I know some people who make money on online poker, but there are some general rules of thumb that make it quite tedious to start with. As mentioned earlier it is all about bankroll management. Here's advice I've been given over the years;
1. If you want to make a steady income then you need to be playing cash games, not tournaments.
2. You need to be sure that on average, you have an edge over most players at the level you are playing at.
3. To ride the peaks and troughs of luck then you need to have a bankroll that fits the following criteria in my opinion: A good player wil come out with about four big blinds an hour profit. You'll want 100BB as your stake to sit down at a table to play a decent session and cover off a bad run. Then to counter a long losing streak you probably want 50x the stake in your bank set aside for poker alone.
Bearing all that in mind, to be safe, and assuming you have an edge then the maths means you need a fair bit of capital to start up properly. Say you want to earn £20 per hour (equivalent to about a £40K a year salary working 7.5 hours a day, 5 days a week). You need to be playing cash games with a £5 BB. That means you should have £500 set aside to sit at the game and about £25K in the bank set aside solely for playing poker.
Of course this is a "safe" way to try and build up through the levels, but while I love the game if I were working the equivalent to a full time job I'd grow tired for that much money. I'd need to be playing in a 10/20 game and that needs £100K in the bank to do safely.
Generally people can accelerate this by having a good run and getting lucky or multi-tabling (and that only accelerates the time and doesn't negate the need for the bankroll). I'd love to play pro as I've had some success in the APAT World Amateurs and in Vegas, but I'd be bored putting in the necessary hours and don't have the bankroll to do it properly.
