Cost-benefit analysis of going pro, please help (VERY LONG)

[king_of_drafts]

[ QUOTE ]
Zack,

Being a professional poker player is INCREDIBLY boring unless you travel the circuit.




[/ QUOTE ]

I really disagree with this. Poker is fun in moderation and makes you money even if you only play like 3-4 hrs a day, giving you plenty of time to do other fun stuff. Most other jobs are tedious, take up a ton of time, and don't pay you much.

Edit: in fact, the circuit/live poker in general is very unpalatable to me because one of my favorite aspects of poker is that I can play wherever I want (namely at home or in an internet cafe) and don't have to deal with the lowlifes and slow speed of casino poker

[turnipmonster]

seems like you need a better job, I can't imagine you won't be as bored or more bored w/online poker. IMO a better reason for quitting work is if you wanted to focus on music for a while or something, and use poker as an income.

[sethypooh21]

Gild, I'm nowhere near your level of poker success (I hope to make low 5 figures or so this year), but my experience might be instructive.

I'm a few years older than you, but your self-description sounds familiar, and I definitely know what you are going through re: chained to the desk. While in law school, I came to sort of the same cross-roads at which you find yourself, with pretty much the same pros and cons you listed - pay special attention to the lack of benefits, resume gap and social isolation, btw.

As is my nature, I temporized, and played pretty much full time for the summer between graduation and the pre-arranged start date for my job - I tried to treat it as professionally as possible, maintaining something of a set schedule (it helped that I didn't have internet at home so had to play at a coffee shop/I-cafe, which limited my possible playing hours, in retrospect a very good thing), keeping my hours up and so on.

I can say that from 3-4 months of "full-timing" it, I got so burned out, and my game suffered so much, that I quit poker, cold-turkey for 18 months shortly after my job started that fall. I didn't miss it at all. (Except for financially, stupid student loans. They actually expect you to pay those back? Who knew?) Now that I'm playing again, but maintaining a balance, not only is the game fun again, but my play is far better and more disciplined, I'm less prone to tilt, and so on.

I guess this is a long winded way of saying that, it's not necessarily "job vs. poker" - get a different job, work for a non-profit yourself, but don't 'drop out' of the career track entirely. You'll be happier in the short term, and incur much less risk of drastic underemployment long term.

[geormiet]

I played 15-20 hours a week this past year, and I don't even have a job.

I'm going to make this simple - bad time to go pro (i.e. bad time to quit your job). This isn't 2004. You got a great thing going. You'll find you won't WANT to play more than 15-20 hours a week anyway.

If you have something great to do instead of your job, then I think then you should consider it. Otherwise if you are thinking of just quitting job and replacing it w/ more poker then I say bad idea.

[Reef]

get a different "real job" and play poker part time.

[sebbb]

how about:

1) Working part time (is that even possible)

2) Going back to being a student

[Victor]

"(I would be surprised if I made less than 150k playing forty hours a week)"

dont play 40 hrs a week.

"10) Wasting my gifts/intellect

I am by most measures society has provided for us at genius or near-genius level of intelligence. I graduated high school with a 1530 SAT when I was 16 (I skipped 1st grade and started early) and started (and didn’t finish) an MA at UChicago when I was 20. I graduated from McGill University in an Honors program with a 3.94 GPA in my last two years. I scored a 99% percentile on my verbal GREs (750/750/6). I’m not trying to brag. I am just stating facts that suggest that there are a lot of doors open for me because of my natural abilities.

I also have excellent people skills, a good work ethic, a great sense of humour, and comparable research skills and experience (research assistant for three years, graduate-level methods training, a year of work doing quantitative data analysis in public affairs research) to a PhD-level political science candidate. In other words, I could very easily succeed in business or academia or in another socially accepted career.

There’s a strong case here that I would be “wasting” gifts that God gave me."

do you think your current job is gonna fulfill your lofty potential? doesnt sound like it to me. if you are so smart, you should just quit your current dead-end job and pursue these high aspirations. play poker on the side while you are starting your own political party or whatever.

(btw, i think you and dean should go start a genius forum so you can jack each other off. take wacki too.)

[DING-DONG YO]

Alright, now that I have some time, I'll give more than .02.

First off, it sounds like you're in a bit of an after college funk. Your job(s) during your first years after college are tough. You're overworked, underpaid and underappreciated. College doesn't do a very good job of preparing you for life in the real world. It is a shock to your system pyschologically to go from being a fun happy go lucky college student to a 50+ hour per week working stiff. And you're the stiff at the bottom of the ladder. You're going through this now and everyone does.

The encouraging part is that (and I know you know this) it does get better. You're gaining invaluable experience now that will make you more and more marketable as time goes on.


Now for a story.

The dot-com bubble was in full effect when I got out of college. I majored in accounting at one of the tougher accounting programs in the country. I did what most accounting majors did and started working for a public accounting firm making 38K/year and working 60+ hours per week. This was at the same time that my friends were getting out of college and working at internet bubble type jobs making 100K+ right out of college. They did this for a few years while I trudged along working twice as hard making less than half as much money.

Then the bubble burst. My friends went back to school for MBAs/PHds, etc. etc. or just hopped from job to job. Often because they felt underpaid since they went from making 100K to 40K (think EM2 having to get a real job, not to pick on EM2, but just for some perspective). Their time in the internet bubble did very little to help them in their career long-term. One or two saved the ridiculous amount of money they made during this time but most of them blew it. Now while I have moved along very well in my career (controller for a large subsidiary of a large publicly traded company and on a CFO track, no I'm not telling where), these guys are in their early 30s and have struggled to get their careers going again. They lost 3-5 years from their careers with very little to show for it.

The reason I bring this up is that there are a lot of similarities between dot-comers of my day and the poker players of today.

Playing poker full-time may indeed provide you a better lifestyle in the short term and even a generous financial cushion to get you started in life. You could even do what one of my internet bubble friends did and save that money to start your own business, then, like him, you won't ever have to work a real job again. That's the best case scenario, obv.

Worst case is that online poker dries up and don't kid yourself, the signs are there. Then you have a large resume gap. If you're out of the workforce for a significant amount of time for any reason, then no explanation you can give will just explain it away. You're going to look flaky no matter what.

I'm not going to say you should do one or the other, but I wanted to give you (and especially others in your situation) some things to think about.

[Gildwulf]

[ QUOTE ]
"(I would be surprised if I made less than 150k playing forty hours a week)"

dont play 40 hrs a week.

"10) Wasting my gifts/intellect

I am by most measures society has provided for us at genius or near-genius level of intelligence. I graduated high school with a 1530 SAT when I was 16 (I skipped 1st grade and started early) and started (and didn’t finish) an MA at UChicago when I was 20. I graduated from McGill University in an Honors program with a 3.94 GPA in my last two years. I scored a 99% percentile on my verbal GREs (750/750/6). I’m not trying to brag. I am just stating facts that suggest that there are a lot of doors open for me because of my natural abilities.

I also have excellent people skills, a good work ethic, a great sense of humour, and comparable research skills and experience (research assistant for three years, graduate-level methods training, a year of work doing quantitative data analysis in public affairs research) to a PhD-level political science candidate. In other words, I could very easily succeed in business or academia or in another socially accepted career.

There’s a strong case here that I would be “wasting” gifts that God gave me."

do you think your current job is gonna fulfill your lofty potential? doesnt sound like it to me. if you are so smart, you should just quit your current dead-end job and pursue these high aspirations. play poker on the side while you are starting your own political party or whatever.

(btw, i think you and dean should go start a genius forum so you can jack each other off. take wacki too.)

[/ QUOTE ]

lol guys just forget about that, the only reason I said that is to address the wasted potential concern that is going to come up. I probably came off as a bit of a douchebag in that paragraph.

It's also not a dead-end job, there is growth potential and I can use it as a springboard into an MBA/business world.

[dustyn]

Here's been my experience with poker. I am in grad school now but quit my job for a few months to take some time off and play poker professionally. I've also played "full time" for a month or two at a time and here are my observations. I play mid-high stakes NL currently, but switched from mid stakes limit about 8-9 months ago.

Poker is best when you have another commitment. You play better, you are less tilt prone and you don't let the game take over too much of your life. A full time job is obviously too much of one, since you're often too tired to play well and can't put in too many hours. I think this can be many things - a part time job, maybe school somewhere (that's not too time consuming) or something like that. Without something else to do, I find that you push yourself to play SO many hands that it becomes difficult to deal with long term.

I think if you go pro now you have to start your exit strategy the moment you begin your stint as a pro player. Not a 3-5 year exit strategy - a 1-2 year one. Immediately start devoting energy and some time to the next step in your career, or at the very latest start after 3-6 months.

Being a pro poker player is another job. Granted it pays well and gives you freedom, but it's still a job.

I am more bullish than most I think about the quality of games being OK in the middle term (5+ years) because there's still potential for growth internationally. Poker just started taking off in Germany for instance. Games like 3/6 and 5/10 NL are still pretty easy to beat for decent win rates if you aren't playing on FTP or PS (which you won't be). That said, long term the games will probably dry up, but in the short-middle term, I think you're fine in terms of profit potential over the next 5-8 years. The problem is if you do NOTHING but play poker, your competitive drive pushes you to move up and play games with higher, more profitable stakes. This is good and bad but I think it's challenging to move down when the games start to dry up at the higher levels, and it seems a lot of people's egos are too big to accept that.

I think trying to shoot for more than 25 hours a week as a poker pro is suicide for almost everyone. I know there are some people who can do it but I'm curious how many years they last. Forty hours is just too much IMO - you might be able to get away with it at the 3/6 or 5/10 level for a while, but if you're playing 200-250 hours of mid stakes poker a month, eventually you'll want to move up. At the higher limits, the games become more stressful and I think you have to play fewer hours to keep your sanity.

Obviously I don't have a clear answer for you. I think if you have something you can do on the side or on your own relatively soon it's a good risk to take. If you don't and have no options outside of poker in terms of self-employment or a future business, it's a much larger risk.