[phish]

To butcher Winston Churchill: If you are 20 and not a liberal then you have no heart, if you are 40 and not a consevative then you have no brain.

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I think the quote is: "If you're not a revolutionary by the age of 20, then you have no heart. But if you're still a revolutionary by the age of 40, then you have no head."

To be 40 and not conservative is not indicative of a weak head. (Tho to be 40 and a revolutionary in America may be.)

But to get back to the question of how much is a good income: I would say that if you're only making 50K a year playing poker, you almost certainly have the brains to make more in another line of work, without the stress and burn out that playing full-time small stakes would induce.

In my opinion, the truly successful pro poker player should not need to play more than 20-30 hours a week (lower end for online players, higher end for live players) to make their nut comfortably and build their bankroll (save), whether this is 50K for a kid just out of college and living with friends, 100K for a person with a modest lifestyle, or 200K+ for someone with family and upper middle class aspirations.

There are simply way too many marginal players miserably squeezing out a subsistence income. Those guys have 'not made it'.