The good: it pays fairly well, especially if you get rolled onto a trip. An unused reserve day pays 6.0 TFP, but if you go out on a trip, you're paid the average daily guarantee of 6.5 per day on the days you fly. So it's very unlikely you'll get less than 100 TFP per month without picking up any extra days.

The biggest downside to reserve at SWA: reserve days are ineligible for ELITT, the system we use to trade trips with the company for other unassigned trips. If you have a regular line of trips, you have a good shot at being able to change them for different trips (maybe an easier one, maybe one that pays more, maybe an overnight you like), changing workdays for a day you need to be home, and so on. With reserve? The only way to make changes is to swap or give away the reserve days with other pilots, and that's often hard to do.

If you're living in base, it wouldn't be terrible. We don't do "ready reserve" (sitting at the airport in case a trip pops up), so you can sit at home or run errands or whatever. You have two hours from notification of a trip to report to the pilot lounge.