It is a difficult situation because of competition. One can try to get the state or so to pay a part of the salary. Do part time, do the job when someone is sick, on holiday, do a lower job, get more education, get self employed, try from less populated areas.

OP,

I think your situation is actually much better than most:

1. good health
2. smart
3. 30k in the bank
4. lots of valuable experience from years as a poker pro & traveling
5. young

Now its time for a career reset.

You only need to get your foot in the door at any company within an industry you are interested in. Once inside, you will be able to rise up faster than you think if you perform well and network well. Then think about how you can create your own opportunities with you new skills and network.

Start by identifying a couple industries you want to work in.

Then start searching on job websites and working with placement agencies.

Obtain or maintain healthy habits: eating, working out, positive mindset.

theres also a vice documentary about him. i took a couple of times the 30-40 power breaths and took a cold shower after in the last 2 weeks, also tried to apply that 'brown fat activation breathing' technique while in there, not sure if i did it right but im gonna do it again.

thanks for that interview link

After poker I was convinced that I should switch to something else than my original choice at University. Might have been a bit optimistic, applied for very popular program and was rejected. So I went back to the thing I studied originally. Today I am really glad that I did, I guess there was I reason I choose it in the first place. Imo it is likely that it is the same for you. Give it some time, take some courses if you wanna refresh, apply to some companies and sooner than you think you will be back to your old self, but with much better habits and some perspective on things.

We are basically the same person.

I'm 30 with a finance degree but played online poker rather than getting a job, after black friday I moved to California to grind live. I beat lowish stakes live but I'm never going to a be a crusher and I don't really enjoy playing anymore.

I've been trying to learn javascript but its been a slow process and based on things I've read on reddit it seems hard to break into the industry being self taught. I'm thinking the poster directly above me is right- go back to what I studied originally, I have a degree, might as well make use of it.

I have feelings of dread sometimes, like I've backed myself into a ****ty corner by choosing poker after graduating. At this point it seems really hard to get back to an employable state. I might look into that account temps that was posted above, but as OP said I've forgotten most of the things I learned in college 10 years ago.

One of the hardest things to figure out/accept is that despite you being a really smart person, that's not always enough to get you a job you want. You think people who get jobs because they know a guy are *******s, and you want to get your job on merit since you have so much merit.

I'll tell you right now: Network like crazy. I've gotten every job I've ever had at least in part due to networking. Hiring (and accepting a job) is all about taking chances -- with people you know, a lot of the risk is mitigated since you usually know things like "this person works hard" and "this person isn't an axe murderer." Let merit get you promoted, but for now, use the heck out of your network.

One of the things that poker does is take you out of the real world, and the habits of work. Years of that is no different to years of being unemployed.

You can break into nearly anything, particularly IT, if you have the skills. The stuff about the industry being hard to break into is just nonsense. If you have good skills, you get paid. It's purely about whether you have good skills. People self-learning generally find it hard to break in for a lot of reasons, not least of which the group contains a high percentage of people who are unemployed, unambitious, poorly disciplined, unstructured, unfamiliar with success, unfamiliar with the ultra high correlation between diligent hours worked and goal attainment, and not hard working.

Good skills are easily acquirable with sufficient work and a mind of your own. The key though is work - most poker players got into poker because they wanted to avoid work, or boredom, or because they dreamed of the big time (itself proving they have a very poor grasp of reality and probability), or avoided the structure necessary for success (false believing structure to be limiting of their freedom), or had other character or social flaws or lack of wisdom or ability to see things through.

What I'm trying to say is that your position is by no means untenable. Don't listen to the naysayers. The bar is pretty low in many fields, and someone who acquires the skills needed, through hard work, will do just fine. It'll be even easier with some real-world networking. You just have ask yourself a bunch of questions, like:

- What can a quality, employable javascript coder do?
- What skills do I need to be able to demonstrate this? What practice do I need?
- What work habits do I need?
- What tests and interview questions should I be able to pass?

Find the answers, get to that level, and you'll have a job. There's no confidence like mastery of a skill set earned through hard individual work. None. If you know your ****, employers can tell.

All that said, javascript sounds like a bad idea. Why not go somewhere where there's high demand and high pay? Quite a few IT jobs are happy and well paid with travel and lots of promotion possibilities - why not go for those rather than be an easily replaceable web clown? For example, database administrator is one of the happiest jobs in America, very well paid, and really ****ing easy to learn. Not to mention growing. Every clown goes the easy and obvious route (I use the web - why not code it? javascript looks easy), but you know what? Why not go the non-obvious, non-crowded route? Choose a field that has knowledge that endures, such that once you're an expert, you have a huge leg up? Coding websites and mini apps in javascript is way less exciting and mastery-making than working on something stable and serious like databases.

It's a perfectly good option.

Poker was always an idiotic decision. But lots of people make idiotic decisions. I don't know a single person who hasn't. The winners are the ones that spend as much time as possible working in a new direction and as little time as possible wallowing in the consequences of their bad decision.

Not at all. That's all in your head. It's done by putting one foot in front of the other until the walk is finished. It's not hard to do at all.

It probably doesn't hurt to get a feel for the working world in some way, even just some dumb temp job. One of the worst things you can do when trying to get yourself back up to speed is to be isolated from the very thing you're trying to learn. That's what causes you to drift from reality and build it up into something bigger and bigger and harder and harder. Becoming employable is not hard and it's not big - it's just a certain number of hours (500? 2000?) of applied work and a bunch of exposure - however you can get it - to learn what you need to be a useful employee.

Other suggestions:

- Treat your learning like a job. Plan it out. Work a 9-5, 3-5 days a weeks, to get a feel for what it's like to work. You will hate it at first, and have trouble focusing for more than 20 minutes, but one day you'll wake up looking forward to doing useful things, and you'll also look forward to and enjoy your time off even more as well. Once that shift happens, work will make far more sense. You have to relearn focus and discipline, to deal with boredom creatively, to enjoy pain and push through it, and to get to the point where you rediscover the joy of finishing something.

- Some kind of structure is a good idea, even if not related to your focus. Go do several things each week at the same time, even a nigh class in an unrelated field, or some volunteering.

- Intensive coding courses, particularly designed for professionals, are a good idea too if you can afford them. You'll get exposure to a high paced, no excuses environment (college is a joke, mostly, especially for people who reject loose structure). You'll also get contacts and a sense of what's out there and who's hiring.

- A lot of the fear of work is simply having no experience with how it works and how it feels. There are lots of intagibles that make the unemployed fearful - social anxiety, no idea of what bosses expect, no idea what their colleagues are like, no idea what level you need to be at to fit in or not to be seen as stupid. The bar for what's required by in the real world is set really, really low, and the more exposure to the world you have, the more you'll realize that. So anything you can do to get around professionals more will do you a lot of good in making things seem more achievable.

- Get whatever help you can from family and friends. Be completely open. Mention to people you just met that you're turning your life around after getting out of poker. Etc. There's a lot of wisdom and know-how in the world if you're humble enough to tap into it; shame and saving face and grandiosity are some of the greatest barriers to accessing it. One thing that openness does is make people feel safe, and that makes them very inclined to help you in ways you might not even realize are possible.

That is a fantastic post, ToothSayer. Thank you for sharing.

This is really true. Your background doesn't mean much because everyone else is just lying anyway. Decisions are made based on referrals and people skills as much as anything else. Learn how to make friends immediately.

Toothsayer's post is also absolutely fantastic.

When I first made the switch every day after work I was barely able to move it was that exhausting. But you just have to keep committing to going in each day and it gets easier and easier until it's normal. Now I tire out easily playing poker.

Care to share more of your story?

And just to expand on picking an in-demand area: the happiest job in America and the happiest and most in-demand job in IT has a huge and growing shortage of skilled people. Isn't that just unbelievable??

This is the kind of stuff you have to look for if you're choosing an IT profession, not javascript. Employers are desperate for DBAs, which has so many benefits. You can get in as a less attractive candidate. You'll be paid more. It means you have your pick of jobs and locations. It means your skills, once you acquire them, will be uniquely valuable for many years (which means job security, including in a downturn), because major shortages like this take years to fill, and by that time, you'll be years ahead in experience. It also means there are possibilities for starting up your own consulting business, which is where the big money and good life is.

If you're outside the box you should be thinking outside the box. There are lots of areas where skills are needed and jobs are easy to find that can set you up for life. Why people take the normal route (vanilla accountant, java or javascript) rather than specialize in in-demand areas is beyond me, but they do, so it's your opportunity.

I'm going with the pessimistic view, because I went from poker to real world job and then quit to move with my girlfriend on her job transfer. Jobs suck. It's like the grass being greener on the other side. I agree with picking industry you're interested in, yada yada. You'll enjoy the new comrads, you'll enjoy the Happy Hours, you'll enjoy the new challenge to learning something new and having a structure in your life. Then, the newness wears off. Office politics will happen, your boss will be a nutjob, and you'll be sipping beers on Friday to take away the tiredness of the last 5 workdays. Saturday you'll enjoy yourself. Sunday you'll think about Monday.

My advice: Figure out what you want in life, and break it down how to get there. Figure out how to add a ton of value to some industry you're interested in that solves a ton of people's problems. Snag a job in that industry, get paid to learn all this **** for free. Start working in your free time to building something of value, get out of rat race. You aren't missing anything.

On another note, why don't you just get good at poker? It seems like you just never kept working on your game. There's tons of soft Euro sites and such to make plenty of money. You might not have a drive any longer because you got complacent. I got the same way. I've been reignited by knowing people are still winning and there's tons of things to learn about NLHE, let alone several other games.

So in short: No it's never too late to get a job, figure out your long term goals, make steps to get there, add value to the world by helping as many people as you can, keep traveling the world after accomplishing this.

Toothsayer-

Thank you for taking the time to write out such a great response to my post, your advice is extremely appreciated. I've taken your thoughts about a DBA career to heart and started doing the SQL course over at khan academy, which I'm going to followup with courses from SQLzoo and PluralSight. I've already read your responses multiple times and I'm sure I will continue to do so, there is so much great stuff there. Thanks again!

TS, why are you so negatively biased towards poker as a profession? if one can make a life changing amount of money and invest it wisely, it is hard to call that "an idiotic decision."

also, I would argue to be successful at poker you need to have strong work habits. I didnt become committed to self improvement until i was making money in the continuously challenging environment of poker. poker molded me into someone that is very committed to success and happiness, and I am a better person from it. it teaches you to sink or swim. grit and determination on a scale that would be hard to attain at too many other professions. that is transferable into whatever you chose to do after poker.
it sounds like you think all poker players are lazy with terrible work habits.

+1

I think his assumptions certainly hold true for the majority of poker players. Also, for the few people who are genuinely successful at poker, a strong argument can be made that they would have been equally or more successful committing that time to a "real world" activity. Of course this isn't always the case, but it means that the group of players for which poker was a non-idiotic decision is infinitesimally small.

i think the guys that put themselves in a hole are the ones that made enough from poker to live a "poker lifestyle" but not enough to save meaningfully for the future. i think the majority of online players that started before black friday thought they would have poker income for many years to come (including myself.)

its silly to say choosing poker as a profession was "always an idiotic decision." thats just far too black and white of statement, as is you saying that an "infinitesimally small" group of players made the right choice to play poker as appose to trying another career. i think you underestimate the value of making a lot of $ young and saving and investing early as apposed to coming out of university $xx,xxx in debt from school loans. a lot of guys were making relatively easy life changing money for a quite a few years. that sort of opportunity doesnt come up very often.
you could be right, i could be wrong. who knows? I do think TS and your comments are far too polarizing. the factors involved in making the decision to play poker or pursue a more traditional career are far too complex to comment on. each individual has their own different set of circumstances. maybe some would've gone on to live more successful, fulfilling lives, but maybe not?
I do believe that the huge financial head start and lessons learned by being successful at poker young are benefits not to underestimate.

this

it was a rational decision for the time although irrational to think you'll go baller all the way....

It's a high risk activity.
Expected return is low - below minimum wage
It's high volatility
It's not a happy activity for most people
It's not a positive activity for civilization or in terms of extenalities
It doesn't develop your social skills or give you mobility or connectedness (for most people)
It makes you miss out on a lot of normalizing experiences that help many people make sense of the world and feel control and grow as people.
It keeps you out of the real world, where you'll probably have to return one day with a big gap in your resume/life story and an umemployed habit set.
It's intellectually dulling for most people
It probably reduces your emotional range
It has a low level of respect among most people

It's just a horrible, horrible profession to choose. Does one in 20 or so get lucky enough, make enough money and have the character to handle the negatives? Sure. But they'd likely do well elsewhere anyway. So you're left with the maybe 1 in 100 who make large amounts of life changing money.

The same can be said about betting your roll on out of the money calls on your favorite stock. The odds in that case are actually higher, and you don't have to give up years of your life staring at a screen to get those odds.

Expected value of anyone entering poker is pretty damn low, far too low to outweigh the negatives.

I'm glad it worked for you. You're an outlier for sure. In fact nearly anyone who comes to BFI is going to be an outlier.

And I fail to see why you can't get these positive aspects playing on the weekends or a few evenings or for supplemental income rather than dropping college/a career for years and all of its benefits (external and internal).
No, not at all. I think poker has a tendency to:

- Make you less employable
- Make you less sociable
- Give you a smaller emotional range and lower level of novelty seeking
- Make you less disciplined
- Lower your social status
- Lower your resolve and decisiveness and feeling of control over your destiny, given its large uncontrollable swings
- Develops an ideology of helplessness due to lack of immediate and controllable feedback; this has the effect of slowing your wits
- Bring out negative aspects like gambling addiction and hope addiction.

Some people will be immune from these effects, but the large majority net suffer from these in my opinion, for an expected return that's very low. It's quite clearly an idiotic decision.

I'm glad you found it useful in some way. The only other thing I'd add is that it's essential to get off the computer and out into the real world. One of the biggest problems you run into doing your own thing for so long is that you get out of the mindset of hard structured activities. Being around other people gives you a benchmark for learning speed and professional competence, as well as helping you pick up a million things by osmosis; Kahn Academy and online courses are just not going to do that.

It's actually really hard at first to keep up in a fast paced work world (even though it's easy once you learn) and spinning your wheels at your own pace learning online just isn't going to do it. You need to be around people and learning to move at their pace, which is both really fast and difficult and also surprisingly slow. If your mind is choosing its own challenges and its own pace rather than having the other people or the world set them, you don't adapt in the way you need to and you don't gain the knowledge of how you have to think and structure time and why. The other thing that real-world people working on the same task give you is emotional motivation; competition, desire for respect, avoidance of shame, impressing a girl, being liked and asked for help, watching other minds at work on the same subject matter are all extremely valuable and a huge part of motivation and happiness that you simply miss out on self learning online.

ESKiMO-SiCKNE5S's post above alludes to just how much adaptation is needed.

in the spirit of not hijacking OP's thread, this will be my last post on the matter.
I definitely disagree with you on the odds of making it in poker. between 2003-2008 a lot of people made a lot of easy money. i think if you were on 2+2 at the time and watching CR videos there is a good chance you could have made a living if you were intelligent and hard working.
as for 2015, i def would not recommend to start online poker as a career. i also think if you are doing it for a living now you should definitely be working on a back up plan for quitting. so much has changed I dont think it is worth it.
I disagree with your generalizations about how poker changes people in the ways you listed. its different for everyone and those generalizations would def fit some people, but its the opposite for a good amount as well i imagine. the only one that applies to me is dulling of emotions. that can be a good and bad thing. knowing how to keep your emotions in check is massively beneficial to being successful at life in numerous ways.
thanks for the interesting discussion.

Counterfactuals are hard I find it very hard to belief this is applicable to me.

Poker has a much bigger and faster correlation between what you put in and what you get out than pretty much any other job.

Prior to 2006 there was lots of easy money, so there was certainly a case for poker. Leaving when the UIGEA happened was the only sane decision for all but a very small handful of people (who were already smart and capable). Basically if you weren't crushing the games already when 2006 happened, it was very stupid to continue as you simply lacked the aptitude or intelligence to ever do well. I'm talking 20 to 1 at least odds of you ever doing well.

The other point is that there's absolutely no need to play poker full time. You can study and play poker, or work and play poker. Rather than have X winnings from poker, you could have 1/3 or 1/2 or 2/3 of X winnings from poker and still have a place in the world, all the intangibles of that, and future alternatives for when poker got harder. One guy I know made over half a million while finishing a very difficult masters. When UIGEA happened he was laughing - he'd lost nothing and was half a million richer. Thus he was able to simply let go and see that games were gone, because it wasn't his sole source of income or respect or something to do. He stopped playing and nothing else in his life changed; it wasn't a crisis.

You need to have circuit breakers and backups for bad decisions or poor estimation of your skills, or bad luck. In fact, I'd argue that part time poker has better returns for many people than being fully invested; when it matters too much and you have no backup, people get emotionally invested and make bad decisions and go on tilt. 2006 is an example of that - people with other things to go to simply moved on. The ones that stayed were the ones who'd made it a life focus and lumped all of their dreams in with making it big in poker. If you have nothing else, making the (correct) decision to quit when the games get harder is so much more difficult, and life's about making correct decisions. And setting yourself up so that you will make them.

Going 100% poker was an idiotic decision for nearly everyone except the natural vagabonds. But like I said, everyone makes stupid decisions.