Re: The House
Dibs,
I definitely have some shared feelings. However, I mainly agree w/ Gild. If you want to make a ton of money from poker and have the abilities to do so, there's nothing stopping you right now.
My situation is that I started playing in 2002. In 2003 I was playing 10-15 hours a week and made something in the $100k+ range. 2004 same thing. Very nice money for a hobby, but nothing that really impacted my life. Given the state of games at the time (how big they were, how often they went, how profitable they were), my expectation was that the games would stay good and get a little bigger for some time, and if I focused on it I could probably make $500k-1M per year at poker. That was not enough to really focus on continuing to play seriously and keep moving up limits.
Looking back a couple of years later, I was completely wrong. I would have guessed that by now, 25-50NL and 50-100NL would be going strong and there would be some tough 100-200NL games going. The fact that there are often big action 200-400NL and 300-600NL games going on online is something I did not even imagine. Had I thought this would happen, I would have been much more serious about continuing to improve and keep my game sharp and play the biggest limits. However, a couple of years ago I didn't really see poker as something that would present any more significant challenges to me, nor provide a way to make amounts of money that made a real life-changing impact for me. I had no idea games would be at a level where it would be possible for top players to win 500k-1M in a month online. Nor did I imagine the size of big buyin tourneys or the endorsement dollars that would be possible.
So, sure, I look back and in retrospect would have liked to have taken a shot at putting myself in a position to be vying for that kind of money in poker. But I don't really regret not doing so, as I'm very happy with what I did with building value in a couple of companies over the last few years, one of which has already made me a nice little chunk of money, and the other hopefully will end up making me more money than I could realistically have made focusing on poker.
I'm a firm believer in not worrying about things you didn't do and making the most of the choices you've made and situations you're currently in. For me this means that it's currently much smarter for me to focus on scaling some businesses. For you this might mean it still makes sense to focus on poker. Figure out what the best path is for you starting from the here and now and quit worrying about things you might have done differently in the past.
|