Kinda just play them when I feel like it tbh man. Generally higher ABI stuff that looks soft and definitely alongside zoom tables, as 2 tabling MTTs or whatever would kill me. Last year I played 1200 or so, this year about 300 so far.

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Yesterday graph. Played really well again for the most part and $1k zoom was running all morning with about 35 entries, which is an absolute rarity! Good chance I'll be playing some more live poker in the near future, since some guys who are very good for the game apparently took the casino for a lot of money at the roulette wheel. So if the big games are popping off, then it'd be silly not to get in there and try and make some big bank.

1) Biggest pot I've won in a while



2) Rungood



3)



---------------------------------

Never done this in my life, as a massive Celtic fan, but am considering lumping max bet on Hearts at Tynecastle tomorrow. Celtic won the league at a canter last week, and have seemingly spent the 5 days since partying in Tenerife. So would expect a raft of changes to the first team lineup at a minimum, if not some sore heads. Hearts at 10/1 seems like a very good price given the circumstances.

“Warm weather training”

With regards to post poker discussion - Probably going to look into doing something entrepreneurial down the line

For poker itself though the scene is going to stay lucrative for many years - live cash, online cash, online mtts... staking opportunities. Even with solvers and bots the ability to make 6 figs not taxed I don’t see disappearing anytime soon

But yeah - employment and 9-5 is a naaa from me




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Just adding to this and the post poker discussion.

It's a very different situation for different people. The younger you are, the more decisions now compound later in life. If you're 20-25, offer from McKinsey/ Google/ FB, taking that for a lower salary than 2018 poker is going to compound to financial EV through your life that make whatever you make from poker completely insignificant.

I also strongly disagree with the idea you can just go from poker to 'something entrepreneurial' and have a high P(succeed). In a super competitive environment having spent a large portion of your life playing poker definitely puts you at a disadvantage.

Making 6 figures a year for the next 5 years is something which is easy to say, but I think few people would take a bet that they actually will. Even making 6 figs a year for the last 5 years has been pretty hard.

Apologies if it looks like I was attacking your post, it was just one of the only ones I read in detail.

That said, in a vacuum for a winning 200z reg now poker probably beats almost every other form of income if you find it rewarding. The ability to travel and play from wherever is pretty much the nuts, and you do learn some useful transferable skills wrt mental game, can save up a lot of money due to the tax which if you invest properly can compound. If you are 30+, have been playing for years then sticking with it is almost certainly optimal. I'd just say don't underestimate the doors you close by doing so.

Disclaimer; I've been working 9-5 on emerging tech consulting for last 2 months for probably ~75% of my poker EV, and struggling to play 30k hands a month, so maybe some confirmation bias here. But even if I quit tomorrow and went back to poker full time (which I was really struggling with, wasn't finding the grind rewarding), I'd have learnt some skills/ lessons which I literally would never have learnt otherwise.

^^ good post. Family considerations also vary hugely across the spectrum.

Dicing with death here...at least as online is concerned. It takes but a moment for a government to turn the lights off in any particular country...as many folk hereabouts can testify.

Online gambling in the UK pretty high up the regulatory/political agenda at the mo. Nothing will happen until post brexit ofc, but once that **** fest is out the way, stand by for action.

Fun to read the end game posts. Poker...

- Taught me what making more money in a month than anyone I've known feels like at 21-22.

- Allowed me freedom to do whatever I wanted at all times during most of my 20's

Things I've learned are...

- Money and stuff means nothing to me, beyond a very basic point. All aspirations of material possession have evaporated completely.

- I over indulge in my hobbies/passions at my peril. It's nice to be able to pop away for a week here and there, but stick around in your dream for months and it's going to lose its novelty. And when it does, what's left to dream about? What I'm getting at is that I've kind of tried the lifestyle of the early retiree in my mid 20's and it popped that dream very effectively.

- If I don't have a routine, an abyss of anxiety and depression awaits me.

At 20 I was heading into business to make money, to allow for material possession down the road.

At 27 poker had allowed me to revise everything. I don't need money (beyond median income) to do what I'd do at this point if money were no object. And I genuinely mean that. I want some free time, but beyond a certain point I just become jaded and miserable.

With this refreshed perspective I could backtrack to where I kind of lost myself, and that was leaving the idea of the sciences at 17 ish due to it being a non ideal career move. So back to school it was and it was a very clear narrow down to either biology or geology. I felt it was a genuine flip and let work availability decide so geologist it was.

Currently doing the slow and relatively easy BSc grind. Moving into important MSc decisions next year, and hopefully that will mean more interesting tasks at hand. But hey, poker is still alive and I get to pay for my studies and the future MSc with it, so hurray.

Will prob start my path with some field element to the work and look very much forward to a more structured existence. All I wish for at this point, work wise, is to do something I find relatively interesting and meaningful, with people who ideally takes the work relatively seriously. Setting monetary aspirations aside this should be more than doable, and to detach from these ambitions has been the greatest gift poker has given me. It will severely alter the direction of my life, and I think for the better.

100% agree with plastic about the whole "when I leave poker I'll go into something entrepreneurial" thing. It's way harder than most envision and I feel like there's a lot of people who would be even unhappier living the stressful entrepreneur life than they would a standard 9-5. Owning your own business of some kind is def nowhere near the same as the relaxed self employed poker player grind.

still 200times better than slaving a 9to5 though...

Running a business has different stresses and strains to poker, it's not necessarily worse or better. There aren't that many poker pro's casually making 100k a year, if they do find it so casual then they are probably the worst type of people to go down the entrepreneurial path since they clearly should be working harder.

The stress of losing your ability to earn good/care free money through poker should also not be overlooked. I can think of 1 guy in particular who's suffering likely contributed in part to his suicide. Be smart and plan as much ahead as possible.

Poker shouldn't be stress free in 2018, if it is then you're probably not working hard enough and vastly under cutting your earning potential. If you're going to be a lazy **** at poker then there's a chance you're going to be a bit of a lazy **** in business.

Also people who say they expect to be making 6 figs for the next 5 years online are either the top 1% of regs or ****ing crazy imo.

I genuinely think this attitude is childish. You should assess decisions on the basis of whether you take more from them than they take from you.

For example, in my position there is zero percent chance I continue doing what I'm doing for the next twenty years. But in the spaces where I see there being extreme economic opportunity, AI, blockchain, RPA, there is also zero percent chance I could have self taught myself to a level where I am a competitive on the business side.

By 'slaving in a 9 to 5' for two months, I've basically took a ginormous shortcut to building a useful network and learning skills and discipline that when I do do my own thing actually give me a chance of success. I've realised I was a lazy **** when I played poker full time, still made 10k in the last two months from poker, and got paid a decent salary.

There are definitely things that suck, and definitely hard to get around confirmation bias, but 38 days holiday, weekends free, finally learning some discipline, plus all the above exposure to resources I would literally have never got otherwise mean it's been +EV for me.

Just providing a contrarian voice in the '9 to 5s' are rot narrative. Also it's more 8-6 in any worthwhile job. In a startup or something 'entrepreneurial' you can chuck in weekends too.

I think might have come across differently to what I originally meant. I work hard and don’t think it’s necessarily easy to make 6 figures in a year playing poker. If you are currently
Making that however then I do believe it is relatively easy to keep making that in this climate. The difficult
Part is getting your game to that level...

As for alternative options, I love poker, the competition, the freedom and personal autonomy the job gives me. If I went back to employment I would receive a very large paycut - most graduates in London are on 20-30k GBP ‘pre tax’. So we’re looking at 3-4x+ salary with poker.

I think as long as you don’t close off any doors for the future and keep your options open, playing poker for now could definitely be a very viable option for some
People. I think it depends a lot on your love for the game, if you enjoy the grind, and what other options you have available to you.


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Is mckinsey such a good place to work? Passed the written exams and decided to not go to the next phases when discovered that people used to work 11+ hours/day there lol

The biggest problem of playing poker full time would be the loss of love to the game. If the magic of the game fades out, it must be quite miserable to grind. As a hobby thing I think its the best thing ever. 100 times more productive than playing other videogames.

Capital compounds, but so do opportunities at our age, just have to decide which is faster. We have opposing views on the feasibility of 100k plus in 5 years time without playing live, but impossible to say I guess, seems unlikely that solvers regress though and people remain as stupid as they are atm, wouldn't be too surprised if less than 100 people make 100k GBP+ online next year.

And 20-30k is not a good salary, easy enough to find substantially higher in my experience for a talented graduate if you can sell lessons from poker still.

Probably the absolute best place that recruits any reasonable number of graduates, in terms of the value of every hour you work there compounded. Basically allows you to walk into any other company in the world for the rest of your career/ gives you ultimate ability to draw people to work at your startup through skills/ reputation.

EDIT; if you are looking at life in a vacuum, 200z is better than McKinsey, less hours, probably slightly more money. If you want to look at everything you do when your young as echoing through the rest of your life which I think is optimal, it isn't really a comparison. Older you are, closer it gets obv.

I think you underestimate how tough it can be to work in those companies, a lot of people that went to uni with me and are working in consulting companies right now say that it's insanely hard in there. First, they hire you as associates(so they don't have to obey any labor laws), then they make everyone work insane hours, which creates competition between the workers, and on top of that, everyone gets so stressed out in their jobs that they spend a lot of money in their free time to compensate.

Even a friend of mine that was really wise with his money is having trouble in saving some of his salary, everyone that works with him go out on expensive restaurants/nightclubs/trips, and he has to do it because of networking, since the bosses usually go too. That work hard play hard lifestyle isn't wise imo, poker isn't as easy as it was, but comparing poker to that is just insane, now add stuff like traffic jam to the equation and you will see that poker looks way better.

One argument is that by working in a consulting company you will develop a lot of skills to build your own business, which is 100% true. But working like crazy for 10 years to then get out and make your own business and work even more/have risks is quite insane and you need a lot of energy to do it.

I think that working in a softer job, like a government job, or even getting your PhD and trying to be a teacher for an university while playing poker is way smarter than going deep into the corporate world. Getting a PhD isn't that hard if you take your time, at least here in Brazil you can get one in a top university by taking it slow in 3-5 years if your professor likes you(ofc you could do it in 2 years if you go hardcore), also it costs 0. As a matter of fact, you also earn around $700-$1k month just to study and work on your PhD here(don't know how it is on other countries).

So working in a more stable job that requires way less effort/stress while playing poker in the extra hours is a really good option imo, probably the best of all worlds. If you're an university professor, you won't get fired like ever, work hours are pretty small and if things go bad in poker and you hit a downswing, you will be fine with your fixed income. Also poker will be an extra source of income, and you won't have burnouts in poker by playing 20-40k hands/month.

I am working in one of those companies, hence why I had the confirmation bias disclaimer.

Still find time to play 30k hands a month, keep fit, socialise, think it just depends how you prioritise things. You do make some legit points though. I'll clear the floor for some other opinions, and go and worry about ETH being declared a security and destroying my retirement fund..

Completely understand your perspective George and not trying to bash your points, I just want to put my perspective out there.

I think if you get a job out of university for a year and then leave on your own terms the loss in opportunities/employability down the road is diminished than if you just played poker out of uni or education.

I also think you’re over estimating an average salary. I was being too tight for sure but 30k London is very average. Yes you can get higher salary but I had no luck when applying out of university.

If you are able to make 3x+ more money, absolutely love the grind, have a burning desire and passion towards poker and are given the flexibility and freedom to work your own schedule, then to me poker is a blessing.

If you have other high paying options, or don’t have that same burning desire to grind poker then fair enough it’s probably not the best idea to stick at it full time. However for some I think it is a higher EV life option.

Again, just sharing my personal thoughts and not trying to discredit anything you have put forward.





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Really enjoying all the post poker plans thoughts/discussion/perspective. Thanks to everyone that has chipped in so far!

+1

Heeeeeeeeeeeaps to catch up on in here, sorry guys!

Yesterday was my birthday, so took the day off of all things poker. As a present Aimee booked a table in a few months time (the place sells out like 6 months in advance) at Tommy Banks' restaurant in York, The Black Swan, which is two time Travellers' Choice Best Restaurant in the World, so am super stoked for that, being the foodie that I am.

I played my first game of 11s football in years at the weekend, and managed to re-agitate a lower back injury from a few years ago. Have been feeling a bit down since, as it really ****s with my mobility, and last time this happened it took about 9 months of rehabilitation. I was really enjoying getting back to regular football as well. I'm seeing the Chiropractor this afternoon, so fingers crossed its just a pinched nerve, and not something serious.

Haha, exactly this. Unfortunately Celtic just too strong.

Really appreciate all the discussion on post poker plans. The arguments around current EV playing poker, vs long term EV of an internship at a financial institution/tech conglomerate is an interesting one. I do think that people ITT are largely being too optimistic about the prospects of exiting poker and swanning into something interesting and entrepreneurial, with flexible hours and a high salary cap. It kinda just doesn't work like that. The business world is sooooo competitive, and every year outside of graduation that isn't spent developing your skill set is going to be seen as a wasted one by the big firms. Unless you have serious capital behind you, its also going to be difficult to kick-start your own thing.

I've tried to be as cautious as I can on this front. So despite playing poker for years, I've also completed my degree and chartered engineering qualifications, PRINCE2 and Sigma 6 Project management qualifications and am regularly involved in business decisions of a Project Services company that I have a stake in. My CV doesn't have any real glaring holes in it, which is the main worry for a lot of people when transitioning out of poker.

Sorry I can't give detailed responses to all the good stuff in here, I'm just really pressed for time right now. It's definitely appreciated though, and these are my 2c.

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Got kinda stomped on Monday and didn't play yesterday with it being my birthday, so here's the graph since last update.

1) Reg



2) Rec



3) Reg



4) Rec/reg

Yikes get well soon bud hope it ain’t nothin

Best wishes on the recovery from tweaking that injury Kangal

Just all in crypto guys and ripit9to5 we will have financial freedom soon and lambos and islands

Thanks guys, just a minor disc herniation, so just a short course of physio required and I should be brand new

Lambos on the moooooooon

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Solid regrind today, sick 7BI upswing in 600 hands or so to close out the day. Stars had a reboot, which kinda broke my momentum. But it feels good to finish the day on a high.

As mentioned above, I was in at the chiropractor yesterday afternoon, to get my back looked at. I dunno if anyone here has had Chiropractic treatments before, but they don't mess about. Felt really good afterwards, but mid treatment I'm pretty sure I was just getting the **** kicked out of me. My lower back muscles had essentially gone into permanent spasm, to protect the spinal injury, so Doc had to do quite a bit of work to get them to relax. Going in again on Saturday morning, and then probably once a week for the next 4.

Off out to watch the Premier League Darts live tonight with some mates. Darts in general is pretty zzzzzzz, but the live events are always a great laugh and super boozy. So should hopefully be a good night.

------------------------------------

1) Reg



2) Not reg



3) Some kinda reg



4) Dream



5) Reg - Blocking AQss and AQcc seems kinda important



6) Reg




That'll do for today. Thanks for reading bros

you re welcome bro. hf getting smashed while watching people throw sticks at walls

Nice regrind there bud.

Andddddd Lambos to moooon


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