As a parent, how amenable would you be to your kid pursuing poker...?

[suzzer99]

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AZK,

I hope you won't think I'm attacking you but did you ever stop and think that maybe it's not poker that give you that snobby personality; perhaps it is just you are as a person.

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Absolutely. But I wasn't as frivolous w/my money before poker because I had to work really hard to get it. I would go out and buy nice things once in a blue moon, or at least think about how expensive something was before I bought it. I used to go to the supermarket in college every Monday because the steak leftover from the weekend was on sale for $1.99/lb...no way i would ever consider buying steak from a supermarket now... see the difference? Obviously I'm snobby about a lot of things, but it's not widely known, only my family and best friends know that I like really nice things... it's like this, if we were going to take liquor/bar/drinking as an example, when I am out with my good friends and I order a round, it's top shelf, when they order a round, it's rail, I still drink their round, but I would never order rail for myself...does that make any sense? I don't criticize either, it's just at this point in my life I wouldn't buy it to drink myself.

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FWIW I've never known the value of money whether flush with cash or flat broke. I drank cheap beer when I literally was lucky to have $20 in my pocket on a night out. But the second I started making $20k/year I switched to sapphire & tonic. I have friends who make pretty good money but freak out about spending over $6 for lunch. I just don't see this as a very fun way to live.

If I work my ass off at a job, it's to achieve something. The money just comes along with the deal. If I have some money I buy something fun with it. It's also nice to know I'm not one setback away from financial ruin anymore. But never is money the primary focus of anything I do. I think being desensitized to money is a very positive thing.

[kyleb]

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"You can make $150,000 - $200,000 if you drop out now and play poker?"
"Yes."
"Can you prove it to me?"
"Sure, here are my stats and winrate and my extrapolations for the future with considerations built in."
"THEN WHY THE [censored] ARE YOU IN SCHOOL"

That is how that conversation would go down.

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When he/she is a young kid, I will probably teach my kid poker and chess. Both develop strong critical thinking and reasoning skills and poker makes basic 6th grade math somewhat exciting.

If the kid wants to drop out of school that is another story. I would ask him/her to outline the basic pros/cons of doing so and make sure they understood the risk they were undertaking. I woud counter the $150,000-200,000 argument with looking at the long-term earnings of a poker player vs. a successful person in a wide range of fields, try and get them to think about the long term. Ya, they may be earning more than their sucker intern friends at Goldman Sachs now, but not five years from now unless they become the next Aba. I'd want to make sure they had a long-term plan besides 'POKERRRRRR OMG MONEYYYYYYY'.

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Right, this is how I basically feel. If they are smart enough to extrapolate and plan 3-5 years in advance based on best and worst-case scenarios, then I would give them my blessing. I mean, [censored], they're gonna do it anyway.

As for the poster who asked if I would welcome them back into my house, if they're making $100-200k/year, they ain't living under my roof ever again.

[xxThe_Lebowskixx]

teach your eight year old poker, let him play 10 hours/week and by the time he is 18 he'll have made 500,000 USD at $100/hr.