Becoming a professional player

[jeffnc]

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Thanks for the feedback, in your opinion how does the system you are presently under work as compared to other options?

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I'm sorry, but you're going to have to rephrase that. English isn't my first language, so please be clear. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

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How is your system of government like other systems? How is your system different from other systems? (Technically he asked how your system is the same as other systems (compares), but as an English speaker I know he also wanted to know how it contrasted [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] As we were taught in English class, "compare and contrast")

[omahaChamp]

I agree it looks like a sad profession. I've met some pros its bad when you can play better than them. Even the dealers have no respect for them.
its a dogs life there is little glammer in it.

[timmer]

When the big rolls get broke they either sell peices of themselves off, borrow money from flush players, get a job usually with in the "industry", sandbag marks or drop down to the mid limits, or any combination of the above.

the very best pros maintain multiple income streams. which poker is but one.

I am on first name basis with many very good poker players and almost all have outside sources of income or have done the above.

[timmer]

What are you going to do once the Kyle bill gets linked to some omnibus spending bill and is passed late in some congressional session next year?

Huh? what then ?

Name some political opposition to the Kyle bill ?

what would you do if you found that some foreign based online casino went flop bot with your bankroll overnight?

Have you factored in "total loss" to your equation?

MULTIPLE INCOME STREAMS its the only good way.

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1) On a monthly basis I withdraw half of my earnings to spend. The remaining half went towards increasing my bankroll.


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[James282]

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Online is really new to me, so I DO forget that you can be playing 4 tables at once. It seems manic to me--flipping from screen to screen, hopping from one table to another, with scant seconds spent considering what's going on anywhere. The whole approach must end up being completely statistical. Why not just program your pc to do all that and stay in bed--it'll come to that, surely. What a dismal way to make a living.

But you guys crack me up with your remarks about how weak our random number generators are (yeah, and you're forgetting completely that we have to TIP them. Imagine!) and our color scheme limitations. I have trouble wrapping my head around what most of you are really up to. It's so utterly foreign to my experience of poker. Guys, it's people--that's the good part. Otherwise, just go daytrade.

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What a stupid post. The good part is people, right --- I prefer to make 4x as much with 1/2 the risk.
-James

[theBruiser500]

Dynasty, I went back and read your thread and post (it was good). How you liking it nowadays?

[XChamp]

mtdurham: Is that actually your story? That sucks.

Someone needs to explain to me WHY going pro is a bad idea if you have 100k+ hands at $40+/hr and have made it through some huge down swings perfectly fine, because some people talk on here like it's just as stupid as putting all your savings on black.

[Rudbaeck]

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I agree it looks like a sad profession. I've met some pros its bad when you can play better than them. Even the dealers have no respect for them.
its a dogs life there is little glammer in it.

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Well, most jobs, even those requiring a college degree, are really dogs life as well.

Going to work every day at the bank to manage mutual funds? Atleast you're not gambling with your own money. And even when you lose YOU win big.

Programmer creating cutting edge bespoke systems? You'll have an insane boss with a severe case of feature creep. You won't be allowed to spend enough time with the client, so frankly you won't know what he wants, and he'll be mad when he gets what he said he wanted. Which off course isn't what he really wanted.

Psychologist. Yes, you help people. Then they kill themselves. And the medical doctors always have the final word.
Doc: "We're giving this guy haldol."
You: "But he's not psychotic! And he's both epileptic and depressed!"
Doc: "We're still giving him haldol."

[Rudbaeck]

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How is your system of government like other systems? How is your system different from other systems?

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We have free health care for everyone.

All education is free, and student loans available to everyone. If you don't have kids and don't have insane spending habits you can study four years at the university without working extra.

Dental care is free to everyone aged 0-17, and to older kids who are still in high school, though never to anyone over 20.

Social security. Unless you are mentally ill you are going to have a home and food on the table. (The homeless we have are basically all former psychiatry patients who got kicked out on the street after a psych reform of almost unlimited stupidity in 1992.)

Taxes get amazing high once you get to the upper end of middle class. It starts out at 32-33% income tax, but it escalates on the part of the income above a certain figure. And then it keeps escalating. Fortune and inheritance tax is high as well. (Obviously someone is paying for the above benefits.)

Income from gambling from non-EU countries is however taxed at a flat 36% regardless of whether it's $1 or $1,000,000 per year. Income from gambling withing EU is taxed in the country of origin. Lottery winnings in almost all EU countries is free from tax, so you pay 0% tax in the country of origin, and to avoid double taxation it's tax exempt here.

Obviously it's heaven for a degenerate gambler. There are, to be honest, probably a dozen countries in the world where it's better to live. They are either tax paradises or oil nations. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img] There used to be only a couple of countries that had it better, but it's been too long since there was a pan-european war we could sit out of.

We have all the usual political freedoms. We contribute heavily to peace keeping forces in the UN, our foreign aid as % of gross national product is one of the highest in the world etc.

If we could do something about the weather it would be Eden.

We have a multi party legislative body. We've basically never had a single party majority in the legislative body, but the same party has been on top the last 60 years with breaks 1976-1982 and 1992-1995. Currently there are 7 parties in the legislative body.

We probably have the weirdest court system in the world. As almost all western democracies we have jurymen. Though using the same term is wildly misleading. Each juryman serves for four years. Layman judge would be a better term. The general courts are made up of three jurymen and one judge. Each has one vote. In the criminal court ties are broken in favor of the lesser punishment, in the administrative court ties are broken by the judge. The bizarre part is that the jurymen are politically appointed. (By tradition they are appointed according to how many seats each party won in the election, so even the smallest parties get a certain number of jurymen. But as the law is written there is nothing to stop a majority party from appointing all jurymen. It's flat out insane!) Jurymen usually end up serving about 10 days in court each year, but it can fluctuate a fair bit, especially in the criminal courts. There are more judges and fewer jurymen in the appeal courts, and as per usual the two supreme courts are made up of judges exclusively.

It's quite likely that criminals will face psychiatric care instead of prison. To top that off our prison terms are short, guards are unarmed, and most inmates are allowed to visit their family every few months. (They leave on Friday, without a guard, and unfailingly report back on Monday morning.) Criminality is low, repeat criminality even lower.

If you end up in a Swedish prison you don't need to worry that you'll become Bubba's bitch. Because Bubba's girlfriend is allowed to visit almost as often as she pleases, and she and Bubba are left in a visitor cell, complete with a bed for a couple of hours.

For a while we had a problem with Russian and other ex-Soviets taking the ferry over and killing the first retired person they saw to get to spend 6 years in a Swedish prison. Then we deported them back to Russia to spend 6 years in a Russian prison. They stopped doing that.

Visitors, especially americans, find us to be a cold and distant people given to heavy drinking. Atleast the last part is true. The first part is probably true as well. We are not properly urbanized yet. Swedes have few, but deep, friendships. The kind of friend who walks 20 miles in the snow when it's -40 degrees out to help you. Because, quite frankly, it's within living memory that those were the kind of friends you needed. Our cities grew late, and we still suck at the casual social lubricant needed for the cramped city life. The kind of casual friendship so common in more properly urbanized countries is still seen as false here.

Even in the middle of a city you might see a dozen swedes run naked and steaming out of a house to roll around in the snow. Usually both men and women. Don't worry, even though they are hot and sweaty and naked with their friends they are not having an orgy. They're just enjoying a sauna. In the countryside they are not content to merely roll in the snow, these madmen will proceed to build their saunas near a lake, and then saw a hole in the ice to jump into the freezing water. For pleasure. If it's over 50F (10C) Swedes can often be seen outside wearing shorts and t-shirts. When it's 70F (20C) they'll be complaining about the sweltering heat. This from a people who during the winter happily squeeze together in a room the size of closet and crank it up to nearly 200F!!! (90C)

Swedish economy is constantly threading the fine line between genius and madness. A good example is out military industry. We build some of the best conventional weapons in the world, and then refuse to sell them to anyone who might conceivably use them in a war. There are half a dozen countries in the world who develop fighter jets, we are one of them. We barely export any. It makes no sense whatsoever. We have the most advanced fighter jet in the world by a fair margin. We haven't been to war since 1814. If anyone can explain this to me I'm all ears.

We're also shameless hypocrites. We signed the Ottawa agreement, we fight hard to make other countries scrap all their troop mines. We develop new and better troop mines and we probably have more troop mines per capita than any other nation on earth.

Oh, we have more guns per capita than the US, but we very rarely shoot anyone. Everyone has a couple of hunting rifles, and quite a large part of the population have automatic weapons in their closets. We know that the Russians are coming. They're always coming. That it's been over two centuries since we last fought them is just a temporary lull.

Did I mention that we are hypocrites? Swedish diplomats and organizations are all over the globe fighting for the rights of indigenous populations. We carefully robbed ours of all their lands, and we're bloody well not giving back any of it.

The public does have access to 99.9% of all land though. You can legally stop someone from camping within 100 yards of a lived in house. Other than that you can't keep em off your lands. If you own a few thousand acres of woods don't expect to get to pick the berries there. They are public property. (Ok, it's still illegal to pick crops from a farmed field, cut down trees, hunt etc. But if you'd want to start a revolution in Sweden make it illegal to walk in someone else's wood. Fenced in woods like in Germany or the UK would lead to people being stabbed to death here. Fast.)

We're mad, and we have it good.

Did I mention that Swedish girls are tall, busty and blonde?

[Rudbaeck]

Summary: It's like Canada, but more crowded.