[Blarg]

What's amazing to me is how piss-poor about money some of the best players are. You always read about so many of the best poker players in the world losing hundreds of thousands on proposition bets or dumb sports bets, just squandering in a minute what they had to spend a long time grinding out. And they don't necessarily have anything ro replace it with besides talent.

Obviously interpreting being a pro purely as a measure of poker skill alone doesn't give the kind of picture we normally associate with professionalism in other fields. And there are undoubtedly many mediocre players who do fairly well because they don't screw around with their money, while there is no shortage of brilliant guys who are idiots when it comes to money management. The Stu Ungar model comes to mind of a genius professional who lived without professionalism.

I think both ways of defining a professional player -- as someone who plays at a really high level and as someone who plays for a living -- have merit, but lean toward validating the simple, technically correct, and merely grubby definition of a guy who plays poker for a living. Even if you're a genius poker player, if you can't manage your life, you're incompetent at one of the most important aspects of being a pro poker player.