backfire like he won't believe. I told him not to quit his job.

If he thinks he's good enough to turn pro then he's good enough to make decent money playing in the spare time until he knows he's good enough.

Why move to Vegas if he plays sit n goes?
Why do you need to transfer money to him for him to play?

This guy has got important responsibilities to financially support his kid, taking his chances in Vegas hardly seems prudent. If he's good enough to make it in Vegas, why not play on the internet, at least then he'll be able to be around his kid, rather than knowing him as a name on a cheque.

Just my two cents,

Molina