+1. It seems pretty obvious to me tbh.

As an American, it is very difficult to make 90k per year playing poker. The best of both worlds is to make 90k or whatever at your day job and then grind live games during the weekend and make another 50k+.

It's easy to make 90k making poker as long as you ignore rake and any 'downswings' that are the result of 'variance' and certainly not poor play.

If you make 90k from your normal job you probably don't want to waste your valuable free time for a measly 50k extra.

Especially as a programmer you're way more likely to work on some side projects that might net you a couple of millions some day.

ha I understand the point you're trying to make, but 50k is not "measly" in comparison to 90k. In fact, there is a big difference between making 140k per year and 90k per year. Think about it over a 10 year time period. Not including taxes you would have saved an extra 500k. If within 10 years you have a really good programming idea that will make you more than 500k, then you should go with that; but, more than likely you'd be better off making the extra 50k per year.

If you're going to put in the hours to:

A) Be and stay good enough to win at poker.
B) Make 50K/year

You might as well just get extra programming contract jobs and still make your 50K/year extra.

It basically boils down to it being easier to make $X/hour as a programmer than as a poker player. And while it's a little easier to put in extra hours playing poker - it's not that hard to get extra contracting jobs as a programmer.

If you can get programming contract jobs and make an extra 50k per year that would be awesome, and I hope to do it one day.

But if poker is something you enjoy and if you want to be careful about getting burned out doing too much programming, then poker is a great little side job to occupy your time.

And I am debating whether or not I want to spend my free time playing poker or working on a side project idea that I have.

Agreed. And this is why I play poker.

But if your goal is just to make 50K/year (or any $X/year for that matter) it's almost certainly easier to do it programming than playing poker.

I'm not sure if I'd be able to enjoy poker unless I was constantly striving to move up in stakes. Back when I used to play, I hit a wall at 5/10 NL psychologically--the swings started to get out of hand, and the game stopped being as fun for me.

If you enjoy playing then keep playing. In terms of the project you mentioned, hopefully it is interesting enough where you will be excited enough by the prospect of completing it that you won't get burned out.

Use your programming skills to build bots to crush micro.
Retire.

I think it takes roughly a week to learn enough to make 90k a year from poker.

Most people can't be bothered to put in the effort required though.

I've learned both poker, and programming. I play poker, I don't use programming. For me, it was merely a matter of what could make me more money in the long run.

...

It's pretty crazy to say that it takes roughly a week to learn enough to make 90k at poker. For starters you can't just learn stuff and that's that. The game tends to evolve and good players stick around more than bad players.

Next thing you want to sell a 1k eBook teaching everyone this amazing secret. Tri is that you?

How much do you make per year? Since you ask about 90k in the OP I assume it's not much more. If that's your long run outlook for poker you made the wrong choice.

Wild guess..you play MTTs huh?

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...6&postcount=14

Yeah... I play MTT's, what of it?

MTT's can be low variance, and highly profitable. I started playing poker in June last year, the link is from 1/7/2011 till 31/7/2011.

Huh? You played 5k MTTs in one month? I don't think so...

I assume you meant July 1st 2011 to July 31st 2012. If so, that's only $30k in 13 months. Sorry but programming salaries destroy that. Taxes or not.

You can make 30k part time programming. at home.

Sorry... what was that?





[x] sustainable


FWIW, this is without my euro sites.

We're derailing the thread quite a bit but I don't think a comparison of programming to poker is bad since it may be interesting for many poker players that are looking to make the switch etc.
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165+ 180s/day is pretty impressive. If you 24 table them that's almost 7 complete sets (obviously you'd add them once one closes etc)..seems like quite the grind.

I know 100k is very much possible but I'd argue that your statement that you can learn all you need in a week is complete nonsense. Granted I play cash games (or played it's mostly a fun hobby now) but it is very much the case that you keep learning constantly. Flopzilla ranges over and over read/post/analyze hands etc.
Kind of hard for me to imagine knowing nothing about poker but I'd say to become a +EV player from knowing nothing at cash games it takes vastly > one week.

My entire point is another one though. Maybe I'm just odd but poker kind of turned into too much of a grind for me. Programming is much more creative and I think it's a lot easier to "burn out" from playing poker than it is from programming. Granted if you take some slave job coding Java for a bank it might be the same.

The most important thing however is growth potential. I'd guestimate that somewhere around 100k there's a pretty solid brick wall for most poker players that is fairly hard to overcome (maybe at 150k). Less games, less fish, tougher opponents. Programming there's pretty much no limitation to growth since you can always try to build your own company etc.
The highest I played profitably on a regular basis was 600NL* and it was getting quite a bit tougher at 1kNL (actually I only mixed in 600NL if there were sufficient fish and grinded 400). I'd like to think I'm fairly smart and have good learning habits but it would have certainly taken me quite some time to climb even higher in stakes and there was a pretty huge mental barrier due to the sums involved, too. I'm sure such a "comes easy then gets harder" plateau exists for every player. Even if some are really good and never run into that wall we're not talking about those people. We're kind of talking about average-ish folks here.

*I've taken successfull shots at 2kNL+ but that wasn't exactly regular grinding it out, getting hands in play

Indeed, sorry about that, I was skimming through a few threads and saw the post that I initially quoted, it made me do a bit of a double-take.
I hate to be making this so self-centered, but I only know my own experiences in learning/teaching the game.
It took me roughly a week from "I know what a Big blind is" to get to the point where I was comfortably making $20-25/hr.
It took me about a month to get to $50-60/hr.
In that time, I didn't use any external software as a learning tool other than pokerstove. I think people put way too much emphasis on tools like flopzilla/SnGwiz etc. and as a result they never learn the underlying fundamentals involved(which you get a very good grasp of by doing the calculations yourself.)

I think learning poker is a lot like learning programming, if you learn through the standardized template, you will never get to the point where innovation(lets be honest, innovation is the reason why you love coding, making **** work in ways that you never thought you could) happens naturally.

I've done this with 2 students so far, from 0 knowledge of NLHE(They played 5 card draw when they were kids so they had a basic knowledge of hand rankings) to +EV at low stakes MTSNG. It's not difficult, it just requires motivation, I'm sure you would say that programming is the same. Accelerated learning is possible as long as you are willing to put some effort in.

I disagree, I'm sure you can figure out why based on my previous arguments so I'll leave it at that.

Just out of curiosity, what are you at now?

Because that number isn't that high for many programmers. It's basically equivalent to a 90K/year salary with benefits, 4 weeks of vacation, 10 statutory holidays, and 40 hours a week work weeks.

I've changed my schedule to be pretty huge fields/high stakes games so I'm unsure.
My best estimate using ANOVA model is about $120-$150/hr but my true $/hr at this point is a lot less than that due to 6 months of what I used to believe was "downswing" but was, in reality, a misunderstanding of variance resulting in me ignoring my decline in skill. I've since fixed that problem.

Keep in mind that I live in Australia, poker is tax free here. when I said $20-30 and $50-60 per hour, I was referring to the amount I was making that I was able to withdraw to my bank account.

Also keep in mind that I have no qualifications, I dropped out of school in year 11, and never progressed further in the official education system.

That being said, I didn't realise that $55/hr was fairly standard pay for programmers, thats quite a bit higher than I realistically expected most of them to earn.

Oh and don't forget about the benefit of not having mentally cluster****ed week, momths and maybe even quarters.

365 days off per year tho