If you could play professional poker for a living, would you do it?

My friend is a poker pro (high 8 fig net worth). Dropped $20K on one night in Tel Aviv. Just got accepted to NYU Law. Never went to undergrad. Such is life.

I wanna learn to play poker one of these days. I feel like I'd be great.

I think it'd be awesome for a few years and then you'd get sick of it. The problem is if you spend your 20s grinding online from Thailand or Canada or wherever, you'll be left with zero marketable experience so it'll be near impossible to find a normal job after that. The swings can also be pretty intense (particularly for live tournament regs), so you have to be the type of person who can handle that kind of vol in your net worth. Other than that, it sounds amazing, I've been tempted myself but too much opportunity cost.

I've been playing for 5-6 years now, used to play online when people like durrr/blom/isildur were starting to make bank (although I was never good enough to play that high) and I also know people that used to play NL10k+ online and I really dont know if I would want to live that lifestyle. It sounds awesome, traveling the world, winning huge 6 figure cashes, etc. but I think eventually you would get tired of it and want to settle down into a "normal" job - your 20s dont last forever.

A lot of good high stakes players move out of poker after a few years, either they dont last or they get tired of it. Krantz tried becoming a filmmaker, Raptor went back to Columbia and does angel investing, Ariel Shneller went to Yale law.

Poker is very similar to being an entrepreneur in a lot of ways- saying that you can just quit your job, crush poker, travel the world and bang girls is like saying your going to quit your job and get $5mm in seed funding from KPCB and Andressen Horowitz.

I think you may regret pursuing poker if you indeed do 4-5 years from now. You could always pursue a career in finance then play poker all you want after you have worked in finance long enough to establish a solid nest egg. Hold'em will always be there....

2 friends (not really friends, douchebags I know) did this and attempted to make it big in vegas about 4 years ago. 1 went bust and is in law school, the other has made $3.5mm and has a WSOP bracelet. it's definitely possible to make a living, but if it was easy it wouldn't pay so well, so just remember that.

I would personally never do it, I get physically sick to my stomach gambling and I feel like it's purely luck (probably because I don't understand it). I realize this is weird because I'm co PM on an individual stock strategy, but I feel so much more comfortable in that market than at a poker table (or any gambling really, even on the golf course for 5 bucks a hole).

to your questions, I'd have a backup plan, like save a certain amount of your winnings so that if you go bust with your play money, you're not on the street. develop a savings and spending strategy so you don't have a big year then when you have a bad year, you're stuck paying the mortgage on a $5mm high rise. I don't see a lot of downside if you have a safety net financially, I'm sure a pro poker player would be attractive to b school after you wound down your career (assuming you didn't make enough to never have to work again).

This is very similar to being a day trader for a living. It's foolish, no job security, no marketable skills, as far as any landlord or bank is concerned you're unemployed. Do it on the side if your must. Make your money elsewhere and abscond to the Amalfi Coast or the Seychelles a little bit later in life.

I love gambling, but I still think playing poker would be too much of a grind. In order to consistently make money, you need to be playing a very large amount of games - if you play the right tables etc. you can likely get the odds slightly in your favor (and it sounds like you already have), but I have a hard time seeing how doing so over a long period of time would be any fun. For this to be really attractive, you need to make sure that a) you will enjoy doing it in the long run, or b) it provides you with exit opportunities after poker. I am not sure either is true (unless you make bank, which would of course give you all the exit opps you want).

No way and I am in that group that played tons of cash games before UIGEA. My favorite was PLO, never really had as much fun in NL Holdem.

Variance is a bitch. For all the big "wins" you read about with Durrr, Ivey and such they have just as many losses in the same range. There is a reason the "true" list of millionaire poker players is very short. There are folks who have multiple WSOP bracelets and have hardly any assets to their names.

I would not play poker for a living because I suck at it, and I hate gambling.

Also, no one is going to believe this but there was one point in time where you could glitch UltimateBet and get your buy-in for a tournament back after you lost it. I'm talking you play a $500 dollar heads up game and get it back if you lose. I could have made tens of thousands if I wasn't a retarded 15 year old.

40-70 k?!

thats awesome! what site do you play on? how casual is casual? how much do you think you can make?

Sounds great as a career to me but I don't think it beats getting a solid education + job as the risk is too high. I love the game and I plan to get more serious with it (and not just play 2/5 NL with friends/at casinos) once I have a few more $$$ saved up.

If you can make that much and you enjoy it, go for it!

As odd as it may sound we bought a UK based online gaming company about a dozen years ago as online gaming and especially poker was really taking off. Side comment-if you can start one of these and get it to work you can make outrageous amounts of money, although I'm sure the space is flooded and mature now.

We sponsored a few pro poker players and I saw a few that really embraced the perceived lifestyle and others who looked at it purely as work. The successful ones didn't necessarily fall into either camp specifically (as long as the ones who embraced the lifestyle stayed away from drinking too much which is pretty tough if you're constantly in casinos). One guy who did really well had a wife and kid back in Spain and he treated his job just like anyone else would-traveled, went to work and came home. Put money in the bank and only risked smaller percentages of his net worth. Dan Bilzerian he was not. If you can do well you can do really well but I'd bet its a little like the PGA your. The top dozen or twenty golfer fly in private jets while the ones who are just trying to keep their card live in small RV's getting to tourneys and living pretty crappily.

I can't think of many exits although I know I've seen a few that went to places like SIG but I think they had advanced quant degrees before poker or got them after they quit.

It would be an odd lifestyle but if that's your bag, try it out. Maybe work for a couple of years in IB, consulting or whatever, get some solid experience and try playing poker for a bit. If you're loving it keep trying. If you're a couple of months in and hate it try to land another job and go back to get your MBA. I have no idea if an MBA would look down upon it but if they do just chalk it up to time traveling or some BS.

I play poker on the side. Both online and live. I have been focusing more on tournaments lately (mostly WPT events on the east coast, sadly wasn't able to get down to Las Vegas for the WSOP due to work) due to the fact that tournaments have a well-defined beginning and end.

With cash games, it's a constant grind and if you know what you are doing it starts to feel like a second job. Another problem is that post-Black Friday, the online cash game scene for US players has been pretty abysmal... Obviously, if you are willing to move to overseas or play live cash games in a casino, that wouldn't be an issue. However, live games are difficult since you need to live in close proximity to a casino, you can only play one table at a time, etc.

With tournaments, although the variance is much higher, I find them a lot more fun. Obviously, you are losing money the majority of the time (e.g. not cashing in the tournament), which makes it harder to make a consistent living if you only play tournaments. However, all it takes is one big win to erase all those losses and have a profitable year. This fact alone keeps many players showing up again and again on the live tournament scene - especially the negative-EV average Joe-types who should be saving their money and probably don't realize how much of an underdog they are in these events...

But I digress... I think if you want to make a career out of poker, tournaments are the way to go since media exposure and endorsement deals only come to those who bink a big tournament at a high profile event. For better or for worse, nobody cares about the person who makes $500k a year grinding in cash games, whereas if you make $500k in a tournament you will get offers to be featured in poker magazines, receive interview requests, endorsement offers, etc. Winnings from tournament poker are also tracked globally, and various magazines/organizations hold races for "Player of the Year"-type awards. I'm sure a lot of relative unknowns have their poker careers skyrocket through these types of avenues.

With regards to what you should do personally. Since you are still in undergrad, you have a luxury that many of us cannot afford - free time and flexibility. Although I wouldn't advise this, you could probably on a total whim skip a few days of class to go play in a high profile, multi-day tournament. I don't have this luxury and I can only play these types of tournaments when I am on vacation that has been scheduled months in advance. Most of the time, I only play 1-day tournaments on those once-in-a-blue-moon occasions that I have a Saturday off.

Good luck and I hope to see you at a final table some day.

Nope. I like playing poker and I can certainly see the appeal of doing so professionally but that's not the life I want to live. Dan Bilzerian may look like he's having fun on Instagram but telling people about all the hookers you've boned is pretty weak past a certain age (or any age, let's be real).

And yes, I know Dan Bilzerian didn't really make his money from poker and isn't representative of the other guys on that list. But living in Vegas? Playing cash games on your laptop all day? Nope.

I can't argue against the nays, but if I had the talent to play poker for a living, I wouldn't be discouraged one damn bit. Not sure how it would turn out, but I know with my personality I'd give it a go. I'm not sure I'd get tired of it unless I was losing a lot.

Dan Bilzerian barely makes any money from Poker.

Here is how he really made money. Long, but really interesting article.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/for-decades-ex-corporate-raider-holds-of…

I'm a No-Limit Hold'Em fan. I would NOT play for a living unless I had a HUGE bankroll, and if I did, well...I wouldn't exactly be playing for a "living" anymore.

Agree with Deo that cash games are a huge grind, and tournaments are so damn volatile. We can be confident that a great player will do better than a good player in the long run, but in a 1-hour long heads up game, I'd say the skill advantage is slight.

OP how the heck are you making 40-70k a year playing casually? I'm seriously concerned that you're not practicing proper bankroll management (or maybe your BR is just much larger than I'm assuming).

Quick Calculations:

Assuming you're playing 20 hours/week, you play 20*52 weeks = 1,040 hours/year (round to 1,000).

Let's say you're making 50k a year, so you make $50/hour. Now say that you are winning 5 big blinds per hour (a VERY good winrate in Poker for those who are not familiar), so the big blind at the tables you're playing is $10. That makes the standard 100 big blind buy-in every time you sit at a table $1,000. Using a moderate approach to bankroll management of keeping your buy-in for cash games at or below 5%, your minimum bankroll is $20,000.

Ok, so on second thought that's not too big of a number. Maybe I was just alarmed initially being a student with more than that in student loans. But whatever you decide, just keep in mind that if you play for a living, your bankroll will need to be much larger (I think the common strategy is 2%? making your BR size $50,000) in order to sustain constant withdrawals for your living expenses.

The scenario just does not sound appealing to me: variance is pretty damn high in this game. When you go through a bad streak and your bankroll dips below the recommended level to continue playing at the stakes you're playing at, it's gotta be a tough feeling to actually drop down to the lower stakes knowing that you need to win money in order to continue paying your rent. And that's leaving out the entire emotional and psychological effect of NOT allowing the real-world value of the chips on the table impact your play.

So if you're making 40-70k a year, save 100-150k, get a "normal" job, continue to play on the sides with a downside limit of your 100-150k nest egg and up your scale as you win more and more. Say you set 100k as your downside at have 150k available, play with that 50k, make 20-30k and just start scaling it. Until you're making enough, consistently, to quit your job.

Suggested reading list:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-gossip/quitting-poker-l… http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-gossip/there-any-live-p… http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/30/business-finance-investing/pervasi… http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/61/mtt-community/view-why-i-quit-poke… http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/26/psychology/my-reasons-quitting-pok… http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/19/high-stakes-pl-nl/seeking-advice-r…

as the brother of a poker pro (pulls in 6 figures tax free/ year - lived in australia, malta and the UK) as well as friends with someone who is that top ranked status on pokerstars (can't remember what its called, but the one where they give oyu a car or 100k) , I can explain your options pretty clearly.

I refer to this as the Poker Trap in how I view life.

Progression: you will reach your maximum earning potential from poker, within a few years. As a fully quantified game, the limit to what you can know in this space, is known, especially in online games. Reading tells etc. can be improved on later on.

Lifestyle sacrifice: Your income will outstrip your peers in early life, but will peak. This is the real killer. For you to then leave this, you have to start from virtually zero. You will need to go right to the bottom of the career ladder, in any field you choose and accept the standard of living that comes with a 90% salary drop. You will have established a grand total of zero contacts as a network. The lifestyle hit gets worse the longer you leave it, and there will be a growing resentment of what if creeping into your mind. However the house you live in, the car you drive all require maintaining, which you cant afford off of any other income.

I personally value quality of life significantly. To put this into perspective. I am looking to move to a new apartment in the new year, (rent) which will be double the price of my existing one, for the sole benefit of being able to walk to work. This will enable me to have better quality free time, not have to drop out early from nights out, and also work longer and harder and more efficiently (gym nearby too). I am offsetting the cost of salary against higher probability of promotion, which in most suited jobs incurs at least a 20% income boost.

Final thought: I couldn't dream of working in a job where I couldnt smile for hours at a time. Even minutes is a struggle. Funerals are awkward.

triple wtf

double post

I know 2 pro poker players and they are the complete opposite:

1)Believe me or not, I'm playing a certain sport with a former WSOP bracelet winner. As much as he seems to enjoy life and be good financially, I'm not sure I would live his life. He barely sees friends and family and can't get a real relationship. His last two GF were either fake for the media or a thief that tried to steal him. He's living the good life..he's traveling all around the world..Europe,Caribbean, Vegas, etc... but it seems artificial, I don't know where he'll end up after he's fed up with playing..probably just invest his money and roll the bones, which yes sounds cool..but maybe I'm too emotional and you'll think I do not have the instinct but I'm the kind of guy that could refuse a job transfer for my fiancé.

2) The other player used to make approx. 200-300k a year playing poker..but he started drugs to keep his focus and these drugs turned heavier...now..he's not able to play anymore and developed some kind of mental illness... but that's another story. He dropped high school to play..now has nothing but the condo he bought..barely no money left and he started to look for a job..but it's hard since employer do not always take pro poker player as valid Xp.

Anyway it's a high risk/high reward situation...

Doesn't seem like a safe bet. You can always play online during your free time and make some money on the side. Going all in so to speak seems like a crappy risk/reward ratio. Maybe something to get into if you unexpectedly get fired but quitting your job to become a gambler seems foolish.

Doesn't seem like a safe bet. You can always play online during your free time and make some money on the side. Going all in so to speak seems like a crappy risk/reward ratio. Maybe something to get into if you unexpectedly get fired but quitting your job to become a gambler seems foolish.

On a side note, can anyone here that is interested shoot me a pm with advice on how to really get better at poker? What sites, books etc?

duplicate