Convincing family about Online Poker.

[Se7enTwo]

Man....$50k a month.
I wish I was rich. I have problems protecting my $50 bankroll. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

[Mothercanuck]

Just tell them you are a Robustosaurus Rex and they'll understand...

[lucky_mf]

[ QUOTE ]
As a poker pro I wish I had finished college and found a fulfilling job, maybe ran into poker later on in life. Here's something I read which you might benifit from -


Here are a few comments from an old article about playing poker for a living. It's old, but it's still true. Maybe doubly so for people playing online for a living. If you think it sounds glamorous, read on:

You might make $50,000 to $100,000 per year if you're a very good pro. You're probably not. Very few professionals make six-figures and up -- less than 1 percent. You might as well try to become a movie star or a pro athlete -- the odds are better. With a regular job you're guaranteed a paycheck every two weeks. That's a pretty good deal when the bills come due. With poker playing, there are no guarantees. You might even lose money. Most who try to become professionals, lose money. They fail. End of story.

Getting credit is difficult, if not impossible if you play poker for a living. Be prepared live on cash. You can't get simple things like a car loan, or a mortgage on a house. If you somehow get a loan, you will have to put down 5 or 10 times the amount of money than most people with regular jobs. Someone who works and belongs to a credit union can get a house with a few thousand down. You better have at least $20,000 or you'll end up paying rent the rest of your life.

Tax problems are almost inevitable if you gamble for a living. If you get really good at poker and score $100,000 a year, you probably won't declare it properly and pay taxes on it. You simply won't. You're in a cash business and you will always find something else to do with the money. Gradually, the years will pass along and one day the IRS will get you. Especially with computers literally taking over our lives. You used to be able to run and/or hide. That won't be an option going forward. They will get you -- count on it.

Poker playing provides absolutely no benefits. No perks. None whatsoever. You have no idea how important these benefits are until you need them and don't have them. No 401K. No retirement income. No vacation. No sick leave. No disability coverage. And forget about getting a promotion.

If you play poker, you probably work nights and sleep days. How are you going to attend soccer matches and ballet dances? You won't. Because you won't find a woman worth marrying. Who would want to hook up with a gambler?

Society gives you no respect. In fact, much of the world looks down on you. Incorrectly perhaps, but that's the way it is. Many poker players are lowlifes. You may meet a lot of diverse people, but everyone is on the room for a reason -- to get your money and leave you destitute. So much for the social thing.

You are constantly around a lot of miserable people. Life is a very short ride, and sharing the backseat with your typical casino gamblers for most of it is a prescription for despair and depression. There are exceptions and we all have poker friends who we like and admire, but really, how many? The vast majority of gamblers are of low character and are a big-time drag to share existence with for long periods of time.

Poker is a sedentary job that frequently exposes you to second-hand smoke and unhealthy foods. You can overcome the sedentary part with a disciplined workout program, but the smoke is not something you can avoid if you want to play in really live games. All you have to do is look around the average poker room to see that poker players, as a class, are less healthy than the general public.

It's boring. Poker turns into a horrible grind when you have to play correctly every day. You create nothing in poker, beyond grinding out your living. You help no one. You achieve nothing. You don't grow as a human being. Most of the conversation at the tables is confined to trivia or worse -- listening to bad beat stories and tales of misery. Sitting at a poker table for long periods of time is intellectual death. Talk to some of the poker pros -- they are human vegetables. Bring up something profound that's not related to gambling and they are like deer caught in the headlights.

Your options are extremely limited. Let's say 30 years goes by. You're 50 years old, you're tired, and you want to find a real job and hang with real people. Well guess what. You don't have a marketable skill in the world. You can work for Wal-Mart or flip burgers, if you can explain to them why you haven't had a job since high school. It's the same thing a convicted felon goes through after spending the first half of his life in a correctional institute. Your options are extremely limited if you later decide to do something different with your life.

Many poker players don't have family lives, don't have social lives, and can't get dates. They're still living in an apartment and paying rent since there was no reason to buy a house. They've pissed their lives away playing poker. At the end of the road, you're tired, you have nothing to show for your stay on the planet except the fact that you maybe managed to feed yourself. Maybe. If so, congratulations. Really impressive.

Get a real life, and treat poker as it was meant to be treated -- as an entertaining diversion. If you're young, life should be about big dreams and big plans. Anticipating a pro poker existence is setting the bar way too low.

[/ QUOTE ]

Wow - bummer. Keep the dream alive. If I do ever decide to give up my job to play poker it will be 100x better than what you describe.

Seriously, a good online $5/10 NL player makes about $1000 per 1000 hands. 4-tabling 1000 hands takes about 3hrs. So for 90 of work per month (22.5 hours per week) said player is earning $30k on average ($360k per year). If the same guy wants to grind out 50K+ hands per month, lives cheaply, and invest well he can retire (or play at his leisure) in 10 years with a lot of $. Even a $2/4 grinder can make $200k+ per year. Honestly, who needs a care loan (or a mortgage loan for that matter) when you make $360k+ per year?

How many players can grind $5/10+ NL for $1 per hand? Probably not many, but for those that can it is a pretty good living.

This said - being a live pro probably sucks pretty bad.

Lucky

[FNG]

Couple things...
[ QUOTE ]
They call poker call gambling

[/ QUOTE ]

It is.

[ QUOTE ]
don't like changing there views

[/ QUOTE ]

If you still haven't mastered there/their/they're at 19, you *seriously* need to focus on your education. Start by learning what you should have learned by now but haven't.

As for justifying your playing, use it to pay your bills while you're in school. If you can't do that, you're not nearly good enough to consider poker anything but a hobby anyway . And like somebody else said, make no deposits.

[lucky_mf]

If my kid game home from college and was spending countless hours each day clicking away on an online poker site without much to show for it, I would be pretty concerned. I think the solution is clearly to limit your play to a few hours an evening after 10pm when they are likely to be asleep.

As others have said - unless you making at least $25 an hour and using the money to live off and pay bills poker is just a hobby and should be put in its proper perspective. I think it is easy to become addicted and waste a lot of time that could be spent on more productive endeavors.

Lucky

[kabouter]

I agree with most posts here, and unless you pay for your rent/education/food then it isn't really your decision. I mean you don't have a job so you are playing with the money they probably gave you to buy stuff for school.

And you probably put a lot of hours in a month and only earn like $50..I don't live with my parents anymore, told them that I play poker though, but if I didn't make $600+ a month it would be a complete waste of time. As soon as I'm done with my master I will probably say goodbye to poker, except for some live games that I still enjoy.

Sure there are some people here who earned a lot of money with poker (Aba, CTS, Empiremaker, grimstarr, etc..), but I'm like 99,9% sure that I will never be as good as them, so I'd rather put my time in getting a good job when I'm older.

Cliff notes: Don't be a fool, focus on school!

[raze]

As someone who was in your exact spot two years ago, I would say don't spend another minute trying to convince them. It won't work, my family is the same. I actually moved out when it became much more profitable to get an apartment and play professionally than to stay home with free everything, and not play (btw I over-estimated my skills and my bankroll, and I had to really work to up my skills quickly in order to avoid disaster =) Things smoothed out a bit with my parents after I made it clear I was able to live -and- grow my savings account through poker, but I wouldn't suggest simply moving out, unless you are deeply certain it's the best thing for you.

[gedanken]

One thing you'll have to learn in life is people can be irrational. Your parents probably are. You can be, I can be, it's human.

My mom grew up in a household where her dad would come home on a Friday with no paycheck because he'd gambled it away between work and home. She cried the day my sister announced her engagement to a (kick-ass responsible) poker player. He got a regular job as a dealer, gave her grandkids, and was paying the bills, and that helped a little. Then he got a job trading stock options, and everybody was happy. Now, instead of gambling for $100's of dollars a night, he's gambling for millions, but don't try to explain it to her, it's not about reason.

The funny thing, though, is that there's often wisdom in the conventional thinking. Gambling, generally, is bad. You know it. MOST of the time, gamblers lose money, enough to build a city in the desert. Families get destroyed, kids go hungry. It's a little disturbing.

Maybe, instead of fighting your parents on this, you need to show them that you understand their point of view.

[gutte169]

I, and a few of my friends, have come from very conservative families where our parents are very opposed to "gambling". The best way to go about it, is to show that you take it seriously. First off, slacking off and slouching in your chair for hours on end while they are around isn't the best impression for any "hobby". Get into it, read books in front of them, look at PT stats in front of them. Maybe try to get your dad to look at your PT statistics, or tell your mom some interesting stories of other intelligent kids who are making a good living on this. Let your parents know that you enjoy being competitive and show them that you are taking it seriously. They will probably never come around to love poker like you do, but they might respect the idea and maybe even be supportive.

As others have mentioned, if you need more than 1 or 2 withdrawls from your bank account to poker sites you probably can't win this arguement. Be realistic with yourself and it should rub off on those around you.

[MrWooster]

Just as a point, whoever thinks that poker is not gambling is WRONG! Poker IS gambling, and you must remember that. The only difference between poker and roulette is that you can play in a way which is +EV. It is very important to remember that poker is gambling if you want to go far.