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Originally Posted by gobbledygeek
Awesome results and super interesting giraffe!
Too lazy to look up what your job wage was before (I'm guessing comparable?), but any thoughts (albeit only after a year) regarding pros/cons of both routes?
GsuperboringgiraffesismybusinessandbusinessisgoodG
It was roughly 100k after bonuses + benefits (not amazing, 3% retirement, so-so healthcare).
Pros and cons of both routes? As in not quitting your day job? For me having the bankroll and then being able to work less hours doing something I love it is not even close. Downswings do suck though.
To put things in perspective, my previous job was about 40 hours per week most of 8 months out of the year and 50-55 hours the other 4 months. I had 5 weeks of vacation.
I did some quick and dirty math, it looks like I played 194 days, and when you figure if I play 5 days a week, I tend to get in about 33 hours on average. And I took a lot of days off. It averages out to about 39 weeks playing 5 days a week, 33 hours per week, and 13 weeks of vacation. It's an absurdly good work life balance. Basically I have been able to take things easy and have a lot more time to be with my family.
When considering whether it would be worth it to play full time, I looked at my win rate, but I also looked at is my winrate was much lower how well I would do. I was having winrates of $160-200 per hour, but that was with running well and playing some very good games. The kicker is I knew I could easily do better than my day job even if I made $100, which ended up being good because that is exactly what my win rate ended up being. And I would certainly be able to survive if I had a year where I made less than my day job because of my bankroll and savings.
On top of all of this I had lost my passion for public accounting. It would have been different if I loved my day job.
There are a lot of moving parts that need to be there for it to make sense to play poker as your sole (or primary) source of income. Ultimately it boils down to, will you be more happy playing poker full-time? That is going to depend on how satisfied you are with your day job. It is also going to depend on how much you are able to beat the poker games available to you and how well you are equipped to deal with variance financially and emotionally. Keep in mind that game conditions can change. Losing poker players leave pools for good, or drastically reduce their hours, or drop down in stakes. Ideally you want to be better than the median reg/pro and be able to stress test your winrate and bankroll to see that you would be okay with a much lower winrate than you expect and a much worse downswing than you expect. This way you can withstand changing game conditions and extended, severe run bad.
