Never had the real-job-experience, so can't really compare. What I do know is that going through a 500 BB LHE downswing a couple of months after taking the leap in 2006 was a pretty miserable experience.

Yeah, I went the week of the $1500 PLO event last year and did very well in the PLO cash games. Not so well for the event

I like the idea of continuing to grind on the side and build my roll to 50k and taking a shot from there. I really don't like the people saying I'm almost certainly no good. You don't know me, quit hating. While it's possible your theories are correct, it's also possible my theory is too... and your hate is very tilting. And the guy who said I don't know equity or other advanced concepts.... honestly, please don't disrespect my intelligence. I wouldn't consider doing this for a living if I didn't put countless hours into studying the game. Just because I don't have a lot posts on this site doesn't mean I haven't been going through it for years. I have. I've been studying the game since 2007.

Anyways, good points. I think the best idea is to keep my current job and keep my poker bankroll separate from all other expenses. If I make it to 50k I will take a shot... I'm going to continue taking shots at the WSOP and other places with my vacation time until then.

I look forward to bumping this thread down the road and proving the haters wrong ..... until then, cya.

If you're *very* tilted by internet hate

PLO may not be for you

So much this. /thread

Was rootin' for OP until he started talking about "haters"

^
hater

This.

OP gets good honest advice for free and responds by calling people haters. WP OP. You close minded and ignorant thought process alone will break you. And FYI many losing players beat PLO for over 100k hands so until you have at least a 500k or 1 million hand sample don't open your mouth about "proving" haters wrong. I change my advice now anyway. Quit your job and go play full time.

It's a sad testament to our times that this makes any sense. Ask your grampa what he thinks of that statement.

OP, keep in mind it may not be as easy as you think to get a job after a 1-2 year lapse in work on your resume. Most employers will not consider poker a great skill, though perhaps they should.

Another thing to consider is you are working your way up in your current career, at the bottom of the ladder. It is supposed to suck the first 5 years, because you're doing all the shyt work with little pay. If you put in your time and impress the right people, the job will likely become easier and more lucrative. 15 years from now the games may be dead and there's little guarantee you'd be able to clear $250/year anyway. Balance that in your calculation and remember you can always play poker on the side for enjoyment and extra cash.

With the variance of the game being as it is I think playing live PLO for a living is ridiculous / unfeasible.

Pretty interesting question and something I have thought a lot about recently. I understand your frustration with your job and I understand your sentiments because I am in a very similar situation (although there are a few key differences). I work about 70-90 hrs a week so not a lot of time to play poker on the side. Have been playing on and off for past 4 years but focused more on career than poker. I recently ran $2k up to $30k with some $10k tilt downswings online over the past 3 months. I have been sitting around thinking to myself, man this **** is easy. I work 80 hours a week killing myself for bosses that don't care about me yet I go home at 12 am play for 2 hours and make more in week than I do a month of my day job. So I had this back up plan in my mind that I would let my bonus hit in March, take that and the poker money and move to Vegas or Canada and play professionally. **** it let's take 6 stacks of high society and let this **** run. I feel so Matt Damon right not even God could stop me. Long story short I just ran on a 20 buy in downswing and it is ****ing rough as ****. I have never seen decks this cold. Didn't win an all in for a week. Burned through 3 months of work in basically 4 days.
There is something to be said about confidence in yourself and following your dreams, but at the end of the day you need to be realistic about what you want to do. Poker is a game of chance and variance. Chance and variance are very cruel mistresses. So let's assume for the sake of argument that your 5k hand sample is an accurate picture of your winrate. You have to understand that 100-200 buy in downswings are possible for winning players in PLO. So if you admit this is true and reading the boards here at 2+2 should make you realize crazy runbads are within the realm of the possible, quitting your job (non-variance income) and "going pro" is essentially a bet that you won't run bad when you first start out. And not even run bad, but that you won't run marginally bad. Imagine what it would feel like to lose 50-70% of your roll when that's all you have. Can you continue to play +EV poker running 20-25 buy ins below EV?
Additionally, take a look around and notice when most of the pros started out. I could be wrong, but seems like most built their rolls during much easier "poker economies" than the one we are in right now. The games are tougher. There are less fish. The regs are much better. Live games are even worse because you have limited volumes which amplify the effects of runbad. Limited hand volume makes runbad much harder to get over as you can't just grind through more volume and try to get your EV line to converge towards your actual winnings. I mean just browse through the threads and look at ChuckBass' runbad over like 60k hands. You run into that live and you are broke. It doesn't matter that you are a winning player in theory because in reality you are broke and some rich businessman just ate your roll. On top of that you don't have any hand histories so you won't know if you truly are running bad or if you are just the next Swedetooth. Can't get staked, flat broke. I'm not saying it's going to happen, but it's a very real possibility. I am not advocating one side or the other, but rather want you to understand that quitting your job is essentially equates to a bet on rungood / runbad / variance. Wish you the best with whatever decision you make.

tl;dr - Quitting poker is more complicated than "am I a winning player" it is also a bet on initial variance while you try and initially build up your roll. For more info on the math check out wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marting...bility_theory)

OP, while the message has been said with perhaps a little more vitriol than is necessary, take heed. Back in the day, you didn't need much about you to turn a tidy profit at this game, but nowadays it's a f***ing battlefield. If you've found yourself a fertile patch of live ground, do it, take your shot and make your money living your dream, but the human brain can not be equipped to comprehend variance in anything remotely approaching a realistic way. Even if you've been grinding these last six years full-time, you still wouldn't have a real sample size from which to judge, and without experience and extreme capacity for introspection without blinders, it's very difficult to say honestly that you have an edge over the field for the following reasons and that your leaks aren't in immediate need of plugging.

If you're on your own (i.e. no dependents), you're responsible, have a back-up plan if it all goes wrong, and have all the other qualities necessary to be a professional poker player (i'm sure there's lots of good articles online that will be good food for thought, go googling, start with roys blog?), screw it, take yor shot. But realise that any of the peeps itt giving you abuse aren't doing it out of a desire to be a d*ck to you for their own amusement, but rather to present the other side of the argument forcefully against what does sound like blind optimism.

It doesn't make any sense. I've been my own boss for the last 6 and a half years and it was pretty awesome for a long time but it's been making me miserable for a while and all I want to do now is get a real job. Sounds horribly cliched but our generation really does have it easier (physically, mentally we have a whole nother set of problems that basically none of our predecessors had to deal with) than any other generation.

As Bob Dylan said, we all serve somebody.

But it does make sense to so many people these days, which is pretty messed up because our predecessors worked three times as hard under much worse conditions and were probably happier. My first reaction is to say tough shyt, kid, you ain't seen slavery, but maybe it's all relative.

sick wall of text. MAYBE 1 person will read this?

It was obv OP is a donk when he starting telling us how he folded KK on AK8 and the bit about calling a $160 bet with a single pair of aces...

I dunno why these threads dont get moved to a small stakes thread or something. its always the same, a bunch of really great players are trying to help some beginner who isnt here to really ask a question; instead they come here for confirmation and disregard anything else.

it makes sense to me after 15 years of working experience in various jobs and fields, talking with colleagues and observing them. makes even more sense now that i quit my job.

interesting question about your post is that we do we do feel guilty about "having it easy" compared to earlier generations? don't fathers always want better life for their kids? they do, and yet we generally feel a bit guilty if we have it easier.

If they were happier, did they really have a tougher life? I understand what your saying, but that doesn't make mental health issues a lot of people have nowadays any less severe.

Besides, there has always been a lot of depression, mental health problems, unhappiness, suicides etc. They just used to be much more of a taboo before, and in many cases people didn't even see them as real problems. Similarly like many highly functioning people with some kind of mental ******ation were probably considered "that slightly slow/goofy guy" rather than realizing it's an actual disability.

I tend to agree with "people nowadays are way too lazy for their own good" to some extent, but still I think many old/conservative people value hard work way too much. It should be something you might have to do to get by, but it shouldn't be a positive value in itself.

It's also worth noting that napsus worked a career that is probably more stressful (and more hours) than >95% of people have, which may have something to do with him calling it modern slavery. And from what I know of him (from athlete to bank career) I doubt he really is a good example of "these lazy kids today", what you were indirectly suggesting by quoting what he said. I'd imagine he's someone willing to work very hard to achieve his goals. (kitchen psychology and making guesses based on someone's posts, I'm aiming to become Dr. Phil of 2+2)

Fantastic thread, where it's lead. It's interesting. Our grandfathers worried about things like how to feed their 6 kids, fearing things like world domination by nazis or maybe russians. We worry about crazies shooting up gradeschools or maybe blowing up subways. And we fear.. the thing this western world fears most I think is boredom. Ty jeebus for internet porn and 2+2.

I think there are deeper fears in the human mind than boredom.

can i ask what kind of 35k year job will pay 250k in 15 years?

i dont know where u live but i did a little research last night and found that in most places its hard to find a PLO game that constantly run. do some research first, don't assume that you will get to play a lot more sessions just because you have more time when you quit your job. i heard that lots of PLO games only run during weekends anyways.

One can *definitely* play PLO professionally in the same way one can play NLHE professional and that's not even a question. The game will be always be around in our lifetimes, I guarantee it.

Now, @ the OP:

If you don't like your job I suggest dedicating some time at least every week to do something different.

However, from your posts I'm not sure you're ready to dive into poker full time, maybe you are, but that's just the impression I get from reading them. This is coming from someone who DID quit his job to play poker. If you want specific details feel free to PM me.

Please don't take offense, like many others here I am just trying to give you FREE FRIENDLY ADVICE so you have a good future.

Cliff note: play online.

There's no need to play live with that ridiculous rake when you can multitable online, this way you'll gain experience, learn fundamentals and find out if you're competent ten times faster and for less money.

Assuming that you're American (otherwise why did you think about playing live at all ?), you can choose among Bovada, which allows neither rakeback nor HUDs and is thus the closest to live poker, with the additional twist of anonymity of players, or Merge (Carbon) or WPN (Americas Cardroom); the latter has close to no PLO games now, but Merge customers are now so angry with the replacement of rakeback by a worse VIP program that many of them are expected to migrate to WPN soon (Those Americans who play on Revolution network most likely say bye-bye to at least 30% of their winnings.)

During your week off, you can play 20K hands online, which is four times more than your entire live experience. Install free MergeKeys and a free trial of Pokertracker, deposit some bucks to Carbon from your credit card and gogogo! We can even play heads-up for rolls at two tables of $0.25/0.50 for the first 4 days of the week (while flat rakeback is still allowed) if you make some more posts on 2+2 and then send me a private message After you return to work, continue playing online at weekends - that's when most fish is there anyway.

If you're not from USA, it's way better as you can choose from a wider variety of poker rooms and banking methods
Having an understanding partner and family like you is a huge 'if'. Quitting the job otherwise is likely to result in full loss of one's weight in the environment and society in general, leading to loss of confidence and thus money in poker. Been there, done that.
Poker is slavery too. It's too similar to any job and requires insane discipline as well And most top online poker rooms treat regs no better than slaves nowadays, even try to wipe them out if they're too nasty (winning).

At what stakes? Surely you can't be advocating that at $10/20+ with the range of games out there (if you look hard enough) that there isn't a sick living for highly skilled PLO professionals.

i quit poker and have a job(that pays less than poker).

my life is way better off.

i recommend this unless u are making 200k+/yr

Interesting point by nachunja, my ex roommate (poker player) said he only thought poker for a living was worth it at £100k/year.. Something I think is probably fair.