Hi

I'm more and more posting solely in the Psychology forum than anywhere else :-)

I've been on and off poker various times during the previous years. Until mid last year I began twice or three times from scratch, ran my br quite high for my standards and tilted away alot, but mainly because of personal problems (being lonely, not achieving what I wanted etc..)

I've blockd myself for a year and now my life is perfect on track (as I've posted recently). I have my ultimate dream job, of which I dreamed of since I was a child and I have the perfect girlfriend and very good friends. I'm healthy and I will make also good money in my job..at the moment 90'000 per year, and shortly before I retire it will rise to about 300'000 per year.

My dillema is, I don't like not being good at what I want..as in Poker. I guess I'm good because as long as I didn't tilt I was always succesfull. I started to see poker solely as a hobby, not grind at all and be happy with my income. However when I see how many people here on 2+2 earn a ****load of money (and are a lot younger than I am with 26..) I'm just depressed. I wonder would it be worth spending more of my freetime studying poker or should I just not bother and enjoy my life as it is? Is poker really that easy or is it hard to maintain a normal life if you play poker profesionally?

Your 26 making 90k a year and have a happy life. What the **** are you worrying about ?

I'm not a poker-pro, and i don't make alot of money. But i do know that you should enjoy and be happy with what you have. And if poker is one of the things you want to add to your life, then go for it. See how far it brings you, and then look at your options again.

Edit:
ps:

If you love the game, it's worth spending your time on, if you don't love it, then don't bother. Money should not be the only thing motivating you.

ps. ps. When people say they make XXk a year, is that with tax already payed or what ? Do u get the full sum on your bank account, or if not, how much do u have left after taxes and stuf ?

this!

The only depressing thing here is you actually believing a lot of them Fact is, it's the internet, anyone can embellish their own stories here. Plus, you're on the number 1 poker website in the world, you're bound to run into plenty of highly successful players. There's plenty of other things you could be depressed over, but in the end, it's not worth it.

Anyway, to answer your question, NO! Poker is NOT easy. If it were, I guarantee there'd be a lot more winners out there, with you probably being one of them right now if you aren't already. It's a complex, difficult game that requires massive amounts of patience, discipline, tilt-control, observation, luck, and other things few have. I personally get insulte when someone tells me it's an easy game because they usually say it without even knowing it well enough, they just make a quick judgment without thinking ahead.

But it looks to me like your life is going very smoothly and happily as is. I'd actually advise against playing poker because I don't want to see you rocking that boat too much. Poker is the perfect thing to make life spiral out of control, ya know? But if you really want back in on the game, then do it for the right reasons. As mentioned, money isn't a good enough motivation. I play because I just love games, and this is a game that combines reasoning, logic, psychology, observation, math, and guessing games. I do it cuz it's fun

So ask yourself: "What's my reason?"

what does this mean? i'm confused. also, is this in pesos?

Thai baht.

thanks for your responses. I'll probably keep playing poker, however only for fun and don't visit twoplustwo too often, because sometimes it tilts me reading here...
this is in USD.

Could you answer the question about taxes and how much actually ends up in your pocket ? Oh and also, what do you do for a living ?

Your using tunnel vision my friend.

There are indeed some very rich young kids, middle age fellows and elderly gentlemen that play poker for a living.

There are also some very rich young kids, middle age fellows and elderly gentlemen in every other field where it is possible to make a profit.

For every CEO there are skyscrapers full of underlings, just like for every Tom Dwan there are casinos and online poker rooms filled with underlings.

Saying to yourself "Wow, Tom Dwan made $300,000 tonight in 50 hands maybe I should become a professional poker player instead" is foolish.

Do you have a gift as a poker player? Do you have the drive, motivation and a healthy disregard for money? Fine then go for it but from what I read in the OP this is not you. Find what your good at and excel in that field,

You wouldn't say wow that guy won the lottery and now he's rich I should become a lotto player because I can get rich. The logic just doesn't compute.

Do you even enjoy poker OP?

I enjoy poker as long as I don't do it to earn money...if I put 500 bucks into my stars account with the goal of grinding it up I usually lose. If I just put it in my account and want to have some fun with my favourite type of game (MTT) and sometimes cash out a little bit, I usually win. So yeah I basically answer it for myself, I won't do it for a living of course...just for fun.

Especially your post pohlr96 is so true...I've always wanted to be very good in a special field and being successful (especially with money). Not just because of being rich, but because of managing something, analysing something with statistics, improving it etc.
But probably I'm better off starting sometime later on my own business, another big dream of mine.

I'm a private jet pilot in Asia :-) And after taxes I guess you could say 60% of the gross salary will remain. In the beginning probably a bit more, and in the end with 300k maybe even a bit less. But definitely enough to have a good life and a great job.

My Thai girlfriend got her visa, can u private-jet her to amsterdam for me ? Then we'll talk serious poker

Enjoy what you allready have OP ..and be thankfull for that ..

I used to work as a accountant and found it rather boring ( wow shock horror ) but in the evenings i would small talk the wife and jump onto the poker tables ....

Over time .. i turned it into $15k and never felt the urge to pull any of the monies out .. in fact it did not feel like real monies and it did not matter much whether i won one week or lost the following week ...

I had enough money through my job to keep everything ticking over and the poker bankroll was just my personal reward for doing something i really liked ..

One day at work i was doing payroll for a firm of solicitors and actually knew one of the solicitors ... she had been studying away from home and i think had put 7 years of her life into becoming a qualified solicitor and this was her first major job back home since then ..

Her pay was good, but after tax / ni deductions i felt that it was a small reward for 7 years of hard graft ..

I worked out how many hours a week i would need to play poker if i was earning a standard xbb/100 hands to equal her net pay ...im from the uk, so no deductions for me .. and the answer was quite shocking ...

With that thought dominating my mind .. i began to hate my job more and more .. and eventually bit the bullet and went part time and using poker to cover the rest ..

Life was great for 3-4 months .... wow, all that spare time and just living it easy ...

But then i started to not enjoy playing too much poker .. and the fun had been taken away from it now that i felt i had to earn monies ...

Over time .. i just did not want to play and just started removing my bankroll is steady chunks untill i was down to roughly $2k ..

Obviously with such a roll .. i had to go back to work ... which i did ...but i do wish i had stayed at work origionally and just been happy to play poker for the fun of it ..

You seem to have a quality life as it is OP ... so just enjoy what you have

yeah good idea, maybe you should limit yourself from coming to 2+2 cause reading your posts tilt me. you are 26, you make $90,000/year in this economy, and you are complaining? gtfo!!!!

I want to be good at MMA but I'm not going be bothered if I'm not on the next PPV getting my face smashed in by Wanderlei "The Axe Murder" Silva.

If I were you I'd be pretty satisfied with a more than comfortable income and a stable job and if I find myself with a 100k+ bankroll from playing poker in my spare time, well, fantastic.

Also, is it poker u want to be good at or is it the dream of making it big in poker that is driving you? In other words, maybe just concentrating on playing good poker and not on the dream of making it big can help your situation.

Lol i like you ^^

Thank you all for your respones. I guess you're all right...I will focus on my life, career and my dream and just play poker as a pastime. I also thought that as soon as you need to earn money it isn't fun anymore...
I don't know what my real driving force behind poker was..I just would like to be profitable with money, manage it etc. Either with stocks, poker or whatever. But since I'm quite an impatient person I first to get that under control...But first off I just enjoy being a pilot

I like your post...for some of us, I think we question whether it is worth it.....Its like the acting business..for all those that we see that make it big, there are thousands and thousands that dont make it....

But, at the same time...as Ive read from others..poker is a game!! It can be entertainment! How many of us played Uno, Monopoly, Golf (think of how costly this is)

I guess the question becomes, is poker making happier than you would be without it? If yes, then you play...if no, then give it up.

And then seeing that you make 90K a year??? Worrying about poker is like Michael Jordan going to the Minor leagues...a waste of time! Play for fun!

Understand that your original question comes leads to two separate, seemingly contradictory answers. On the one hand the vast majority of players, some 90+%, are long time losers at this game. From that standpoint the game is very hard and very few are able to beat it.

However, very few actually try really hard to beat the game, so those who do put in the requisite amount of work generally are able to make money playing.

Keep in mind that your goal, to be a winning player, is a constantly moving target. The games constantly change, your opponents react and adjust to your play, variance wreaks havoc with you and the like. Mason Malmuth's earlier writings, like Gambling Theory, or Chen & Ankenman's Mathematics of Poker go into this sort of thing quite deeply. There are some very sobering examples of the lengthy time horizon for a player on the bad side of variance. If you haven't looked at these titles, this is where you can get a better sense of the pure probability side of the likelihood that you can make money if playing "correctly".

Due to the educational resources available today, the impatience you describe in yourself can be an asset. With online play, software, video resources, message boards and books, you can learn things in six months that would have taken someone a decade or more to learn not long ago. The downside to this is that those you're playing against have the same opportunities, and in today's game many of your opponents are going to be technically schooled in a way not found in an earlier generation of games.

You'll also want to be very deliberate in your game selection, not just in terms of tables, but in what you choose to play. If you're trying to beat something like full ring limit hold 'em, you're almost a decade late and you could drive yourself nuts in trying to eke out any meaningful win rate. You'll need to figure out what games are still soft enough to reward solid play and figure out stakes which are still meaningful to you and your income level to keep our attention while offering soft enough competition to afford yourself an opportunity to win and grow your bankroll.

This is something I don't think most new players think about here. I just started playing a few months ago, purely for fun but enjoy the intellectual challenge so far.
I usually play late at night, just 1/2 cent on full tilt. Seems like alot of total hobbiest still at that level after midnight.
I'm off today and just played a few hands at 10:30am est...totally different game, of the 7 guys I looked up, there was only one guy only playing 3 tables, everyone else was 4 tabling at least..on table ratings everyone looked as if they were trying to learn a solid TAG game...some were losing some winning..all playing massive amounts of hands. I assume the late teen/20 something wanna be grinders have started their day...and this is only 1/2 cent.
I realize just now after this that if you have a few years of experience you have a massive advantage because all that money from people who want to learn like me will be flowing up to you at the higher stakes and cushion your bank roll while you still learn more. If your just starting out your probly wasting your time unless you are naturally talented.
Don't lose sight of the fact that poker is alot of fun to play, but dreams of being a pro starting out now is going to be a delusion for 99.9% of the people on here.

Just wondering, how u get ur life back on perfect track after u BLOCK urself for a year?
Is that a good way? I mean how did u do that?

Good luck at tables

How about you give up poker and find a more enjoyable, more rewarding, and less stressful hobby.
Honestly poker is a huge waste of time even if the sites were not rigged.