My first thought is, what's wrong with a date on Friday and poker on Saturday?

Other thoughts:

1. Poker is boring to watch. My wife said once that she wanted to watch me play. I told her that I once had a run of bad cards and folded every hand for the first hour of a tournament. She said, "Oh." That was the last time she brought it up. I don't care if she watches, but I wanted her to know that it's not like TV where they show the most interesting hands.

2. What does poker mean to you? Is it for fun, like being on a bowling league? Are you trying to get better? Do you want to make a little money? Do you want to make a lot of money? However you see it, does your date/girlfriend/whatever know what you expect from poker?

If you want to get better at poker, or make money, you need to play more, as well as spending at least spending 10% of your poker time for study. if you want to make a lot of money playing poker, you should be playing or studying during much of your free time (I keep study at about 25% of my time.)

It sounds like you're talking about dating in general, that there is no one special. If that is the case, I think you have two options:

1. Play more poker and go on fewer dates.
2. Find a girl who understands poker and maybe would play with you. This could be another player, or a dealer, or maybe someone who works in a poker room or a casino--or even a nerdette who likes math and would find poker an interesting math problem.
3. Do some of your playing online. You only need about an hour to play a SNG, less for or a cash game.

Clif nice analysis. I was playing the no limit cash game on Friday Saturday nights. That game is exceptionally soft but it only goes twice a week, 3-4 hour each time. In 2014 the entire year, I play about 78 session (250 hours) for winning $6000 which is about $24/hour or 8BB/hr. I know 250 hour is like nothing but live poker is slow and this data is for one year. I do some study, i live in state that online poker is not allowed. This year, hero was working on a girl and I started to notice the opportunity cost of dating. I'm not going to bring date with me to card room ever: as mention above multiple times it is boring to watch. And every date on Friday Saturday night is costing me one session of play (like 60-70$). Good solution would be girl that understands poker. Again good analysis poker clif

Girlfriend puts up with my poker addiction. She doesn't know the game, I don't care.

Thanks, I appreciate that. And by the way, a lot of people would love to make $24 an hour, at poker or anything else. The median individual income in the United States is just over 26 thousand. With a standard work year of 2,000 work hours, that comes to a little over $13 per hour.

A lot of people on these threads who live in places like California and New York like to say things like "if you can't make $50K a year playing poker you shouldn't be playing." In low cost of living areas like where I am in Michigan, 50K buys a nice 3-bedroom house.

I'd love to be making 24 $ an hour playing poker. That's the dream.

I could never date a woman who played poker. In addition to my obligation to lend an ear and absorb the random rant about how terrible her day went or how much of a bitch a coworker is, I now have to listen to bad beat stories?

No thanks.

As a woman, I would love to settle to a person who is not gambler at all. I want his free time to be spent with me and to our family instead of letting him play. Besides, there is no guarantee that he will win all the time, that is why it is called gambling.... So my stand is I don't like to engage into a poker.

I wanted to scream when I read this. Playing poker is in no meaningful way gambling. There are no roulette coaches. There are no forums to learn how to be a better craps player. People STUDY poker to get better. By your dictionary definition he is a gambler, but the real issue is that you two can't agree on how he should spend his time.

Consider the following situation:

1. I play a chess tournament. I pay a fee to enter the tournament, I play for several hours, and if I get enough points (1 for a win and 0.5 for a draw) I win more than my entry fee.

2. I play a poker tournament. I pay a buy-in to enter the tournament, I play for several hours, and if I am one of the last players knocked out, I win more than my buy-in.

Please explain to me which tournament is gambling and why.

He doesn't win all the time? Really? What does that have to do with anything? That is so ridiculous I can barely believe that you typed and posted it.

Professional baseball has a 162 game season, and most teams lose at least 62 of those games. LeBron James isn't voted basketball's most valuable player every year. I might win a local chess tournament, but most of the time someone else will win.

I don't win at chess all the time. By your logic, that makes me a chess gambler who is stealing time from my wife. Fortunately for me, you are not my wife.

My wife is supportive and understands that poker provides an irregular income, just as other jobs do, for example, selling cars. Those car salesmen, by your logic, are clearly a bunch of degenerate gamblers because they don't win (make a sale) every time.

When I cash, my wife is excited. She counts the money, lays the bills out and takes a picture of the cash. She is there to encourage me, win or lose, because she understands that because I take poker seriously, study a lot and play a lot, I will make money playing poker this year.

The truth is that you just hate his hobby, which happens to be poker, because it takes him away from you. You would hate it just as much if he was running 10 miles a day to prepare for a marathon.

Thank you for making one of the dumbest 2+2 posts ever. I don't think that I've ever called someone on these forums dumb, but you earned it.

I told me wife recently that I have never tilted when playing poker, and I don't understand how it happens to other people so often. After reading your post, I understand.

If that's the issue then I assume you would also not marry a businessman then.

Pretty much everything in the world is gambling in one way or another with an attempt to get an edge. For example I signed up my business with Google Adwords (where you pay to come up in searches) this week which I have never done (for this business) before. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, there's no guarantee - a long time ago I did a similar thing with a paid listing in Yellow Pages and got 0 customers from it, it was the same with radio advertising. Obviously if it works I can repeat but there is never any guarantee that it will be profitable in the future - the advertising that worked 10 years ago doesn't work so well now.

If you wouldn't marry a businessman then I assume not one of his employees then either because if the business has to reduce head count then it's the employee who goes, not the owner. An employee is a just a 1-man business with 1 customer.

A farmer? - Risky like a businessman.

Politician? see above.

TBH - "no guarantee to win all the time" is pretty low risk compared to most things in the world where you can not just lose that day, but you can also suddenly lose your ability to make money from it again in the future. The real problem with poker is that so few people are able to win at any significant rate and selective memory convinces them otherwise.

#2 clearly is, #1 clearly isn't.

I'll quote the skill game defense just as much as the rest of us... but that chess argument is weaksauce. In chess you are 100% responsible for the outcome of the game as compared to the skill level of your opponent. I've played a fair bit and can't recall ever being one outed out of a chess tournament.

The term is advantage gambling, and that's still gambling. I'm sure this nice lady has simply seen enough d-bags claiming to "have an edge" that she's probably right to be skeptical of any advantage that a typical player would have.

My answer to that is: baseball

There is certainly luck in baseball that can cause a game to be won or lost, for example, a ball bouncing off the wall at an angle the outfielder doesn't expect. But over a 162-game baseball season the team with the best pitching is very likely to at least make it to the playoffs, baseball's version of the final table.

When you compare the year of a top professional poker player against a professional baseball season, it gets a lot harder to argue that luck is a controlling factor. Occasionally a great poker player will have enough negative variance to mess up a year of playing, just like a baseball team might have several pitchers injured. But it's not the norm for a great poker player who is putting in volume.

In both cases, skill wins most of the time, in fact, there are poker players who were killing it in their 20s and are still killing it many years later, perhaps most notably Negreanu and Hellmuth. Mike Sexton is over 60 and still getting a few WPT cashes every year. I don't think anyone would say that Sexton just got lucky for 40 years.

almost a fair point... luck certainly plays at least some factor in baseball... but isn't gambling as we're not wagering on the outcome in any way.

ie - player salaries are determined before the game starts, and lucky bounce or not - the players will get their paychecks.

^ Then is soccer gambling? European soccer players get all sorts of bonuses for goals, wins, final league positions etc.

But like I said a few months before - I think the gambling/non-gambling distinction is arbitrary. There is risk in everything and (to make a crass generalization) women are risk averse compared to what real life requires, and the kind of problems you have with poker will pop up in a different place such as starting a business later on if you let your partner veto economic things.

so do they lose money if they don't score? miss this next shot and you owe the other team 40K.

side note, I'd watch that.

You're getting into the short-term vs. long-term issue. A professional football player (US) doesn't lose money because he drops one pass. It's about performance incentives that are met or not met over the course of a season.

Also, I should note that some very good poker players take the risk of having a losing year because they think of the long term as being over several years.

Jonathan Little said that for most tournament pros to be successful their ITM% should be between 8% and 16%, and he wants his to be around 8%. He is expecting to seldom cash on the WPT, and he's OK with having a losing year. He pointed out that his first year on the tour he was down 50K, and the second year he was up over a million. Also, he manages his money well and invests some of his biggest cashes in real estate.

IMO part of the problem is explaining poker to Joe Sixpack, who is making the US median individual income of 26K. Joe has a hard time getting his head around the idea of going a month or more without getting paid, and investing in real estate to him is something that only rich people do (never mind that real estate is HOW some people get rich.)

so joe sixpack should start buying into 100K's because it's not gambling and he's guaranteed to win.

got it.

Total non sequitur. The Joe Sixpack that I described wouldn't have the money to play a 100K. I don't have the money to play a 100K. Also, I never said or implied that Joe would be guaranteed to win, certainly not over the short term.

It's not gambling because good players succeed over time and many thousands of hands. When winning bridge players play a card game they can win money over time and get International Ratings Points. When winning poker players play a card game they can win money over time and be listed on the Global Poker Index.

Sorry, I don't see the difference, except that top poker players make more money than top bridge players.

My husband plays for a living and I am work in
An office with a job in corporate America) I didn't play prior to meeting him and saw him constantly on Poker stars .. At some point I started noticing he played almost every night ... It bothered my so much , "can't go to dinner were on the bubble"
All which annoyed me lol however one day I said can u show me what the hell it is ur actually doing? What happened as a result of that question has been 6 years of tournaments all over the east coast for me (used
To use up my vacation days mod way thru the year! Learning how to play, endless home games, trips to so many casinos has added a great layer to our relationship! We always debate,
Discuss hands, argue about hands personally it's a part of us I love. He will peel dah differently since he always jokes that he created a monster lol!

I wonder if we were to write threads

"Relationships & a career in the navy; do they & can they coexist?"
"Relationships & an international business career; do they & can they coexist?"
"Relationships & a fishing hobby; do they & can they coexist?"
"Relationships & mining; do they & can they coexist?"
"Relationships & football; do they & can they coexist?"

if we wouldn't be able to find problems at least equal to the ones in this thread.

Most native speakers of English are going to interpret that as whether you want "a girl who likes you or who likes her own stuff" but I'm wondering if you mean where you want "a girl like (similar) to you (liking poker) or a a girl who likes girl's things (different to poker)". If so it's an interesting question. Generally I say people should try to find a partner and make a relationship that works together like a badminton team (each covering a different area of the court) and not like a downhill skiing team (everyone does their best independently and you sum the results at the end). So insisting on shared interests may be the wrong approach.

Winning players will be more appreciated than losers. Even if the losing player tries to convince his partner that he has a small sample and has only played 150,000 hands or something.

Hello,
As a guy, I have to say it is tough to be in a relationship while trying to reach poker goals in terms of hours played and making tournament appearances and that sort of thing. I have been with my girlfriend for 3 years and just started "the grind" the past 6 months. We are in our 20s and she is not necessarily clingy but she definitely wants attention when I get home from my day job.

Being focused on the long term, it is difficult to get in a full work day and come home and grind the micros or small online tourneys when I have my gf trying to get me to watch tv with her or something. She wants to go on double dates, or go out with her friends or out to dinner and I am always saying I have to "work" or how I'm not gonna blow huge amounts of money on alcohol and wasting time at bars. She is pretty understanding and I'm not saying I totally ignore her, but it does get tedious to keep having to explain myself when I sit down for even an hour.

I wouldn't know about dating another player, but that's my take on dating someone who doesn't really get why we do what we do.

Thanks,
BP

I'm a 1/2 reg who doesn't have a bankroll. I sent whatever I make to my mom and pay credit cards. I had a bf who said "no, you will not go to casino by yourself". We broke up, not because of that, but he was a dictator pretty much. Now I have one who is not such a tough guy but still gives me a hard time about my saturday schedule which is playing late into the night. So i decided to teach him too, I'm not sure if it's a good idea, he's already addicted. I'm a loner and a poker player bf who likes to hang out separately would be ideal.

Maybe a few issues are the same but def not the main ones. People understand having or doing all those things you've mentioned above a hell of a lot better than poker. For most people, poker is gambling and that's a tough part of a relationship to accept.
Someone with a career in the navy doesn't result in spending hours in the casino and coming home -$1k...same thing with fishing or mining. Poker def has unique aspects to it that make relationships especially tricky.

Well, that's true, but I am retired from the army and at one point I was at home home for less than one week during a year. My son was also in the army, and I didn't see my grandchildren for four years, or my other son for six years.

I spent most of my military time (23 out of 26 years) in an army band and we did a lot of touring. I'm been to 10 different countries and my wife didn't get to go with me on any of those trips.

Now I sit at home in my office and grind MTTs at all kinds of weird hours. I'm typing this at 2:38 A.M, after playing a couple of tournaments. Sometimes I'll play a tournament or two, take a 3-hour nap, then play a couple more. It can be 3 A.M. or 3 P.M., it doesn't matter to me. I can start or end a session at any time.

My wife is much happier with my weird grinding hours, and often sleeping alone, than she was when I traveled all over the world without her. She never complains about poker. She is much happier as a poker wife than she was as an army wife (though she was/is supportive of both.) I'm sure that most military spouses would feel the same way.

Interesting Katie, I partly agree.

This is true, but for the kind of people who become poker players, "most people" would be completely unsuitable as partners for all kinds of reasons (here I'm also thinking about people I know who afaik have never got into the game but have that way of analysing the world). If you're an outsider yourself you can't be married to an embodiment of the generic societal average and if poker helps ward that off it's a good thing in the long run for both parties. I just think that in a pairing like that, if it isn't poker it will be something else.

I think you're right though that, for the majority of people, being a "military wife" is a known quantity (also known and understood by the wife's peer group) which makes the situation more tolerable.

Of course they can come back dead (though the risk compared to other jobs is perhaps exaggerated in the public mind).

But to address the financial point, for many not so large businesses, losing $1K in a day is normal. Some businesses lose $1K every time it rains and they have fewer customers than average. Obviously in the long run the weather, like the cards, evens out. Certainly (commercial) fishermen can put to sea and come back having not caught what they needed to break even, can find the catch has spoiled or the market isn't there at the price/volume they wanted to sell. Outside the governmental/military payroll, real life is played for pretty high stakes.

Poker players need to pay themselves a wage based on the stakes they are playing and rolled for, and shouldn't give running commentary on short-term fluctuations in "business-money" any more than businessmen would be advised to do so.