When I first started out I got a lot of advice from a mate, TommyD who also plays for a living and looking back now, it couldn't have been more spot on. It's been far more mentally strenuous that I expected (and I thought I'd over estimated it in my head to avoid a shock!)
There have been some great times and some not so great times, so I'll list a couple of the high/low points below.
Biggest High Point
Just before this happened I can recall moaning to Emma about how bad I had been running recently, then through a small MTT cash and a bit of rungood at the cash tables, I managed to pull off my first ever £1k+ profit week to get me out of the hole.
Biggest Low Point
Before playing full time, I'd already experienced some pretty long and brutal downswings in cash but during these first 5 months I had my biggest ever downswing. No doubt, the longer it went on, the more my play deteriorated as bits of tilt came in etc but the end result was roughly -£2.5k over the course of about 2 months.
Biggest Near Miss
Sky run 2 freerolls per month for Priority members (a mini and a main), both of which are pretty great value due to how small the fields are. They usually have around £400 and £800 respectively for 1st place, and usually only get around 40 runners. On top of that there is a running jackpot for the first person to win the mini and the main before anyone else does which starts at £1k and increases by £100 each month it isn't done. Well in December I won the mini for £370. The following week I was down to the final 7 of the main (with 6 paid - mincash about £140), stacks are pretty shallow at this point and I shipped my 13xBB with JJ over a minraise... straight into KK to stone bubble :( The jackpot was £2k at that point so winning that main would have been £2.8k for a 40ish runner freeroll!
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Hand on heart, I know that towards the end of 2013 I've been a massive mental game fish and it really badly affected my winrate. The big downswing mentioned above really wrecked my head... I was playing worse, I was trying lots of different things like reducing the numbers of tables, then stupidly being frustrated when they (obviously) didn't show instant results, volume inevitably suffered which in reality is the one thing I needed to get out of it.
I spent the last month or so of the year purely grinding MTTs... probably more mental fish behaviour because at the time I just wanted to do anything other than sit at a cash table, but I know there's tons of value in the stakes of MTT I'd be playing and I've never really put much volume in at MTTs. That final month was ok and I made a decent profit despite probably like 20+ very deep runs in the month and fading a decent score every single time bar that one freeroll for £370.
All in all, I've made ok profits over the period but have seriously under achieved imo and the only person to blame for that is myself... which brings us to 2014 and how I'm going to go about changing that.
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I think 2014 is going to be a big year for me but that's not gonna just happen by chance, it's gonna take a lot of hard work and discipline. So what's the plan, well it's pretty simple really...
1) This is probably the most important point of all; I've taken a lot of advice on board from Ryan Spittles and really respect his attitude towards the game. So, no more ranting about runbad, no more slagging off 'bad' players or moaning about how good their results are/how good they run considering how bad they are blah blah. It's all just a complete waste of time and mental energy, and all it does is negatively affect my own mindset for the game when all that really matters is my own game/results.
2) It's back to the cash tables for the new year and back to being much more disciplined like I was at first. Planning to really smash the volume this year. No more distractions while playing and back to being stricter about getting the volume in that I plan to.
3) Allocate 6-8 hours per week on pure studying of the game, and actually do it!!
4) Later in the year, finally get out to play some live cash.
