[Janabis]

If you're talking strictly in terms of the necessary skill level required, then beating mid/high stakes poker for a respectable win rate is one of the hardest jobs there is. Of course the hours are better and the work is more fun than any minimum wage nonsense, but flipping burgers or cleaning toilets for 16 hours a day are 'easy' jobs in the sense that anyone in the world can do them, regardless of whether they have an IQ of 80 or 180.

Being a poker professional is 'hard' in the same sense that hitting one of Curt Schilling's fastballs out of Fenway Park is 'hard,' ie. few people in the world have the skills necessary to do it. Obviously the difficulty of the job in this sense has nothing to do with how desirable the job is. Who wouldn't want to be a major league baseball player? If a lawyer or engineer had the necessary skills to beat 10/20NL for $500,000/year, or to bat cleanup for the Colorado Rockies in the World Series, I'm sure many of them would quit their jobs and do that instead. But not many of them will, because they don't have the requisite skills and therefore succeeding in professional sports or professional poker would be too 'hard' for them.