Say goodbye to the dream

[IHateCats]

For all those doubting the reality of working sustained 80+ hour weeks in corporate America, I envy you your naiveté. Admittedly I worked in the tech sector not finance but at 3 different points in my career I spent multiple years in a row pulling non-stop 80+ hour weeks + weekends and I wasn't the only one by a long shot. On the worst project in terms of hours there were 35 of us at the start; 2 years later I was the only 1 left standing because the VP had his stock bonuses tied to our deadlines and he didn't give a crap whether we burned out, left the company, transferred to another group (which he'd try to block) or committed suicide (unfortunately not kidding) , only whether we shipped on time so it was an absurd death march & I spent countless nights sleeping in my office. Consider that the people leaving were forgoing hundreds of thousands of $ in stock options and you get the idea how bad the schedule/work environment was. My gf at the time was a medical intern and my schedule was worse than hers by a considerable margin. Again, this isn't that rare of an occurrence in my experience.

Be prepared to spend a lot of your off hours work socializing/networking/sucking up, you are entering a very introverted world and since you aren't Ivy League MBA, you aren't a member yet. If this pecking order runs counter to your personality, I suspect it will be a problem. Eventually if you can be a top performer that's all that will matter but until then your initial opportunities & perceptions will be heavily affected by your networking.

Lastly, 100k-150k in New York or San Francisco isn't what it is in the rest of the country, take that into consideration.

All in all, I think it’s a solid decision to do what you are doing but a lot will depend on your personality, many people are drawn to poker because the freedom it offers, that’s something that will completely absent in this kind of job. You’ve certainly proven that you can succeed in the poker world and even without online poker; you’ve demonstrated you could easily make a very nice living playing poker and have the freedom that comes with it. It’s all about your own priorities and what matters to you.

Best of luck regardless and respectfully hope not to see you at the table cuz it's -EV.

IHateCats