Hell Just Froze Over.

It must've.

I'm going to take a five month unpaid leave from work to play poker and spend time with my family. Me, the guy who has repeatedly said again and again that playing poker full time was not for him, has now decided to give it a shot anyway. Why?

The trigger for this is that the company I work for is going through a really rough stretch, much like every other company in the world. The difference is that since we're relatively small (only 25 people) we didn't have the necessary cash reserves to deal with having customers who can't pay, and as time goes by it gets harder and harder to meet the payments. So now we're at the junction where we have to lay more people off, and drop further in salaries (we've already taken a 10% hit). The reason to lay people off isn't that we can't find work for everyone, it's that we simply don't have the money to pay them. We have about $500,000 in outstanding bills - that are owed us - and if we could get that money in, we'd be home free. But alas.

So instead of having to let anyone go, I've volounteered to take a leave of absence. Temporarily. In practise it means that the company will have to work a little harder to do my job as well, but they'll save my wages and associated fees while I'm off, maybe $6,000/month. Not huge money in the grand scheme of things, but every little bit helps. I hope.

So that's the triggering reason, the most important reason. There are three other reasons for why this may be a good idea:

1. I get to spend all day at home, with my wife and my newborn baby. That's pretty awesome.
2. I get to be "off work" (yeah, poker is work, but it's not comparable) all throughout the summer.
3. After years of hemming and hawing over whether or not I'd make good money off of playing professionally, I finally get to find out.

So this is a little nerve-wrecking, but also exciting. I'm excited about spending so much time with my family, and I'm worried about not being able to actually make up for the loss in wages by playing poker. But after discussing it with Lori, it's clear that the worst case scenario is still one we can survive: Even if I can't make any cashouts whatsoever during this period because I run like shit for five months, we still have enough in our savings account to make all the bills.

In order to "make it" without it costing us anything, I'd need to cash out about $3,000 a month (yeah, the Swedish currency has dropped quite a lot vs the dollar, so that's a plus, too), which is less than I've averaged in the last five months while playing only recreationally. Or what you'd call it.

I'm a long ways off from being totally baller. But I think I have a decent shot at winning at least enough so that this won't be a drain on our economy. And hopefully I'll be able to make a lot more.

So, cross your fingers and toes and whatever else you can think of crossing, and here's to hoping this will be a great summer.