[ggbman]

I am not a college dropout, however, i feel there are some interesting things to be discussed in this thread. The first thing to tackle is the projected ROI discussed in this thread... it is way too low. It is always better to be more conservative when thinking about what you need to retire comfortably, however 2.5%-3% is such a lowball figure that it needs to be addressed. From 1963-1993, a time period ignoring the tech boom and bust, the average ROI was over 11%. If you take out the 90 best trading days in that time span, the average ROI was still 3.28%. If someone else wants to give more data, it's welcome... i am not trying to skew anything here, i just could not find stats on the cumulative ROI of the Dow Jones since its inception in my quick search. The point is, assuming that our return on investment would be less than half of what it has been in the last century, including the great depression and 9/11, seems too conservative to me.

I really feel that acheiving a 5% ROI pretty consistently with any sort of investing savvy, or just decent networking should be more than attainable.

As far as playing poker live, most big winners online can make a very solid living playing live. I am not the creme de la creme of online players, there is certainly a contingent of players who win a lot more than me, however from my experience i definitly feel i could average $80-$150 an hour playing live limit games $100-200 and below, not taking into account when i take shots a good games higher than that. I think that eventually i would have the capacity to become a winner in the games higher than that as well, but the point is, grinding low to lid six figures will definitly be doable for most of the better players, limit or NL, on these forums. For young people, this is still a huge amount of money, and if they adjust their spending to their new income level, they should still be able to live very comfortable life styles. To make more than $150k a year life, you have to be playing quite high or play a sick amount of hours.

Another thing that should be addressed though, is that young players must learn to adjust our expectations. Many of us have had it in our heads that we will be able to retire before 25 if we so desire, and will be able to do so in comfort. However, having a few hundred thousand in the bank with no debt and a potential 6 figure income is a more than nice lifestlye, especially for a profession where you can choose your own hours and aren't working 70 hours a week.

As far as all this talk about starting businesses, many people on these forums probably have the capacity to do so, but like poker or anything else, it will be a learning process... it's obviously not easy to just start some random business that turns a nice profit in this day in age. But combined with incomes from live poker, i would bet that many people here are capable of eventually becoming entrepreneurs/real estate investors.

And of course, going back to school is always a fine option. Anyone who has proven that they can hack it at poker should have the self confidence and maturity to know that they can be sucessful via other avenues, which are less stressful as well. I will probably get my degree, i hpoe that i will never have to use it to work a job that i dont want to, but it will be there as backup. In general, i would bet there would be several sucess stories of people from these forums from vehicles outside of poker if online poker ever went away.