To go pro or not, and where?

[squiffy]

The beauty of internet poker is that you can play a ton of poker, and see what your earn rate and talent level are, over the long-term, without ever quitting your job. If you live near live games, that's fine too!!!

[Cipher]

Two points:

1) Some people love structure, safety and predictability. Some people love to free lance, live dangerously and can't stand authouity. You need to decide which category you fit into.

2)We are in the midst of a poker frenzy. In my opinion, this will pass. In a few years we will run out of fish and only world class, dedicated, tough people will be able to make a living at poker, just like any other professional sport. This current oversupply of fish will not go on forever. They will eventually run out of money.

If you've got what it takes, nothing will stop you.

Best of luck,
Cipher

[Sooga]

Take it from me. I graduated in 2000 with a degree in mathematics/computer science from a nationally renowned undergrad program. I was then able to get a pretty decent-paying job doing programming at one of the biggest asset management firms in the country. Sounds picture-perfect eh? I thought so too...

Almost from the 2nd week at work I started to hate going. Here was my routine. Get up at 7, get ready, brave the 18-mile, hour-long commute, show up at 9. Plop down in my cubicle, and stare at a monitor, dicking around with code til 12. Take lunch break. Come back at 1. Continue dicking with code until 6. Brave the hour-long commute home. Get in the door at 7.30. Have some free time til 11, go to sleep, then repeat. Day, after day, after day. For 50 weeks per year. I just couldn't handle it. I know friends who have the type of personality that can handle this kind of job, but I was just going nutty. There were literally days when I realized that I had not spoken to a single person all day. Not a one. Anyway, I stayed for almost 2 years, but one day I just said screw it. I just made my mind up to quit. No back up job or anything. I just gave my 2-week notice, and that was that.

Obviously that was not the wisest of choices to make. While I was a programmer, I'd been playing poker on the side, and was making decent money, so I figured I'd just play more hours now that I was out of work. So I did. And while I did make enough money to get me by, the stress of playing went up tenfold. I found myself no longer enjoying the game.

A few months later I found a job teaching high school, and I gotta say it's a pretty sweet gig. I like it a lot. I won't say 'love' quite yet. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] And I'm still playing poker, and I'm back to enjoying it again. Someone on this forum said something to the effect of, 'poker's a great second job, but a crummy first job.' I couldn't agree more. Take it from me, play because you want to, not because you have to.

[MicroBob]

" 2) We are in the midst of a poker frenzy. In my opinion, this will pass. In a few years we will run out of fish and only world class, dedicated, tough people will be able to make a living at poker, just like any other professional sport. This current oversupply of fish will not go on forever. They will eventually run out of money. "


this is a popular argument and is not without merit....still, i disagree.

25 years ago if you were told that legalized-gambling would become extraordinarily popular and profitable all over the united states you probably would have disagreed (if you asked me 25 years ago i would have given a more non-sensical response because i would have been 8 years old).

Las Vegas...and then Atlantic City...looks like we've got both sides of the country covered....anything in-between would cut into the pie too much.
you probably would not have fathomed that Mississippi would do extremely well with the gambling dollar and that Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, Washington, etc etc would also get casinos all over the place, big and small, and would do very well.

well, this is an argument about the regular 'gambling' dollar....the blackjack and roulette and slots-junkies. what does this have to do with poker??
a lot...because to many people it is the same thing....entertainment where you have a chance to win money.


the quality of poker-play will not stay super-fishy forever...but as long as you are decently versed in sklansky you should still be able to do okay.
proper strategy charts for BJ (and poker too for that matter) have been around for a long time....and most players are simply too lazy to bother with them or believe that they actually DO give the player the most play for his money (who cares what 'the book' says....i never hit my 16 against a 10).
these players come back time and time again by the way....and only a small percentage of them have even begun to discover poker.

as long as people are too stubborn to actually listen to the experts and the math-gurus and continue to think they can figure it out for themselves i think all of us better-than-average poker-players should do just fine.


now the possibility of our fine lawmakers pushing forth anti-internet-gambling legislation IS cause for concern....but even then, there are enough idiots to go around for the rest of us imo.

[Cipher]

[bigpooch]

1) If you go pro, play mostly online; if you can beat a B&M
game for about 1 BB per hour, you may do even better per
table online; also, you can multitable so you can get 3x to
10x as many hands per hour as you would in B&M.

2) Of course, poker is nonproductive and if you can make a
ton of money and get reasonable job satisfaction doing
something else, just play poker part-time as a second job.
There are going to be many regrets if you do nothing but
play poker online, unless you are even half the sociopathic
misfit I am! [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[KSU78]

Here in Minnesota, the compacts for the Indian casinos forbid players from touching the cards. The state would like to have all the compacts re-done to get a cut of the pie which they forgot to take when they signed the compacts. The tribes have little interest in re-negotiating the compacts just to allow poker in their casinos.

In some ways, the poker rush is similar to when the casinos here first spread blackjack. It is hard to believe that the women who work the player board at Canterbury Park can actually write so small on Friday and Saturday nights. How long will the poker rush be? It is hard to say. But I am of the opinion that most of the poker rush is on the Internet and not in the brick and mortar cardrooms and casinos.

In some respects, it may be better to view poker like a lottery which is the mindset that many people can easily have towards poker and, in particular, tournament poker. As long as they have fun with it, they will be back to play. As long as they have a good score once in awhile, they will continue to play.

I totally agree with your perspective of the anti-internet gambling legistlation. The day is coming. It is a question of when, not if. That is the main reason I have decided to move to Las Vegas. Besides all the place to play there, the California cardrooms in L.A. are only a half a day away. Laughlin is a nice hour drive from Las Vegas.

[KSU78]

If you go pro, you must have an adequate bankroll for the level you expect to play at. You also must set some money aside to take care of your living expenses for a certain amount of time to cover a reasonable period when you begin to play full-time. It is truly a hard way to make an easy living.

I found this Roy West article on going pro to be worth reading.

[toots]

I can certainly understand your sentiment, but I'd just like to add that some of us like spending our days dicking with code.

[2ndGoat]

To go pro or not- "The Deadline"

In the attached thread, a great number of you gave me advice in two spurts over the last year about the wonders and pitfalls playing poker for a living. I will again state that your posts were extremely useful and I appreciate them all.

In my original round of advice-seeking, I came to a game plan sketched out until August 25th, the one-year anniversary of my first out-of-college job. This date is about to become the present, so I figure a final update of sorts is in order. As before, I'm writing to organize my own thoughts, to give others not as far into poker as me an idea of what's ahead, and to solicit advice. The thread about playing professionally in the mid/high limit hold'em section has somewhat stolen my thunder, but I press on undeterred.

To recap- hated my job, hated my commute, hated mornings, didn't hate poker. Planned to save a 15k bankroll by August, then re-assess and continue from there.

A lot of things in my non-poker life have changed since I set this course. Several days after my 5-month update, my job went from horrible to utterly intolerable. Not only would I be stuck with the menial task of resetting passwords, I would be on-call to do so 24x7, with no breaks except for the occasional weekend if I got someone else to cover for me. So if I was at a party half-drunk (or, well, all-drunk on occasion) on a Friday night and someone decided they really needed to get into a password-protected system, I would have to bust out my laptop and get to business (this situation actually happened with some frequency, since my company was/is recovering from accounting problems and had consultants working around the clock)

Because I had a sufficient bankroll to play online for an acceptable living by then, I balked at this requirement and figured I would either find away around that mess or just play cards. Because I was willing to tell the dickhead that was my boss' boss to go shove it (politely), and then go talk to his boss' boss (who is apparently a very decent human being) about the problems I was having, I actually got into a job I really don't mind... I could almost say I enjoy it a lot of the time. I carry nearly the same level of responsibility as the senior engineers in the group (selection/implementation/administration of firewalls as well as some moderately cutting-edge security devices, and the occasional scripting to support them). I am also on-call only one week out of five, and I do not often receive off-hours calls during that week. I've been told I'll be promoted when year-end reviews come around, which is not a huge deal, but is nice.

Since then, I have been won a little more at poker than I have grossed at my job (going back 6 months). Benefits still push the real job over the top.. but I'm only playing poker 15 hours a week. This influx of money has allowed me to pay off a car loan, get that 15k bankroll I was aiming for, and, at 21, plan on purchasing a home in northern Virginia this winter (at 22). In addition, because it was a viable alternative to "real work," I had enough leverage to demand a better job, and it's always there if things take another turn for the worse.

The way things look now, I'm not planning on quitting my job for poker in the next 18 months. The thing is, I now make ~3x as much in an hour of poker as I do at my job, thanks to multi-tabling and propping. Furthermore, after several very bad streaks, which used to sap my will to play, I'm still going strong. The new tentative plan is to stick around my current job for 2-5 more years, then move to consulting. I will hopefully be able to take one 6-8 month contract per year and spend the off time at poker. If that works out I can ease either in or out of poker while not introducing entirely severe employment gaps in my resume. My long-term goal, independent of poker, is to retire (or perhaps more accurately, not need to work) at the earliest second possible. I really believe I dislike mornings, fixed hours, and limited vacation time more than 99% of the general population. Hopefully the high hourly rate of poker, in conjunction with judicious investment of savings, will help achieve this goal significantly faster than if I did not have it as option.

Thanks again for your advice, everyone. Looking back, I really wasn't ready for the plunge a year ago. I didn't quite have a solid professional bankroll beyond that necessary to make a very modest living, nor had I proven myself medium-term at the limits I was planning on playing. I'm pretty confident I could've made it but it would've been a true grind. With that knowledge in hand, I imagine I will look back a year from now and say the same thing about August 2004. If I do go pro, I doubt I will ever have much of a decision to make, rather, it will happen on its own. I hear that same pattern time and again from professionals on this site and elsewhere, and I can
see myself part of the way down that same road.

Further advice and comments are, of course, welcomed and requested.

2ndGoat