If this is a one month hiatus / vacation from work and you can return to work as if you never left.....and the point is too see how well you do when fully concentrating on poker.......then I see no problem with it, although I wouldnt set your sites too high because I think you may be dissapointed.

2 main reasons

1) It doesnt sound like you have all that much experience playing poker since youve only played live twice, youre playing mostly $50NL online, and your roll is around $3K. This is all just my educated guess since I dont know you

2) Since the poker rooms will be filled with mostly guys, and most of them are grouchy, you might now have a whole lot of fun.

I would stay away from downtown. Is full of old crotchety guys that are no fun to be around. I think you'll like the games and the atmosphere much better on the strip. Caesars and MGM are my fav places to play. Also, plan to play mostly in the evening and into the early morning. The action is exponentially better.

So, to sum it all up, you've been given the opportunity to take a months worth of vacation time from your job, and you're considering using it to spend some time in vegas and see how you can do playing poker. You have a $3,000 roll which is expendable, since you always can just go back to your job and not have to worry about how you're going to live. This is a total guess, but I'd probably think you'd need to make at least a buyin and a half a day at 1/2 NL for this whole thing to be profitable, which as some others pointed out might not be hard to do in soft games in vegas. I'm kind of interested in your poker background though, ie. how long you've been playing online, the bankroll mishaps you've had (as most of us have indeed had them), if you've ever been faced with a long string of bad cards, etc. With only 15 buyins, if you hit a run of bad cards it'd be close to impossible to make it through the month with that roll fully intact. However, if you're a decent player who has 15 buyins for 30 days I think it'd be worth it to give it a shot.


PS. DO NOT agree to meet MVP anywhere in vegas.

Live play has much more variance, partly due to the nature of the situation partly due to emotional swings. People in Vegas want to gambool it up. The structure of many of the cardrooms isn't very good . A lot of 50x blind buyins.

I have seen numerous hands at NL 1-2 and 2-4 where people just refuse to fold. When you have a lawyer drinking scotch, hammered showing off for his girl, calling your all in with 2nd pair only to catch on the river, it is harder to swallow than at Pokerstars random table number five trillion eighty four. You can't physically see the guy that caught runner runner on Pokerstars, but you might want to strangle the lawyer at the casino game.

This is emotional variance, and it is a very big beast if you let it be. When you are trying to make a living playing live, you are only getting 35 hands an hour to work with. Add this to tipping the dealer, listening to Uncle Eddie talk about the buffet in the Tropicana, and all the chaos around the casino, it can become very difficult not to lose your mind (and your bankroll). Not to mention the other games in the casino, why not a couple of hands of BJ to soften this loss today.

And for my final few points.
1. People smell very bad in person, I have sat next to numerous people who tilt me just on smell alone.
2. People are ugly, I don't like looking at them. Yes it is very easy to read people in live play, but having 1000's of hands is a database is good enough for me. Plus the characters at Full Tilt and other sites are more attractive than Aunt Edna.

As for going for it hell yeah give it a shot, but do it with 10K at least. and some breathmints, and very very dark sunglasses. There aren't enough sunglasses at live tables.

On to sunglass story number 1.
I once watched a guy with a binions ring on finger, numerous other swapmeet jewerly strewn about the rest of his body, attempt to analyze a woman's hand. The board was something ridiculous like 3 kings a 10 and a J raindbowlicous.
He spent five minutes explaining the intricacies of what he was thinking. Finally he pulls down his sunglasses only to reveal ... ...... .. A SECOND PAIR OF SUNGLASSES! Shouting out "grandma I figured you out this time I call".
Grandma then flips over AK for quad kings. What did this man have you ask, a straight. Not even a FULL HOUSE. The kicker: Grandma to the dealer "who won that one sonny I can't see the cards on the table".

Five minutes and SHE didn't even know her cards.
Ah yes live play is always wonderful, especially when you have sunglasses.

pretty impressive turning over quad Aces on a board of K K K T J