Originally Posted by PokahBlows

Wow, this thread could be tilting for most. But let's be realistic here. How can a 100k to 200k year job be better then a poker pro. Every job has stress. Life's stressful if you get a lot of second hand stress.

But the option to work when you want, travel when you want is really hard to compare to a regular job. I think pro poker players have freedom like pro sports players and music entertainers.

College is a nerds life, some people have better options. Such as poker/investments.

Its funny how people in all aspects of life say don't do it lol. If its your passion nobody can steer you the wrong way.

Originally Posted by DonkeyDave

If all you got from this thread was "Don't do it." you really didn't get the point of the thread at all. It's more about being honest about the prospect of being a pro than flat out discouragement. I would never discourage anyone to try but theres some sage advice ITT. Too many people make a go for it with a dreamers eye (yes I made that mistake as well).

For someone who seems so sure of the poker life yet doesn't even know how to calculate EV

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/17...vs-ev-1043681/

you might want to heed some of that advice.

Originally Posted by SeeThomasHowl

There are times when you need someone, I will be by your side. I take my chances before they pass, pass me by. There is a light that shines special for you and me. You need to look at the other side, you’ll agree. Darlin’ open your eyes. Let me show you the light. You may never find a love that’s right. Darlin’ open your eyes-- Bobby Caldwell

If you’re around poker long enough you’ll get wind of a large variety of stenches. Some of which will make you sad. Sad for the poor saps from whom they exude. Sometimes it will make your eyes well up at the thought that you yourself are indeed a part of this “community”.

There’s actually very little that’s communal about it. 2p2 is like a college dorm with no chicks and no booze, but with all the post-adolescent male chest-thumping, douchebagery, and self-serving fib-telling. That and a friggin game. PoKeRz!!!!! The game that’s turned more would-be nerd boys into a-holes than Richard Dawkins and Wall Street combined!

This is my 2k post but I’ll spare you the eye-glazing yawn of “my poker story”. I will quickly say that I am a lifetime winner overall. This includes ~500k hands of low stakes online PLO, about 20k games of STTs & MTTs, and around 75k hands of Live 1/2, 2/5, and 5/10 NL cash. I supported myself playing poker (live and online) from 2008 to mid 2010. The End.

Glory days, well they’ll pass you by. Glory days. In the wink of a young girls eye… Bruce Springstein

For those of you who don’t know (of which I hope there are few but I fear there will be mannnny) there is no glory in poker. Unless you make it to HSP or final table the WSOPME or are the next Isildur1. No glory. What I mean by glory is that no one in the “real world” is going to pat you on the back or celebrate or revere you just because you spend countless disciplined hours in deep concentration making highly complex decisions hundreds of times a day in order to net $65/hr without punching a clock. It just isn’t going to happen.

You made $4k last night? So what. Girls want doctors not poker players. Parents want engineers not “grinders”. Generations of conditioning will not be undone in your lifetime. Forget about it. Stop thinking it. Stop hoping they’ll come around. Unless you are very smart with your $ and diversify with savvy investments and wise financial planning outside of your bankroll. And who are you kidding? You ain’t gonna do that. So before that resume gap gets any wider you might want to give some serious thought to just how long you can truly stand living with Stigmata. How important is it for you to be respected by others? You are not, nor will you ever be, the most interesting man in the world because you can shuffle chips and know the TRUE definition of “range-merging”.

From Busto to Mo-busto…

Now… To whom it may concern: I regret to inform you that you CANNOT make $30/hr at live 1/2 NL with a 200max buy and a $4 rake. I don’t care how soft it is. I don’t care if West Indian Gary plays every night and can’t fold AQ-high for his stack post flop. It ain’t happenin. Phil Ivey couldn’t do it if he had a $2m sidebet on it. Well, maybe he could. But you can’t. If you think you’re a live 1/2 pro please (I BEG OF YOU!) stop. Just take a deep, soul-centering breath and think about your life for a moment. Think of your mother. Remember how she tried her best to teach you right from wrong. Remember when she worked two jobs and used to come home at the crack of dawn from work, bunioned and scoliosised-out just so you and your slow-witted brother Derek would have food on your plates and pencils longer than a inch and a half in your bookbags when you went to school? Damnit if not for yourself, do it for Ma. She didn’t want this for you. She didn’t bust her hump so you could waste your life c/r’ing Uncle Willie for his SSI check. You’re the reason she’s drinking herself to sleep tonight. Be merciful.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail. - Midieval Proverb

Simple arithmetic time! YaY!!!!
If you have a slight lapse in concentration (we won’t even call it tilt) that equates to the loss of just one buy-in every 5k hands, that works out to -2bb per 100 hands off your winrate. If you’re grinding 20k hands a week of 100nl that’s the equivalent of -$20,000 a year!!!! And you wonder why you can’t move up. And we’re talking something as simple as one slip every 6 or 7 hours opening a hand you shouldn’t open, or calling a 3bet you shouldn’t be calling, and subsequently getting stacked. Or just one itty bitty tilt shove in the midst of an otherwise stellar session. Or maybe it isn’t one identifiable mistake, maybe it’s several tiny ones. Regardless, it really doesn’t take much. The margin between big winner and small winner -- small winner and b/e -- is just that, marginal. You don’t have to be a bad poker player to be unsuccessful. You can, for the most part, be a good player and still suck.

All you old rappers tryin to advance, it’s all over now, take it like a man. - Tupac

2005 is gone and it ain’t coming back. There will be no second Poker Boom. That was a one shot deal. If you missed it you missed out. From 2004 to 2006 I was playing live 3/6 and 6/12 LHE ‘cause it’s all my local casino offered and I thought internet poker was bollshyt. All the while 2/4 NL on Party was playing like .02/.05 does now. That’s how I spent my Poker Boom. How’d you waste yours?

Whatever the case, check it out McFly, you can’t go back in time. I’m really sick of 25NL grinders saying “Send me back to 2003 with $50 and a laptop and knowing what I know now, and by the time UIEGA passes I’ll have $500k!” Well, you know what buddy, you’re probably right. But do yourself a favor, LET IT GO. It’s worse than saying your goal in life is to have Megan Fox tongue-lash your perineum. I mean unlike the back-in-time thing, that goal is actually theoretically POSSIBLE, but you’d never be retarded enough to feel like it was owed to you or that there is something missing in your life because your not able to attain it. Get over it and move on.

In 2010 I’ve had more poker friends quit poker than ever before. And these guys aren’t scrubs; they’re mostly current or former MSNL / MSPLO winners. Good, smart, hardworking players. But it’s that they’ve come up against the reality of today’s poker climate. Very few players are getting rich these days. That ship has sailed. So more and more often guys who have been around a while -- guys in their mid or late 20’s say – are just looking at their 20k rolls going: “F-this grinding out 1.8BB/100 stuff, I’m cashing out my roll and going back to get my Masters.” And it's the right move.

Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. What ever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. - Steve Grand

If you're a lifetime 3.4BB/100 winner at 25NL-thru-100NL over a gillion hands, good for you. But you are not a 3.4BB/100 every minute of the day. When you first groggilly open your eyes in the morning that is not your winrate. Which is why hopefully you dont wake up, roll over, and instantly start 9-tabling at 8am. Cuz you know better. But think about during a session. Say you open the SB w/ A7 and the fish in the BB calls. the flop comes A 7 2 you bet, BB calls. Turn: 5 you bet BB minraises, you either ship or call, the river bricks off and the fish shows you 63. Simulateously on another table you run AJ into 66 on an A-6-J flop. Now the wave of emotion starts to overtake you and you are no longer making crisp rational decisions the way you normally would. Should you get up from your games? This is low stakes, so many fish! And you're a 3.4BB winner! No, at this moment you are not. However steamed you are, have enough wherewithall to say to yourself "Despite my winrate, at this moment I may not be a winner in the game. I should walk away until my mood normalizes. My 3.4BB winrate is not static." Your bankroll will thank you for it.

In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment. - Charles Darwin

The winner is the chef who takes the same ingredients as everyone else and produces the best results. - Edward de Bono

You are surrounded by simple, obvious solutions that can dramatically increase your income, power, influence and success. The problem is, you just don't see them. - Jay Abraham

Okay I've painted a pretty bleak picture above, but don't get me wrong, I'm just ranting about the common misconceptions and self-delusions of others, many of which I have partaken in myself in the past. YOU CAN SUCCEED AT POKER. You just have to get your mind right and be realistic about it. There are a number of things you need.

1) Youth helps. Being a professional poker player is a lot like being a stripper. You have a very small window to accomplish what you need to and age is the enemy. Once you get to be over 25 say, a lot of words like marriage, children, morgage, retirement -- start to suddenly have meaning. People around you (parents, friends, sig others) begin to expect you to, if not already have "made something of yourself", at least be on the way to achieving some sort of status in society. So if you are getting a late start, you may want to explore other options than poker.

2) Preparation. Everyone knows this but very few people heed to it: you not only need to have a bankroll, you need to have $ outside your roll as well. How much? That's tough to say. Hopefully you have a low monthly nut and little to no debt. But regardless your going to need cost of living $ on hand that you do not use for poker -- the amount of which may need to be equal to or greater than you bankroll. Ignore this notion at your peril. Unless ofc youre 19 and living with your parents or something.

3) Everything else: poker skill, work ethic, mental discipline, emo management, blah blah blah blah, you know the drill.

I guess what I'm trying to stess in this post is honesty. Be honest with yourself. And if you have an honest dialogue with yourself and realise that things don't quite work the way you thought they did, remember, theres more to life than poker. At the end of the day it's just a game.

Originally Posted by vektor

I've met people in the industry I'm going into that are near billionaires that have fractions of the stress the pros have. The level of stress and sacrifice involved in most career paths are nowhere near the level of a poker pro, add that to the social isolation and constant hostility, there's no arguing it's an inhospitable psychological environment.
And I do think the large majority of pros would switch paths me because at worst I will have a 9-5 that pays between 100k-200k a year with low stress and non-hostile social interaction. At best.... much more than Ivey or Dwan ever made.

I've already ran my own company in a competitive industry before I went back to school, ran it for a year. Sometimes I'd work 90 hours doing nothing with my friends. Still these times were much less stressful than the times I was trying to eek it out mass tabling online. The social isolation and the hostility involved have such negative impacts that it's not worth it.

I believe some people love playing poker, because I did, but things change when you rely on it. I've conversed with many people who have succeeded and failed at taking a crack at poker and the large majority say that the ups and downs feel like too much. I'm not saying don't do what you love, I'm saying eventually poker turns on almost everyone and it starts to wear on you much worse than most jobs because of certain specific aspects common among most poker pros. These are words of advice from someone who has seen what the majority of poker pros really are, in the end it's not a dream like many people think in the beginning.

Originally Posted by amurophil

Not sure why anyone would think this is a good post. Its obviously a losing player sour that he doesn't have the passion to keep up with the game anymore.

Sorry, backwards rationalization and an attempt at witty prose doesn't win my favor on this forum. Nor does it win you happiness. Have a nice life fighting the good fight OP, conforming to what society wills you to do.

Originally Posted by nanana

didnt read all the responses, but OP got sooooo much things so very wrong. that bit about "making a small mistake every 6-7 hours, opening a hand and getting stacked" very clearly shows a total misunderstanding regarding basic equity-principles. its clear that you cant beat any game at all with that much flawed thinking.

stop crying, stfu and start working on your mindset.

/threat

Originally Posted by PokahBlows

Great quotes sir, but why is there a poker window for age? Harrington didn't win anything until his 40s.

The reason I quoted this again is because its a new era coming. Its called post black friday what are your thoughts now? Since you made this post 5months ago.

Originally Posted by SeeThomasHowl

1. That’s how I spent my Poker Boom. How’d you waste yours?

2. remember, theres more to life than poker. At the end of the day it's just a game.