Becoming a professional player

[tek]

[ QUOTE ]
I mean most professional players don't have mainstream job skills..

Huh? All the ones I know had jobs, have degrees and were often successful at what they did. How you came up with this one, I have no idea, it's one of the stupidest things I've read in a while.

Peace,
Joe Tall

[/ QUOTE ]

You are basically stating that the people you know were semi pros, since they had jobs.

My question relates to full time pros who were always gamblers and didn't have jobs.

Learn to read and learn to reserve judgement. Just because you don't understand a question doesn't mean it's not a valid question.

[sublime]

Huh? All the ones I know had jobs, have degrees and were often successful at what they did. How you came up with this one, I have no idea, it's one of the stupidest things I've read in a while.

name one

[Action Scott]

Phil Gordon

[Cosimo]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I mean most professional players don't have mainstream job skills..

Huh? All the ones I know had jobs, have degrees and were often successful at what they did. How you came up with this one, I have no idea, it's one of the stupidest things I've read in a while.

Peace,
Joe Tall

[/ QUOTE ]

You are basically stating that the people you know were semi pros, since they had jobs.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think it was tek who said "Learn to read and learn to reserve judgement."

Joe's post could be interpreted to say "these guys had degrees and real jobs before they quit to become full time pros." The use of the past tense suggests that their real jobs existed at a time prior to their status as full time poker pros, and have since ceased to exist.

-

That said, most of the people that I've seen who are professional players are utter degenerates. The online, clean-living, college-educated poker pro is a new thing, and I don't think there's that many outside of 2+2 and the pro NL tour. Most pros squeeze out a small living from 3-6 or 4-8 games, coupled with disability or pension or living with mom.

And I say "most" here because I think there's more of the people I described working full-time at poker than there are WPT/etc tourney pros and 2+2ers. I think that's the heart of this discussion: how many fall into these two major categories? Are there other categories?

[Woody09]

Gotta agee, most people you here that are "profesionals" do not live a glamorous life. Guys like Gordon and the other WPT'ers took their poker fame and flipped it into writing, designing sites, making videos. These guys make "profesional poker" look glamorous. However, my conversations w/ so called "profesionals" indicates, in my mind, that it is not very glamorous.

[senjitsu]

It can not be interpreted that way. If joe was refering to a condition that existed prior to another condition in the past, he would have had to have used past perfect tense -- "these guys had had degrees and real jobs..."

sorry... couldnt help myself

[ QUOTE ]
Joe's post could be interpreted to say "these guys had degrees and real jobs before they quit to become full time pros." The use of the past tense suggests that their real jobs existed at a time prior to their status as full time poker pros, and have since ceased to exist.
[ QUOTE ]

[CrackerZack]

What do you want?

Big names? Phil Gordon, Paul Phillips, Greg Raymer, Chris Moneymaker.

People from here? JoeTall, Dynasty, David Sklansky, Mason

The reason many of these people are good at poker is because they're smart, educated and mathematically oriented. Shockingly, those are skills that employers tend to look for.

[sublime]

People from here? JoeTall, Dynasty, David Sklansky, Mason

hence the sarcasm laden question [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[CrackerZack]

I've been away.

And your icon is a red sox logo. I try to read through it as fast as possible to stop the image from burning my eyes.

[J_V]

All the professional gamblers I know, are kids in there 20's w/ more money than they know what to do with and all the time in the world to enjoy life.