I wrote a blog about this topic (mostly talking about what to say away from the tables) about a year and a half ago (I now live in Vegas). Here's the text:
“So, What Do You Do For A Living?”
A common question among poker players is what to answer when someone asks you what you do for a living. Personally, I like to stick to the truth, which is often a great litmus test of how likely I am to to be friends with the person anyway.
Take, for example, this conversation which takes place almost weekly in my life:
Random person, “So, what do you do for a living?”
Me, “I play poker.”
Random person with their nose wrinkled in the air as if smelling a rotting corpse, “You make money doing that?”
Me, right before I walk away, “Do you make money at your job?!”
Hate to say it fellow ladies, but this happens more with other women asking me than guys. There are a few logical reasons for that, mainly being that fewer women play poker than men and thus are less likely to see it as a viable career. Also a woman is a lot less likely to be trying to impresses me and get my digits, so she may not care about offending me. Or maybe women are just nastier in general (just kidding ladies).
Location is obviously a factor in how a random person responds to your profession. If you tell someone you’re a poker pro in Vegas, as I have, mostly when asked as I am getting a pedicure or whatever, the response is generally pretty enthusiastic. (Except for once when a pedicurist at the MGM spa proceeded to tell me about how her husband lost 100k at video poker—bit of a buzzkill lol.)
Living just outside of Washington, D.C., people are not as used to hearing my profession which is probably why I get the above response so frequently, but I think that does not excuse their super rude follow-up questions. Even if a person told me he was a trash-collector, I could come up with something nice to ask him about it!
Other common and just as annoying responses when people find out what I do include, “Isn’t online poker illegal?”, “How do you do that?”, and this one which made me lol “Oh, I looove slot machines.”
At the same time, there are people informed enough to think it is really cool that I play poker for a living—even if they have never played a game of cards in their life. Count every member of my family in this group.
As Ali G would say, “Respect.”
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Often times, at the actual table, I'll say I'm a writer, because well, that's true too.