I play online a lot, mostly at pstars and fulltilt.
It's not that hard to make a little bit of pocket money on online poker if you know what you're doing. However, to make enough cash to pay for uni is a different matter. You'd need to be playing fairly high stakes with a large bankroll. Of course you could whack your loan and overdraft in but i'd advise against that for obvious reasons.
First of all, you need to be a winning player. Any idiot can get lucky in poker because there's so much luck involved, but you need to be winning over long periods of time. You also need to be able to handle the variance. I.e. you could go for months without winning anything even if you're playing well.
Second you need to have good bankroll management. Your bankroll is the amount of money you can afford to invest (not neccessarily the amount of money in your poker account), say £200. You could probably afford to lose that as a student and not be to bad off. Now, you should only be playing with 5% of your bankroll. This is to help with variance, i.e. if you play with the entire 200 you could get 'sucked out' on in the first hand and lose it all, then you're screwed. Also, you're going to play differently with your entire bankroll because you'll want to protect it too much (this is not good).
So that works out at £10, which would be about $0.10/$0.20 stakes. I estimate that if you 'three tabled' (play three tables at the same time) at these stakes you could maybe make about $10 an hour. So playing for 5 hours a night, 5 nights a week would earn you around £125 a week. BUT, this assumes that you are a WINNING player and does not take into account variance, which as i explained before means you could win nothing for ages.
You should also realise that playing for 5 hours a night is easier said than done. Assuming you take neccessary breaks every hour or so, this could become 7 or 8 hours. You couldn't afford to be tired either as this would affect your play. Playing poker at this volume can also become very very monotonous and boring. You may also see that fitting this between your social life and studies might become a problem.
Personally when i'm at uni I intent to play mostly tournaments (which i consider my strength) and set myself a weekly budget of say £20. This way i can just play for fun, when i want to, and if i get lucky, i get lucky. My biggest tournament cash to date was over a grand which came in very handy at the time, if I can do that at uni I will be a very happy man...
Apologies for the mega-long post, but hopefully this has helped you a little. My advice would be to talk to your friends who you say win a lot and get some tips off them. Also read loads of poker books, they will improve your game loads. Good luck!
