Welcome!

I started with a £20 deposit about two and a half years ago.

Like you I've a family and have pretty limited time to play, usually an hour or so when the kids (and sometimes the wife) have gone to bed.
10 hours play would be a good week for me.

I am $14,000 up at the moment and in ring games my hourly win rate is around $30-40/hr.

You can definitely have an enjoyable and rewarding hobby doing this, but the critical thing is to do it right. That means making sure you are properly bankrolled for the limits you play (so you have no realistic risk of ruin), no cashing out (except for emergencies) until you achieve a big enough roll to play the games you want (in m,y case that was $8000 for the $200 NL tables), always striving to improve and lots and lots of discipline...

Post any hands that give you trouble in the appropriate section of this forum so people can help you, and get Poker Tracker as soon as you can afford to (I'd suggest as soon as your roll reaches $200 or so)

Good Luck...

Thank you everyone for the welcomes. I have been reading journals and browsing the forum, and you guys all seem like you have a lot of fun while still taking the game seriously, which I think is great!

I started at Party today, played .02 cent/.04 NL, bought in for $5.00. Played for about 2 1/2 hours, ended up winning $2.50. Played real tight, did not try anything fancy. Only thing is, only 40 of the hands qualified for the bonus (I need to do 500 raked hands in a month to get an extra 25 bucks). I think I am going to stay at this limit for a week and see how far along on the bonus I get, although I have read the $5NL and the $10NL are about the same. What do you guys think? I think I can stay at the 5NL and still hit the bonus, so I will probably do that.

Thanks again for the encouragement. Also, I downloaded your video awhile back excession, it was very cool and imforative.

Hopefully I can work my way up like Xaston, minus the strippers and the mad jewlery (the wife loves jewelry, so I am sure some will be involved eventually!)