So over the last year or so, I've met a lot of you younger guys who are getting ready to graduate (or drop out of) college. Pretty much everone is kinda lost/confused about what to do with their life and always asks me the same questions. I met datrip down in PCA and he said it would be cool if I did a sort of question/answer thread since it's getting to be that time of year when everyone wonders what to do with their life and I've experienced both, the working world and the life of a pro.

Some background on me... (summary at the bottom if this is tl;dr)

I'm 24 and currently live in Boston. I graduated from Dartmouth in 2007 with a degree in psychology (lol). Although I had been playing since freshman year and made a lot of money beginning with my sophomore year, dropping out of school never ever even crossed my mind. I loved college so much and never wanted to cut my time with my friends and my hilarious days as a frat boy short.

I applied for a lot of consulting and finance jobs my senior year after party poker shut down. That was a big shock for me. Every consulting firm rejected me but I was able to score interviews with the likes of Goldman and a big hedge fund. I was able to use my experience as a poker player to get a job at the fund as a trader. It was all they really talked about in my interview, which was really cool. I thought working at a place like that would be a great experience and was excited to start.

Work was very cool at first. Everything was so fresh. There were new people, new challenges, new things to learn--everything was going well. As the months went by though, I could feel myself slipping. Things were starting to get monotonous. Things that were once interesting new problems to tackle became boring chores. My manager would try to dress up new assignments for me but I soon realized they were all the same. Even trading on the desk had become boring--trading the same bonds, making the same phone calls. I grew to hate waking up the same time every day and going home the same time every day. People would talk about going to vegas, things like that, and I would always be like "damn i totally could do that as a pro right now"

It wasn't long before I was considering quitting (probably about 3 months or so). I felt stupid to do so; I had one of the highest paying jobs of anybody coming out of College and worked very reasonable hours (50 a week or so). Pretty much anybody would have killed to have my job. Even so, it would sort of crush my soul to work all day for 500 dollars when I knew that I could make that in an hour playing cards.

Ultimately, it was not my job that pushed me over the edge. I loved the people I worked with (traders are hilariously awesome people) and I still do find markets fascinating and interesting to analyze 'til this day. I just wanted to do my own thing so badly. I remember one day i took the day off to play tournament at foxwoods. I was killing time playing 1/2NL and I was SO HAPPY that I wasn't at work. I was probably borderline delarious because I thought **Wow, I would unquestionably rather grind this 1/2 game for the rest of my life than work**. This was, of course a ridiculous thought and I clearly would never do that but I think it's a good example of how unhappy I was with my life at that point in time and I realized it was probably time to move on.

The day I quit was the hardest day of my life. I felt like failure--like I had let the guys who had so much faith in me and hiring me down. I'm not used to failing at stuff in life. I have this one track mind that wants me to crush everything I do and that's one of the reasons i'm a great poker player. I knew I'd miss the guys I worked with so much and that I'd never find such a hilarious group of sweet dudes to spend my hours with every day.

In the end, I decided life is too short to be unhappy. I think this is the only shot we get so we may as well go all out. I walked out of the office feeling like a 10,000 lb weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I drove home 100mph with the windows down in the middle of december blasting "Baba O'Reily" and singing at the top of my lungs. It was probably one of the most movie-like scenes of my life

I've been a pro now for over a year. Not one day has gone by where I have regretted my decision and I still smile everyday that I sleep in until 11. This post is getting a little longer than I wanted to so I'll cut it short now.


**CLIFF NOTES**
-went to college
-got job
-quit job
-played poker for year


I need to run some errands and will prob be back in a couple hours or so. Hopefully this thread becomes useful to some of you guys and doesnt slip to the back pages. I wont be offended if it does though

OH YEAH!? Sounds like the MAN still got you by the balls!

So what's your set up, how long do you play, what do you eat while you play and graphs!

I'm in a similar situation as you, in that i've been in the working world (software/web development) for the past 3 years, and am being made redundant tomorrow. I've been chronically unhappy in my job for the last 6 months maybe, because of how repetitive and unchallenging it is. I'm finally in a position where i can make a very good living from poker, and have decided to do it for about a month before considering rejoining the work force.

Do you ever worry about not being able to rejoin the working world? Not from a mindset point of view, but rather your skill set being made obsolete? I'm not sure how relevant this is in trading, in development technologies change very quickly. Do you also worry about explaining the gap on your CV?

I feel that online poker winrates are kind of a fallacy, because people constantly quote their hourly, yet its pretty meaningless because very few people are putting in 40hrs+ a week. There's also the huge amount of time not spent playing that people put into their games that they don't factor into their hourly. In 15 years time, i don't expect most people to be making the $100/hr that they're making now, because the games will get tougher and interest will most likely have declined. Do you worry at all about the long term?

you know i have awesome questions to ask you steve....

i just have to think of them first.

duh duh duh.... the wait begins.

I think working for the man, and then moving to Poker will make you "cherish" it a lot more than someone who has never worked a regular job.

i've got a computer that used to be jacked up in 2006 but isnt anymore with a 30' and a 24. When i move somewhere else next year i'm gonna get the most pimped out computer the world has ever seen and probably two 30's, even though i dont usually play more than 6 tables

i play like 15 hours a week in summer and 30hrs a week in winter to get my grind on so i can golf more in the summer. when i move to california i will probably play 10 hrs/week

i drink musclemilk+OJ shakes when I play. They sustain me when I am too lazy to make a sandwich and have the added bonus of causing me to have to take a ****, which makes me always cut my sessions off before 2 hrs. i spew when i play >2hrs so it's win win

graphs? um, here's me 6 tabling 5/10 6max, though i havent really played 5/10 in a month or so

I used to be worried about the long term. I think that even in the worst case scenario for me i can still grind 1/2 and make 100/hr. I dont think poker will ever die and think it will actually get much better in the future as legislation in the united states becomes more, shall we say, "enlightened"

personally, I dont worry about going back to the working world because I've decided I never want to go back. I can't work for people, I just always have to do my own thing. If my back is ever up against the wall, I know I will figure something out. I have created a good financial safety net for myself. I can always survive for 4 or 5 years without a job or go back to school for something if I have to but I don't plan on it

I'd like to make a couple million more playing poker very seriously the next couple of years and then probably move on to doing something else. I dont think people realize how easy it is to build wealth when you have lots of wealth to begin with. They say "the first million is the hardest" and there is a lot of truth to that, so if you can make your first million fairly easily playing poker and have still have decades of your life ahead of you to build wealth, you're in better shape than most people realize

This is so true. I'd almost recommend everybody grind a job for 6 months or so just so you know how good you have it when you quit. I feel like if I never worked I might be less happy now, always wondering if the grass is always greener on the other side.

i definitely love life now that I know the grass on the other side is basically just full of dog crap

Favorite Golf Course in MA area

And do you regret your draft of the NE Defense :P

Why isn't fulltime playing poker more monotonous than your job was?

hmmm i just dropped out of college after the first semester (actually i got suspended for a semester for failing everything lol, but not going back after that) so i will try think of some good questions.

What are your favourite trash talk lines you say outloud during your sessions?

Schedule? What do you eat? What do you think of playing PLOLmaha for a living?

Wannamoisett Country Club (technically RI i guess but i grew up in RI so whatever). It's private though, hopefully I can play there in the next 20 years or so

No more than I regret losing my internet connection and having Yahoo automatically draft Ray Rice for me

Poker is such a small part of my life now, whereas my job pretty much defined my life before. 80% of what I did every day at work was pretty much the same thing. I haven't figured out poker yet and probably never will, which is why it never gets boring for me I guess.

I play poker basically whenever I feel like it. Sometimes I wake up and I'm like, fk poker I'm spending the entire day on the driving range and it's nice to be able to do that

You'd probably be bored watching me play. I generally say and do nothing no matter what happens to me (unless it's just absolutely absurd, in which case I'd quit anyway). I feel like keeping myself cool helps me keep a clear head with my decision making. Sometimes I trash talk people in the chat when they wont play me hu but I dont really have anything against them. It's not like I'm gonna go 4 table Roland or someone at 25/50

In my younger days I used to yell and break **** all the time whenever I took a beat. I've broken like one thing in the last year, a mouse i dont even use that I flung against the wall after altrum altus slowrolled me.

I generally wake up at 11, eat a shake for breakfast and play for a couple hours if I feel like grinding midstakes. Lately I've been playing a lot of high stakes cap games where there's sometimes no action so I'll sit at a few tables and wait with the volume turned up. I'll just like play guitar or call of duty or something until somebody sits. After that I'll go to the gym, make myself a sandwich and watch some tv shows I DVRed. Later I'll play another couple hours and eat again (I eat like 6 or 7 times a day).

Night depends on how I'm feeling. When it was warmer I went out with my friends pretty much every night, sometimes to a chill bar, sometimes a raging euro club, and everything in between. I'm trying to cut back on the drinking now so I dont go hard as frequently. I often go out and just grab a bite to eat and a beer or chill and watch a game or a movie with my roommates when they get back from work. Sometimes I play poker again at night, sometimes I dont


I dunno, that's a typical "working" day for me I guess. Sometimes I dont feel like playing and I'll take a roadtrip to NY to hang out with some friends. Like I said though, winter sucks and I'm mostly just trying to grind right now.

I'm planning on moving to argentina for a couple months soon to wait out the snow so if any of you are down there let me know. We're gonna get a pretty pimped out house in BA with a hot tub on the roof, etc

Nice to hear you're doing well! You have roommates who work? Man they must be so jealous. haha.

The mind of a pokerplayer----it's terrible----but we all do it...not one of us hasn't thought it at some point in our lives......
When given or told a sum of money...we think...

Man...I can make that much money in one hour playing cards.

Yeah, I never held a real job and am always wondering if the grass is greener.... though of all the people I graduated w/ every single one (not one exception) has told me they'd rather be doing what I'm doing....

cool thread.

you say that you find the markets interesting but you seem to have dismissed trading because you don't want required structure. given this, thoughts on trading from home?

do you see yourself grinding online poker five years from now?

kind of off topic, but do you mind going into the details about how you got the trading job? Did you just cold call a bunch of companies, or were you hooked up? Also, can you expand on how you sold the "poker skills" to them, and do you believe trading is the only profession that looks favorably upon this? Thanks in advance.

I was all about your first paragraph until I got to the frat boy and then consulting/finance stuff, haha. I'm graduating from harvard in june and also made a lot of money freshmen/sophomore/junior year yet never considered dropping out. I'm majoring in statistics and could probably get a consulting/finance job pretty easily if I tried (well, not easily in this economy, but more easily than a lot of my peers), but I just have no desire whatsoever to do that. Problem is, I have no idea what I do want to do, so I'm planning on playing poker and travelling until I figure that out. I don't know if I want to play for a living (in fact I think I don't), but I figure I'll try it at least, since I have nothing better to do.

I don't have a question, just thought I'd comment since your first paragraph sounded so familiar

Would you ever consider trading if your poker BR got big enough? If not, what kinda things are you planning to move on to?

What are your long term goals? How long do you see yourself playing poker?