Say goodbye to the dream

[mindless]

All-

Playing poker makes (relatively) a lot of money without that many constraints on your time. If you want to make more money, trading is the way to do it. Jobs like Jasons are an excellent way to start, and if you want real money, like "I'm bored and want to start buying baseball teams" type of money, you want to get involved with a hedge fund. However, in the same way that poker has huge variance, so does trading. The most famous example is Long Term Capital which you can read about in "When Genius Failed". More recently, A fund called Amaranth lost 6.5 BILLION dollars. Not everyone wins. That being said, I'm working for a hedge fund now and hope that within 5-10 years I'll be a partner, which would mean a salary in the low 8 figure range. I'd take that.

If you really want this type of job, playing up your poker skills is an excellent way to get it. I got the job in large part because a partner found out about my poker skills and having a degree in physics (from MIT). I develop trading strategies which are based upon forming decisions based on incomplete information. Systematic thinking, valuing small edges, money management, and realizing that short-term means nothing are what it's all about. Sound similar to something we do?