Hi Everyone,

Thought I'd share my thoughts on my long term poker goals. I think a lot of us could be in the same boat and hopefully we can form some form of a discussion here about different forms of the poker lifestyle.

Background: Living in Melbourne, Australia, I am fortunate enough to have access to an very soft and easy $1/3 ($200 buy in) game at Crown Casino. I started grinding the $1/3 game late July 2015 and from playing about 20-25 hours a week, I've gathered about $10k profit. On top of that, I came second in a weekly tournament for $3.5k as well. After using some of the money for life and a bit of travel, my roll is now approximately $10k AUD. NOTE: Poker is not my primary income. I own 2 businesses that pay for food and rent.

My Goal

Whilst I am enjoying crushing the $1/3 game at the local casino, I feel like in the long term, I would much rather be playing MTT and travelling around to different locations for the tours. The goal is to eventually be able to step up so I can tour Australia and NZ for the ANZPT (majority of tournament buy ins are around $350-500 and some APPT series (around $500-1k buyin). If successful, I'd like to move forward to tournaments in Macau and hopefully Europe. I am currently undecided about the states because I read that tournament winnings are taxed and if so, I feel that the rake for these tournaments become too high. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this as well.

Questions about moving forward:

1) Is travelling Australia and NZ for the tours feasible? What I mean by that is, given flight, accomodation and buy in costs, do these tournaments now become incredibly hard to beat? I had a friend mention that apart from Melbourne and Sydney, the other series are significantly smaller and because of this, travelling there might not be a feasible plan (unless I plan to challenge for player of the year etc...)

2) What can I do to make significant improvements in my MTT games?
I am currently playing a lot of MTTs and $2.5 180 player SNGs on PokerStars. The MTTs I am playing tournaments varying from about $5-$16 buy in. Are there any specific books or videos that I could learn from?
I am also playing 25 NL as I still feel that the core of even becoming a good MTT player could come from playing online cash.

3) Is there anything else that I havent covered or that I should look at when moving forward towards my goal?

Keen to hear everyone's thoughts. I am sure we can all bring in really good points about this very topic.

TutorV