My proudest poker achievement -- GOLD MEDAL BABY!!!

I started playing Rush poker in mid-February and it took me a week or so to hit my stride, so I was going full speed during March. Now that March is complete, I've officially qualified for a Gold medal in Full Tilt's Ironman program.

This means that I got at least 100 "points" (around 500 hands) in each of 25 separate days during March. The hardest thing I've ever struggled with online isn't winning, it's putting in the volume day in and day out. I did it, and I don't show any signs of slowing down. If anything, I'll be adding more tables.

Monetarily, the Ironman system is a little complicated, but essentially the Gold medal is worth in the neighborhood of $100. If I get Gold month after month, the value increases as well. So if I'm averaging 25 hours per month, that's about $4 per hour in bonus.

I'm getting around $100 per month in rakeback on top of that, so there's another $4 per hour.

If I average 1 BB/100 hands (which I've done now for the last 26k hands), I will pretty much double that. So I could realistically expect to see $15/hour or more over the next year, which for my goal of paying for Disneyworld would give me almost $5k by next March.

Plenty for a killer family vacation, with enough left over for a return to Vegas as well.

A final little bonus is that I'm starting to really rack up the Full Tilt points for their store. While not a super deal, this will add roughly another $0.75 per hour in value. The problem is it will take me a whole year to save up for anything worth buying. Comparing this to a regular job, that's like getting a nice little Christmas bonus. Basically it would amount to a new ipod Touch after about 1 year at my current volume of play.

I've always felt that if I could somehow manage to play lots of hands, the money would really kick in and fuel my desire to play more. So far that's exactly what's happening.