Background:

I am a 22 year-old college dropout (I completed 2 1/2 years of an engineering program at an Ivy League university before succumbing to mental pressure and realizing that I don't think that school is right for me at this point). I currently am living at home with my parents working part-time making around $2k a month doing CRM management and marketing integration at a small wealth management company.

During college, I was introduced to poker and fell in love with it. At college, I was a winning player in our games. We played .25/.25 and .25/.50 with occasional trips to the casino. Additionally, I've played around 200k hands online, between the 2NL-25NL winning between 8-4BB/100 (Stake respective), but was unable to consistently beat 50NL.

After dropping out in November of 2018 (I did not even finish the semester), I was told by my parents to come home to relax and recover. I was allowed to have no responsibilities, but was not given any spending money. My student loans were still being deferred, so I was just in a sort of financial limbo. I had a reasonable amount of CC debt that my parents made minimum payments for until we decided that I needed to start working again. I am incredibly thankful for my family for allowing me to be at home during this time and it was tremendously helpful in recovering my mental state.

At some point during this time, it was decided that I needed to cover my student loans. That was it. They totaled around $250/mo. Additionally, I was not allowed to play poker with any money I made until I was able to pay off my CC debt (About $1500). Well in July, the payments came due, and it was time to start working my now current job.

Currently:

After a few months of working part-time, I was able to pay off my debt, and have saved around $3000. I spoke to my family about playing poker again, and they said it was okay, but only with a set amount of money. They want me to view poker as a past-time with a cost and not as anything more.

I agreed, and began playing last month. I have only logged about 60 hours so far, being up around $4000 playing 1/2. I've been running really well, but honestly know that I am beating the games I'm playing.

I don't think that I'll become a professional poker player as my life, but I know that I want to take a shot at it while I'm in my current stage of life with low CoL and responsibilities.

I'm planning on taking a trip out to Vegas for a week in late January to experience it, and ultimately think it'd be best to take my "shot" out there. I'm trying to figure out how much I need to save as a goal with that in mind. Currently have $3000 "life roll" and $4000 "bankroll".

Any feedback is greatly appreciated and thanks for reading!

For reference, I am quite confident that my living expenses (Rent, Car, Renter's Insurance, Car Insurance, Health Insurance, Gas, Food, Phone Plan, misc.) Will be around $2200/mo.

To be honest, I think you're jumping the gun by thinking about moving to Vegas (I'm assuming to play full time, or at least part time while working?)

How do you "honestly know that I am beating the game I'm playing"? Because you're up 4K after 60 hours? Because that literally means nothing. Especially since you say you've been "running well". As a professional every day player, we don't play to "run well". That's basically what all the recreational players try to do - hit flops and run well. As a pro that pretty much goes out the window and it's a game of "my range vs their range" instead of trying to run well.

I'm not trying to be negative, but there is a lot of learning and live playing experience (at least be able to beat 2/5 for a large sample size) that a player needs to have before even thinking about moving to Vegas to play poker.

So my advice would be to get a good job and play part time until you have several thousand hours under your belt as well as perhaps a good coach if you're seriously thinking about playing poker for a living.

First off, thank you for the feedback. This is my first post in here!

This is from the 200k hands online. (Ik also a relatively small sample size), but mostly bringing it up as a "I think that it is not unreasonable to believe that I am a winning player." By "run well" I mostly mean that I'm +AIEV right now. (Held up when I've been ahead in pretty much all of those All-In situations).

At this point, I'm not looking to take this risk any time soon (At least a year+ before even seriously considering it). I mostly wanted to post this to hear some thoughts about potential monetary goals moving forward.

January is one of the worst times for poker in Vegas. End of December - March Madness is dead. You'd find better games in St Louis, Arizona, or Texas.

I don't play poker, but from talking to people here who do, Vegas is the worst place for a poker pro at the lower stakes. And rent in Vegas is higher than most of those other places. If you can somehow get a down payment for a condo or house though it would probably be cheaper than renting. And property tax here is real low.

Just to be clear, the $4k you're up is from playing online at 200NL for sixty hours?

Trying to grind live games in Vegas is going to be a very bad way to spend any part of your early twenties. Maybe when you're 70 and all your friends and family are dead, then going to the casino day in and day out will make sense just to have some people to talk to and a distraction from thoughts of death. But as someone who had basically the exact same life experience as you--dropped out of college from mental issues and then moved to Vegas to play poker--I have to advise strongly against this. And when I did it almost fifteen years ago, the games were waaaaaaaay easier than they are today. Las Vegas casinos are full of backpack-toting regs like yourself, and while you could probably beat the games if you can beat 50NL, you're going to be living a lonely, boring (after the first couple weeks), stressful (if you run bad, which you will at some point), and unproductive life while you're there. Bear in mind you get in like 20-25 hand per hour playing live, so a 50k-hand break-even stretch means an entire year of your life gone. No medical benefits, no resume-building experience, no professional connections, no meeting friends and girls at work (this is a huge bonus of even wage jobs in your twenties--meeting girls and a friend group at work)--it's just such a waste of precious time. I get that it seems glamorous to play poker in Vegas, but it gets old really quickly, and again: 20-25 hand per ****ing hour. Full ring. And even if you're good, 40% of the time you go home feeling miserable after losing a few hundred bucks and asking yourself what you're doing with your life.

My advice is stick with the CRM stuff if you think there's a future in it for you, or go back and finish your engineering degree. I advise you become a ****ing plumber before moving to Vegas to maybe make $10/hour (and likely $0/hour) sitting at the poker table trying to grind against regs and old nits. I'd advise taking that $4k and going on a month long trip through Europe or something and stay at hostels and meet other travelers, although I don't know if your parents would endorse that.

As for DefNotRSigley's post, you felt it worthwhile to advise OP to put a down payment on a condo in Vegas if he can? LOL. Are you on mushrooms right now or something?

Finish college. Get a job. Show up at the job and don't get fired. If you are hell bent on moving to Vegas, keep living with your parents and don't even think about moving until you have $50k saved and a legit win rate at 2/5 or higher over 1000+ hours.

I have to give Brass credit on this post ..... he nailed it

Damn, another good post itt.

I would add, you have an Ivy background .... go back and finish it. It will do you WAY more good than some grinding in Las Vegas

(OP "But I quit that because I was burned out or whatever..." ....

"Boo F**king Hoo, OP. Cash that Golden Ticket, it is better than pocket Aces.)

You'll be able to answer this question better for yourself after you are out here for a week.

If the 1/2 games where you are living now are really that soft (not saying they are based on your sample size) and you live relatively close to the casino, you're better off staying at home with no rent and treating poker like a second part-time job. Playing part time will allow you to play when the games are best like weekends and during big promo times. There are a few places in the US where the low-stakes games are better than Vegas, especially seasonally (ie Florida has better games in the winter, Maryland is probably better overall since the casinos are relatively new, etc.)

Focus on going back to school in a year or two, even if its for a different field of study and/or less prestigious school.

Move and don't look back, you always have your Ivy league diploma to fall back on. You're 22 with no kids. Live it up here for a few weeks or until you go broke (which will be very quickly) but who cares, you're 22.

Probably need way more money saved to successfully do it but hey it’s prob been done before.

Vegas just has soooo many pros it’s crazy

Read 2K a poker thread by DGAF.

First time in Vegas is always the best

But he doesn’t have the diploma bc he dropped out.

OP, you should go back and finish the degree. If you completed 2 years, you must have made it through most of the tough courses.
(Physics, thermo, circuits, statics, most/ all of the math + some basic engineering etc. )

If you can make it through those, you can make it through the rest. It won’t always be easy.

To be honest, if you can’t cope with the pressures of school, then you won’t be able to deal with the stresses of being a poker grinder.

At least get the degree and then you can move to Vegas after if you don’t want to be an engineer.

I say do it since you have nothing much to lose.

Take your beating, get it out of your system and then when when the poker
lifestyle chews you up and spits you out
you will actually WANT to get a real job and life.

+1

You only live once and now is the time to do it. You know you aren't going to do this the rest of your life, so generate some life stories.

Then go back and get training to do something. Nobody will care about the gap in your resume before your certification in whatever.

If I were a mod I'd ban you until you finish your degree.

Poker will always be there. Things like school have a very distinct shelf life. Go back and finish your degree.

There's a lot of miserable middle aged pricks in poker and they generally started out like you are and had no idea they were boxing themselves into a corner they'd really struggle to escape from if they ever wanted out ten years later.

Man up, deal with it, finish school. We've all had our demons, running from then like this just give them time to grow stronger and then they'll really f you up.

You're 22 and I know you're not thinking about it this way, but you're making decisions that will greatly impact the rest of your life.

Poker is a fine job. It's an awful career. There's no promotions, no resume building, none of that. A degree from an Ivy League University, especially in a great job market like it is now, is worth Hundreds of Thousands or Millions more dollars than any amount of time you can spend getting great at poker and grinding live cash games.

Go back to school. Finish it. Recruit for a job you think you'd like. Go work. If you don't like your job, look for another one.

As the great Freddy Rumsen once said, "Do the damn work, Don."

The "life stories" that follow from an Ivy education are 100x better than those from grinding lowest stakes live poker.

(I've actually been to the Ivy League and have a degree. I happen to live in Nevada,, do not grind poker, but play lowest stakes live as recreation on occasion.. There is no comparison. If you live here, you really should find something better to do than grind 1-2 or 2-5 as a lifestyle. )

I have an Ivy League degree. I’m in my 30s. I had poor grades, played poker all the time, was totally unfocused and was incredibly immature. But, thank god, I didn’t go pro. I went to grad school and now I’ll have an upper middle class income as long as I want one.

Take a look at any 40+ year old poker pro. They’re miserable, in poor health, inevitably bitter. It’s a terrible way to live.

Suck it up. Finish college, get a job.

+1

OP you're also severely underestimating the brand recognition your school opens doors to, I've work with lots of people who do hiring and whenever we're discussing a candidate if they are ivy they get huge bonus points because you know they are smart/capable and likely hard working, also has a very highly connected alumni, you name the company, there is very likely an executive there who graduated from your school and subconsciously or not give you a preference - it opens a lot of doors and creates a lot of shortcuts that someone who went to another great school like Williams or University of Chicago doesn't even have - do not for a minute underestimate the chasm that exists - some companies and positions have an unspoken only ivy policy as well

if you do this, for poker of all things... that decision will haunt you the rest of your life

these are poker players telling you this, many of whom are/were professionals... listen

The people who have failed are happy to tell you that you will do the same. The people who have succeded have no incentive to encourage you. My advice would be not to move in order to play poker until you need a higher stake you cant get locally. Try vegas after 25k earned from whatever runs near you.

Here's the thing about poker too. You can play whenever you want alongside having a job.

It's what I do right now, and you know what? If I have a year where I make zero dollars from playing poker, that's ok with me. If a pro poker player has a year where they make zero dollars, that's a colossal failure.

I turn 35 in two months. I dropped out of school in 2005 for lots of reasons, but afterwards I beat small stakes online for $3-5k a month before Black Friday. It felt like all the easiest, free money in the world.

After Black Friday, I didn't make that kind of money from online or live poker, (despite lots of tries), and bounced around lots of different dead end jobs and just barely got by. At 31 I had enough, went back to school, and finished a degree.

It was a lot of work, but I've been an RN for a year now. I help people, I'm an important part of my community, and I can get a recession-proof job anywhere in the world, forever. I won't make infinity dollars in a year, but I have insurance and a generous employer match for my retirement. I'm unmarried, but the co-workers in my field are 85% women, of all ages. They're even smart, healthy types.

9 months into my first nurse job, I took all my accrued paid time off and went on a 14 day vacation in Vegas in the summer, right as the 50th WSOP was ramping up. I played about 65 hours of 1/3 and 2/5 in 8 different card rooms, and lost about $4k (-$1.6k in one session of Aria PLO, **** is rigged). Got home, went back to work, and laughed it off.

It cured me of ever wanting to live in Las Vegas.

It's okay to love poker. You can always love poker. Games are good, games are bad, but the games aren't going anywhere. You don't have to make bad decisions that can have such far-reaching impacts on your professional future.

Work at your job, get out of debt, move out, finish your degree and get a better job, treat poker as a discretionary income hobby where you occasionally make money.

If I had 10-12 more years in my 20's at my current job saving 10% of my income with an employer match, it'd definitely be worth $1M-1.5M (or more) when I retire.

There's already a lot of good advice here on why not to do it and how a career is better. I'll take it from the (imo) more likely scenario that you don't listen and do it anyway

If you do it:

Make sure you have everything ready to apply for readmission to university. If you tanked your GPA that last semester, see if you can get a therapist to document depression or whatever you were going through and get it wiped from the transcript as a medical withdrawal. Figure out if there's a time limit after which it's harder to get back in.

Give the current job enough notice not to burn any bridges. Consider taking a 1-2 week vacation to Vegas before you even quit. Take a weekend trip somewhere within driving distance before that. Try to put in 20-30 hours at $1-2, it might suck more than you think if you really haven't played much in a casino. As others said Vegas isn't the mecca especially if you can live rent free where you are. They have lots of games and tourists but also some of the worst low limit games. You have to game select/bumhunt.

Set certain guardrails for the experiment. First 2 months must make >=$5k at 1/3, next 2 months must make >=$10k at 2/5 or higher. Must play at least 30 hours a week while not angry/sad/miserable. Study or review hand histories in some way at least 1 hour a day 6 days a week. If you can't hit stuff like that in the honeymoon period you really have no shot. Pack it up immediately if you have a losing month, have a <10/hr week, or dust a bunch off in the pit. Ya maybe you'll fail only because you ran bad, but all pros start out on at least somewhat of a heater(top 25%)

It sounds like brutal advice and it is . . . but . . . it is also good advice including the "suck it up" part. I would venture to guess that the %s of those who make both a good living and an enjoyable life-style from playing poker as a professional are probably very close to those of professional football, baseball or basketball players. It seems that you have more options than a kid from the ghetto looking for a way out. Take them while you can.