poker is a way of life vs. poker is just a hobby

[Rococo]

I guess you are right. If you play 40 table a hours a week, $100 an hour comes to $200K. I don't play as often (or as well) as you do so it is sometimes tough for me to estimate.

[Jeff W]

[ QUOTE ]
My recommendation? Focus on other stuff and keep poker a sideline. There's a ton of stuff much more interesting (some of which is also more profitable) than poker.

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I'd like to hear your recommendations. I am graduating from a small college with an unspectacular 3.0 GPA in Physics in 18 days and I see no reasonable alternatives to a poker career. FWIW, I am a 15/30 limit player.

[Matt Flynn]

creedofhubris,

it always amazes me to hear people casually throw out 200K a year and imply that is easy to make playing poker or to obtain in the real world. it ain't. your PhD in English will never get you there. (you can become a bestselling author without a PhD, so royalties don't count.) unless you are willing to put high hours into a profession or open your own mundane-but-cash-brilliant business, poker is where it's at right now. on the other hand, if you have half a brain and are willing to put in the hours, there are still several easy businesses for making that.

i also doubt many people here can make 200K a year playing poker. 25 hours a week is one thing. 40 is quite another. also, while it's nice to think you can maintain $150 or $200 an hour playing, i contend most of the posters here cannot.

to be very successful at poker in the future, you will have to spend time studying your opponents and the game for real. it will get harder. also, the ups qand downs and day-to-day emotional toll are great. a lot of players makiing 100K a year aren't the happiest people in the world.

i have given it some thought. if the situation in my profession gets much worse, i may give it up and turn pro. however, there would have to be something else to keep my attentiion focused. most likely i would end up writing a book or starting a poker-related business - or a separate cash cow business - while continuing to play 20 hours a week. i can't see maintaining 35 hours a week outside of WSOP and WPT event trips unless the games were ridiculously easy, in which case the positive reinforcement might be sufficient to keep me playing long hours.

if you can play reasonably well and consistently, be satisfied with 120K a year, and have the emotional makeup to weather big money swings, it could be a phenomenal job.

matt

[pokergripes]

I'll give you some possible insight from my experience.

I am a lawyer and a partner at one of the big firms. Make a lot of money, but have a pretty difficult and stressful job. I play a lot of 2-5 and 5-10, and some 10-20, nlh (profitably at the 2-5 and 5-10, not enough sample size to tell at 10-20 yet, but so far so good).

I travel around a bunch with two other lawyers I'm friends with from a different city, meeting in various places to play tourneys, and we spend a lot of time with pros that one of the guy knows well from LA. And I've got to tell you--it stopped looking like a fun lifestyle a long time ago from watching the guys who really do it (and that's not even the multi-table crap you'd more likely have to do on line to make money in the long run, assuming we're me or you, who can beat jellybeans regularly at 2-5 nlh, rather than top pros on the tournament circuit).

These guys mostly live on the edge, as do the on-line guys, worried all the time and not knowing what the future looks like at all. Any time I and my friends are at lunch or dinner with guys like that, there are a few minutes of poker stories (mostly from them, they've got the more interesting ones), and a lot more time spent by them wanting to talk about business ideas and other ways they do or want to make money away from playing the game.

Get your Phd--you can always be the most well-educated and professional individual at the table later if you want to turn "pro", although you quite likely never will. I don't (not even close), although ten years ago I though it looked pretty good when I used to play in Vegas (as a student). It just looks better than it is.

p.s. I saw Eric Seidel (sp?) get interviewed recently on the Travel Channel or ESPN, and it was in a piece about how the top pros really live. Showed his nice big house outside of Vegas, pool, etc. But the thing that stuck with me was the part when he said that, since he hasn't won any big events in a long time, he kind of worries, and has had the thought that, if he doesn't start winning some money soon, he might have to sell his house. And we've all heard of him, and he's considered one of the top guys. Think about that--when's the last time you heard one of the top professionals in any other field say something like that? That's why it won't make your parents happy. They're right.

[turnipmonster]

I've debated playing poker professionally, but the only way I would do it is if I had a lot of other stuff going on with music that made me happy but didn't pay well and I just needed the money. my personal feeling is that it wouldn't be a very interesting way to spend my time, and as much as I dislike my day job at times I still get to solve interesting problems and sometimes invent things and stuff.


--turnipmonster

[creedofhubris]

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But the thing that stuck with me was the part when he said that, since he hasn't won any big events in a long time, he kind of worries, and has had the thought that, if he doesn't start winning some money soon, he might have to sell his house.

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Yeah, those tourney pros have really high variance; long swings of losses. So do limit players. So does my buddy the blackjack player. But I'm talking about cash games. That's what I play, that's what I'm gonna keep playing. You're not going to see me on a TV tourney, except as a lark.

Since I play cash games, I'm really not worried about losing runs. I mean, if the other players are too good for me, I will lose over time, but if I'm a winning player, I'm not going to have months of running bad. That's the virtue of: NL, capped buyins, multitabling, and lots of hands. They all work to limit variance.

[turnipmonster]

FWIW, I am very skeptical of the 200K/year stuff as well.

[invisibleleadsoup]

"if you can play reasonably well and consistently, be satisfied with 120K a year, and have the emotional makeup to weather big money swings, it could be a phenomenal job.

matt"

what is the average wage in america?
and what percentage of the population is below the poverty line?
i dont think the issue here is whether $120k a year is sufficient
especially for someone with an english degree,which won't get you many jobs that make half that.

[KaneKungFu123]

the biggest advantage for poker players is the ability to travel and live in cheaper BETTER country. I spend about $700/month living a life style that would run me atleast 5-6K in the States.

Poker online is essentially THE PERFECT JOB...


[ QUOTE ]
Just wondering how some of you other successful high-stakes players weigh the attraction of full-time poker, and the attendant wins, vs. a more intellectually & emotionally satisfying career. In the midst of a bit of an existential dilemma here.

Right now I view myself as a part-time poker player. (This may be self-delusion.) I spend about 20-25 hours/week playing. It's been my primary source of income for a while now. For a comparatively long time, I made a comfortable sum basically nut-peddling at $2/$5 NL; I was playing at that level for about a year while other strong players who opposed me moved up in limits. I never did. Now I've had to; thanks to some structural changes at the site I play, I've started regularly playing bigger games, $5/$10 and $10/$20.

Anyway. Moving up out of my "comfort zone" has caused some embarrassing mistakes (yesterday alone I dropped three buyins that I had no business dropping, for a $4K hit!), but there is, of course, much more earn potential.

But to play at those levels and win significant sums, I really need to clean up my game. I've been essentially a gentleman amateur. I don't even have pokertracker or a rakeback deal, fergoshsakes. (No need to offer me one, thanks.) I have plenty of leaks, and it would take significant study, discipline, and introspection to turn myself into a consistent big winner at a level where nut peddling is not enough.

I'm also a graduate student. Poker has pulled me about a year off-schedule and if I don't get my nose to the grindstone right now I'm basically never going to finish my degree. Intellectually, I find poker interesting, but since I'm working on an English degree it's not a similar sort of thought to what I'd viewed myself spending the rest of my life doing.

My girlfriend is not a poker player but is very amused at my poker success and supportive. My parents are not so amused.

I imagine stockbrokers and other "sellouts" go through the same sort of angst when they realize/consider that they're spending a lot of time in an essentially meaningless, stressful profession whose sole point is the accumulation of money.

Since I've essentially been "kicked upstairs" to these higher limits, I feel I'm at the point where I need to either acknowledge that this is my life now and I need to get all the tools of the trade and spend my spare time and brainpower working on improving my play, or admit that it's just a hobby, ease back on the hours, focus on finishing my PhD, and treat it as a profitable sideline.

I am also reminded that the guy who got me into this game was originally a physics grad student who dropped out to play blackjack, and who has since convinced another mutual friend to drop out of his grad program to play blackjack. Seems like a common result.

Anyway, comments from those who have faced similar decisions, or found a way to balance poker and profession, would be appreciated.

(This post may amuse those who play against me, since I probably seem like a "full-time player", but, really, I'm not! Really!)

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[theBruiser500]

i've gotten into these discussions many times, and got some good posts if you can find it in the archives in the NL section unders someething like "poker journal." everyone is going to tell you don't drop out of school, keep it a hobby. every once in a while for a few days i'll plya a lot of poker and think i could do it for a living, but i'm only do that for a few days and even then i'm not really happy doing it. stay in school

btw matt i am very surprised to hear you say that.