My Bankroll for Poker in Asia

I moved to Asia with $5800 3 years ago.  It took a couple weeks to get set up again for online poker in Asia (PokerStars was banned in the US on ‘Black Friday’), and with initial moving costs I was down to around $3500 pretty quick.

Your first few weeks in any new city will be the most expensive, and while I was pretty good at saving money some things just can’t be avoided. Luckily I started off in Sihanoukville, Cambodia which is super cheap for digital nomad living.

kick2dante poker in Asia PokerStars

When I first got online and grinding poker again I started kind of slow and was only making about $500 a month for the first couple of months.  A few months in and my bankroll was right at $3k after paying my next months rent and I was starting to get a bit worried.

I was mostly playing MTTs with a few SNGs mixed in, and of course tournaments can be very swingy.  I felt like I was playing well and the games were still pretty good.  However they definitely were not as good as before Black Friday so I was not sure I would survive.

Finally A Heater

Three months after I arrived I had an upswing and it was a big one.  Over the next month I crushed MTTs on PartyPoker and the roll shot up from $3k to $8k.  Considering I was only playing 5 or 6 $11 and $5.50 rebuys a day and not much else that was a great ROI.

I still continued to win through Nov, Dec was a bit slow but Jan was nice.  By the time I left Cambodia to check out Thailand and the Philippines I had $11k and was extremely confident.

Ups and Downs

During my month living in Pattaya I basically made no money at all.  Then for my first two months after moving to the Philippines I made almost no money at all.  I did have one huge day where I won two MTTs for about $1600 profit which helped, but it wasn’t enough.

At this point I realized that MTTs were just to swingy and a downturn could easily break me.  Not only that but Party had dropped all of their guarantees significantly and started to take 3% on Skrill cashouts, it was not nearly as good of an option as it had been before.

50/100 cash games at waterfront #poker

A photo posted by Dante (@kick2dante) on

I’m not a fan of playing live poker in Asia but I guess that could’ve been another option. My buddy has a TwoPlusTwo forum thread about playing live in cardrooms and casinos across Asia.

I hopped around trying out different things.  I spent one of the most tilting months of my life trying to be a rakeback whore on Microgaming.  It looked like the softest site I had ever seen, players certainly as bad as 2005 players, but I got my ass kicked there and had to give up.

Switching to Cash Games

After many months of making very little money I was back to around $5k and once again was getting concerned.  I really had one more thing to try and that was cash games.  If it didn’t work out I would have to jump back into MTTs with $4k and cross my fingers.

It was around September of 2013 and luckily I started off strong to get some confidence and breathing room.  I was up to $7k after a month or two.  Then I had some run bad for a month and treaded water, but around January I hit a big $5k rush.

Once again I was up to $11k and off life tilt.  I had made money in  4 of the 5 months I played cash.  I looked at a really nice condo and almost signed a 6 month lease and gave 2 months deposit.  It would have cost me $2k just to move in.

I’m glad my life nittyness wouldn’t allow me to sign that lease because I made no money for the next 6 months. Meanwhile some grinders on the forums were winning 6 figures in live MTTs.

Games are Dead in Summer

The online games are totally dead in the spring and summer months now, unless the bad beat jackpot is high on sites with one of those, like 888 Poker where I mostly play nowadays.

In a 3 year sample size it has usually gone like this: make no money in European spring and summer, make money in European winter and fall months.  The only people that play when the weather is nice are the grinders.  The fish only play when they are frozen into their homes.

Now during the Summer months I just do online freelancing.  It keeps me afloat living in the Philippines. Then pick up online poker again over the Winter months, especially when the 888 jackpot gets high.

My main goal in life is to keep my roll in the 5 figure range so that I can handle downswings.

13 Responses

  1. kick2dante says:

    didn’t put the partypoker OPR where i crushed huhu 🙁

  2. brianmark says:

    What is freelancing and how does it make money?

  3. kick2dante says:

    freelancers are girls that dont work for a ba……. oh wait sorry wrong topic….. 🙂

    freelancing is when you do online work for different people, they put up work you only accept it if you want, they only pay you if its good enough, its generally pretty small pay unless u have a skill set, odesk would be a good place to start

  4. Allan says:

    what type of freelancing just article writing? Did you learn any specific skill such as copywriting?

  5. kick2dante says:

    despite my (clearly) awesome writing skills as evidenced by the fact that I have a blog and am a published author (ebooks count) writing jobs dont go so well for me

    its just random button clicking, boring, low pay, takes way to much mental energy to make it even halfway decent (for Asia) pay…. but it keeps me here

  6. Allan says:

    What’s the website? I’m interested.

  7. kick2dante says:

    before i was told about it i had to swear i would never tell anyone……. i never break a swear sorry

  8. Has says:

    What other options are there for Western men looking for jobs?

  9. kick2dante says:

    i am releasing a few ebooks soon on how to make money online, for now all thats up is the poker one

    • stupid falang says:

      Did you ever release those ebooks? Highly interested in ways to make money online.

      • Neo says:

        Pretty sure he just did (does?) surveys and other shit on Mechanical Turk. Can make around $1000/month doing that part time, but it looks boring af.

        Freelance writing is a marginally better gig for a native speaker. Especially if you can find a gig that pays $2k/month. Gets boring after a while though.

        • stupid falang says:

          Thanks for the info! I’m Finnish so I’m not native but near native level when it comes to writing. I tried to sign up for the Mechanical Turk and was faced with a notification:

          “To effectively maintain and administer the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) marketplace, we are not always in a position to extend an invitation to complete tasks and earn rewards to every newly registered Worker. Should conditions change in the future, we will notify you with an invitation.”

          Guess I’ll be waiting for an invitation to (hopefully) come sometime.

          • jspill says:

            At one point they restricted mturk to only Americans, not sure what the current status is.

            Since you’re bilingual you could look for translation / transcription / data entry / customer support / forum moderation etc. jobs where Finnish is needed.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *