How have you taken advantage of being a poker pro?

[Schmitty 87]

Great stories everyone. I'm not a pro, but poker is awesome [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img] and I have an ok story imo.

After making a very modest amount of money my senior year of high school, I cashed out everything I had online except for like 50 bucks. My parents are paying a lot of money for my college, so I figured I would work really hard and study all the time, leaving no room for poker. Unfortunately, I hated school for the first few weeks so I played a bunch. I eventually began to like school, but by then I was having too much fun playing poker to quit. Fast forward to January and I'm playing in a WPT event after essentially deciding to quit playing poker four months earlier.

I had never been out of the country until the PCA, and it was awesome for my first trip out of the country to be a weeklong stay at the Atlantis resort, all paid for by a series of mouseclicks. Up until the PCA, I had played sngos and tournaments with buyins no more than $20 for basically my entire poker career. Then all of a sudden I'm top 15 in chips in a WPT event and 3-betting Barry Greenstein with air. I ended up cashing which was nice but at the same time somewhat unfortunate considering my chip count relative to my day 1 tablemate and the eventual champion stevepa (53k to 7k).
After getting back from the Bahamas, I dabbled a bit in higher stakes but set aside most of the money to pay for school. Now I'm back to playing low-limit sngos (beat), but at least I'm doing so while wearing a nice watch and with a bottle of Cristal on my desk (beat too for pointless purchases I suppose). I'm also planning a trip to Thailand this summer because there's no need for me to work a summer job and I can't seem to land an internship no matter how many resumes I ship out.