Wednesday, February 11, 2009

The upside of losing my job

Wow the highs and lows of life. I have the most amazing day of my life on saturday morning when my little baby boy is born and then Wednesday morning I get a call from my senior manager saying that I have been made redundant.

Well f*ck me.. You get paid off with your Royal Flush and then the next hand lose your stack to a runner runner.

The losing player looks at this situation as doom and gloom, the positive attitude player looks at this as opportunity.

I work in the finance industry, I work in a US Bank, I work as a trader. I am high risk in this business. I cant shy away from that fact so I had prepared myself just incase the bad news should arrive.

The downside, I now have limited money. I have a lump sum (almost a years cash) which will run out. I have a sweet sports car I can sell if needed giving me another 6 months money. I have responsibility to my girlfriend and newborn to provide.

The upside far outweighs the bad. Most importantly I get the opportunity of a lifetime now to spend some time with my growing son in his first year of life. I have enough money to last me a year with an extra 9 hours a day in my own space, not working for anyone. I have great experience and confidence to get a job later down the line and can now look at other interests with maybe a switch to a complete different industry. Banking bored the tits off me anyway.

I am considering trying to pull an income from poker. From Jan '08 to now i put $500 online and have turned into over $10k in approx 100k hands of cash. That was playing in the evenings only. I can now ramp up the hands online and see if I can make that a good number and start cashing out. This could be interesting. A sort of pro poker but not reliant on the money. My tourny game has been strong. Im 97% on official poker rankings on FT (darrenb2) so may look at that as an extra line of income too.

I have a business about to start which is poker related that I am reluctant to talk about but anyone who plays in London will possibly here of this business by the end of the year. This will be profitable for the first year with very few outgoings. A few people who read this will know what I mean, the others will have to wait.

So looking at the above, I am comfortable. I have no debt and nothing large to buy for the baby. Its all been done over the past few months. My goal now is to see how much I can make short term through poker playing without using any off my redundancy money.

I have $6k online for cash games
I have $2.2k online for tournys

Im gonna stick to 100nl for now.

Most of all though I get to see my boy explore this world in his first few months.

I am really happy.

Ryverrat

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

the ups and downs of life. wow, this was a hell of a post.
I hope your business idea will work out and you will be better off in your new life.
I wish you all the best and you will have a lot of fun participating in developing your child.
Good luck...you will need it

Ryverrat said...

thanks for your comment. I wish i knew your name/blog to thankyou directly.

Unknown said...

I come back to your page from time to time as I appreciate your musings on poker etc. This post was worth the trip - I like the fact that your boy comes first in all of this - and your philosophical response to being made redundant is also refreshing. Good luck with it all - it's going to be a great year.

Ryverrat said...

Thanks for your comment Richard. I do believe this will be one of the best years of my life.