That's definitely true of FAANG engineers, but literally being a FAANG engineer is a very elite job that requires a ton of other background, talent, and skills that the overwhelming majority of people, including the overwhelming majority of poker players, do not possess. There are certainly a subset of poker players that could have gone down this route. But do you really think Shawn Deeb could be an engineer at Google? Or Daniel Negreanu??

But mostly I was responding to the assertion that the way to earn 300k as an accountant, etc., was to become a partner such that you are managing other people and bringing in business yourself.

I’ll jump into the pool with my opinion:

Job making 100K >poker making 100K. Total compensation for our office (not great benefits, typical of a small business). Ranges from 18 to 25% of base pay above salary. That includes things like benefits, 401(k), contribution, PTO, etc.

Job making 100K + playing poker for fun/side hobby-hustle >>>>>>>>> 100K poker full-time. Can still do a few enjoy, without the heavyweight that would come with a downswing and if you don’t feel like hanging out in a dingy casino, you don’t have to.

All the talk about not having to work for the man/woman and working when you want to really isn’t true. You need to play or be available when the games are running, that’s weekends at a casino or hunting down and getting linked to home or private games.

What are you basing claim (not fact) on?

Note that being a healthy weight and being good looking are different things. You can have objectively attractive people with poor dietary impulse control who let themselves go. There are also a lot of average and ugly people who are physically healthy both overall and weight wise.

And there are some people who eat constantly and never gain weight. Metabolisms vary widely and cannot easily be changed.

trip report!?

Ever been to a country club, a Four Seasons, a community of multi-million dollars homes, an elite private school vs. a community college and a Motel 6? If not, observe and report back your theory.

It's a simple byproduct of evolution, really. Successful types attract more attractive mates.

Kids, stay in school, get straight A's and you have a better chance of meeting someone attractive. Then your kids will be more attractive and continue the cycle.

It's a good thing that we're smart enough to focus on likely expected outcomes rather than outliers. Especially since we know that a pair is more common than a royal flush. Or is a royal flush more common? I get all this complicated math mixed up.

I see. Yeah, I agree.

I've been in real estate since 1990 and its been great to me, I've remodeled and sold on spec, built new on spec and for clients, done flips** and acquired rental properties along the way (currently have about 20 units & live off the rent).

I started playing poker in 1994 and tried to go pro before the boom but Vegas kicked my ass plus I was miserable living like a vampire, no friends and no profit to comfort me so I tucked my tail, licked my wounds and went back into real estate in Texas.

Then internet poker and the boom happened so I started playing as a hobby while still making my living from real estate. I can still remember when Planet Poker came online (I think they might have been the first internet poker room) and I would play on the couch at night while watching TV. While I never got great at the game, I was ahead of the curve for the first couple of years plus a lot of the better players didn't trust online and wouldn't play so the games were REALLY easy. Everyone kept telling me I was going to get cheated but I said, I've been playing off a $100 deposit for the past year and cashed out over 5 figures so if they are, they're not doing a very good job at it and kept playing.

Then everyone slowly got over their fears of internet poker plus every tom dick and harry got on board and most were WAY more committed than I was. When I had to work at the game, put in high volume and try to study, it took the fun out of the game for me. So I was never willing to do the work to keep up and gradually fell so far back that I'd likely be the sucker at most tables today but it was a blast while it lasted.

I don't know how you're defining "passive income" but rental properties could only be considered 100% passive if you do as you said and hire a management company. So you're both right on this subject depending upon whether you hire a management company which I dont. I may one day but given the fact I've built and designed for the last 30 years, its very difficult for me to delegate this to a 3rd party who, based on my experience, will never care about the property as much as I do nor are they as careful with my money like they would be with their own. Perhaps I'll find a company that proves otherwise but thus far all I've experienced is high commission (15%), bad service and poor communication. While my properties are pretty easy to manage, they're not completely passive because I do get occasional calls and texts at all days and hours and ahed to do the occasional repair. However, I do high end rentals with knocked out interiors and infrastructure (new wiring, plumbing, HVAC, etc, etc) so they don't require a lot of maintenance because they're built so well. Plus I attract tenants who want these type of properties, can afford them and take better care of the place than lower budget rentals.

**when I say "flip" I dont mean I buy a property, remodel it and then sell it after its done at a higher price like they do on the TV shows. When I "flip" I pay $X for a property and sell it for $Y after doing nothing but buying it at what I know is under market value. I just bought one a few months ago and waited for the holidays to end, listed it with a broker I know yesterday, got a contract signed today and assuming nothing blows the deal up, I'll make over 6 figures without doing anything more than tying up some cash and doing some paperwork. These dont come along everyday but my experience in the area allows me to spot a deal when I see one and snatch it up quick. This is my favorite type of real estate deal for obvious reasons

So in my experience, you have to go with what makes you happy. Trying to making a living at poker made me miserable. I was lonely in Vegas flying solo and at the time I tried, I dont think there were as many people trying to go pro so socializing was tough for me. But I'm glad I tried because it made me content in what I ultimately ended up doing because I wasn't dreaming about a perceived amazing poker life I was missing out on.

I also have great memories of being involved before, during and after the poker boom. When I was playing at the Mirage, it turns out I was in the same room (not games except one time with Matusow) with Karina Jett (not Jett at that time), Daniel Negreanu, Mike Matusow, Josh Arieh, etc. I spent hours sweating games during the WSOP at Binions when Amarillo Slim, Arieh, Helmuth, Chan, Siedel were there. One of my fun memories is sitting in the bleachers at Binions in 2001 watching the final table of the $3,000 NL event between Erik Seidel and Johnny Chan. I was directly behind Chan, maybe 4 feet and could occasionally see his hole cards as I watched the rematch. The crazy thing is the only people watching were an older couple haphazardly paying attention, me and a reporter named Andy Glazer (super nice guy, RIP).

Its been a great hobby and while I feel like I missed out on some $$ by not taking it more serious at the beginning of the boom, I cant complain about making a profit from a hobby that gave me a lot of joy for a long time. I no longer play because I've lost the "Degen-tingles" as Ryan DePaulo would say plus the game just isnt as fun for me as it was when you had characters like Amarillo Slim, Puggy Pearson, Matusow to an extent that were larger than life. They intrigued me because they had to have a unique social ability to succeed in the games pre-internet which created far more fascinating people than being a leather ass on the internet does (IMHO). I was better at real estate anyway and never got tired of it or felt the kind of loneliness I did when I tried poker full time so I think I made the right choice, I cant imagine trying to grind out a living in the current poker environment.

Here's a little studio apartment I just finished and rented out for anyone curious:

Before:



After:

There is no such comparison for general population. It is all about individuals.

It is just like, playing for NBA is harder than playing for Premier League?

I'm now playing High stakes both live and online, making much more than 300k/year in poker. I quit my job as a data scientist 5 years ago. At that time, I was making over 120k/year. I just knew poker is my passion and I'd stay as mediocre data scientist/machine learning engineer if I sticked to it. One of my close friend, who was my colleague and also my classmate from graduate school, was very intereted in poker. Now he is a machine learning engineer at Google. If I estimate, he's making around 300k/year now. We have almost identical education background, and he is at least as smart as me. I'm better at poker for sure. At the time I quit job, he wanted to make some money from poker, and I signed a coaching for profit contract. However, he never finishes the contract. He did not win anything. He still play poker every now and then as a recreational. It is super easy for people like him to understand thereotical part of poker. But it doesn't gurantee those people can just crush poker with proper training.

My point is, poker is just very different from other 9-5 daily jobs. There is no absolute correct answer.

Where do you play live?

To make 7 figures after only 5 years is impressive.

Becoming a FAANG engineer is a lot more do-able than you're making it sound. It's not really an "elite" job since they now employ hundreds of thousands of engineers. Google in 2006 was elite, now it's just a standard good tech job (but significantly shittier as an employer than it was in 2006). It certainly requires _some_ talent/skill, I don't think anyone can do it, but most people you would describe as "reasonably bright" could.

A CS degree is helpful but not strictly necessary. The easiest path to a FAANG engineering job is to work at any random software engineering job, put it on your LinkedIn, FAANG recruiters will reach out, and you can grind Leetcode problems to pass what's effectively become a standardized test.

Now, this formula was MUCH easier 2013-2021 than it is in the 2024 tech recession, but it's still basically do-able. However, I do agree with you to the extent it's a big life commitment to develop all the necessary skills and do all that studying which most people won't want to do.

Certainly some talent is required but not really that much more than becoming a high stakes poker pro and theres some overlap in skills. I'm not sure about Deeb or DNegs but I have no question guys like Galfond, Haxton, Polk, could have done this. Guys like DNegs could also probably sneak into roles in product management, marketing, or operations which can pay a little lower on entry level roles but typically have higher upside as its easier to get promoted to the top ranks without needing to be a super-genius like in engineering.

Btw, pretty much nobody at FAANG makes more than around $250k salary, the rest of the money comes in stock and at FAANG companies that's effectively cash since it's easily sold. A senior engineer will typically make around 400-600k total and up to 1M is possible even as an individual if you're god-like, or just become a Director+.

Also you typically have to live in very high cost of living areas like the Bay Area or Manhattan although with the rise of remote work some people get FAANG compensation in cheaper areas but you can get a paycut and theres been a lot of return-to-office.

The much, much bigger issue with FAANG jobs moreso than talent or intelligence is just that they are big corporations and they expect you to be a cog in a wheel, show up to work most days, give up ownership of everything you work on on the side, etc. There's way less freedom than being a poker pro. While they're not quite as bad as high finance jobs they are closer to it than in the past. Some people may prefer the structure of these corporations but many poker players skew a little more anti-authoriarian and struggle with it. I certainly did.

I actually worked at Google as an engineer for 3.5 years around when it was transitioning from "fun hippie startup" to "full blown corporate machine" and couldn't really take it. Truly it was always a corporate machine but the facade was much stronger before 2015.

As far as the broader discussion, I always get a little irked by "why play poker when you could make money doing something else"? I don't think everyone has to pursue the absolutely maximum income at the expense of all other considerations. Maybe someone simply likes pro poker more than running some accounting firm or working in high finance.

There's some pendulum where some people are told "do whatever makes you happy" without consideration for money, which is bad advice, but the opposite "optimize for money without considering your happiness" is equally bad advice. No money will make you unhappy but making money the only meaning in your life will too.


300k is a high bar and I think you basically need to do finance, management consulting, FAANG-tier engineering, medicine, big law, or run a successful business. I think for some top stakes poker players, they are just poker savants and can only play poker. I think for many others, they are just generally smart people and could do those other activities IF they applied themselves and committed to those careers but those are big IFs. Most of those careers are high pressure, long hours, and do require a big time commitment to break into . They're not something you do on a whim so even if you could do them in theory, there's still the huge step of doing all that work to get there.

By the way, when working 60 hours a week at a full-time job theres no point in poker even being a "side-hustle" because you wont have the time to get meaningful volume, you wont have the energy to play an A-game, and its hard to care when the money wont mean much relative to your income anyway.

There's a quote from Harold and Kumar that says "just because you're hung like a donkey doesn't mean you have to do porn" that's relevant here. Every single job has its downsides. And when it comes to jobs that pay super-well, the vast majority of them pay that well for a reason, it's not that they're out of reach for a smart person, it's that they require a huge time-consuming grind to get them and keep them.

I personally quit a 400k a year job to focus on poker. That sounds insane on the surface but if I bore you with my life details you'd probably understand why it makes sense at this point in my life. The short version is I get way more flexibility while I build some other businesses that take time, and I enjoy it more since my last job was making me miserable.

There's simply a lot of variables that go into this decision. I do agree that if your only goal in life is to maximize your annual income, being a full-time poker pro is a really bad option. But if you factor in the million other relevant variables, it might make sense, even if you're smart and capable enough to do other things.

Macau mostly.

Pretty sure he meant over $100000, not over $999999.

That’s interesting, I didn’t realize you could make 500k as an engineer, even with ample experience. My dad is senior principal engineer, cloud architect, and has spent his career in greater Boston area, and I believe he’s capped at like 250.
We try to get my parents to move out to Bay Area (where the rest of our fam is) but he doesn’t believe he can get paid enough to make the huge jump in real estate prices worth it (they’re in southern NH where you can get a nice condo for 300k)

hello DrawingDonkey, how can i contact you regarding to your post on Lunar Poker thread please??

That thread has to be 10+ years old lol. You can send me a PM I guess.

lol yeah I know. Just bugs me because 999999 is technically 6 figures so to say "over six figures" implies at least 7. It has become so common I will just have to let it go I suppose. I still think decimated means to reduce by 10%.

Huh, I always knew decimated had a real numerical meaning based on "deci-" prefix, but I thought it meant reduce to 10%, which more easily got it to the figurative meaning of "nearly destroyed". But you are correct about the historical original meaning.

To play devils advocate - 100k working for someone at least in the US is taxed so heavily and all those benefits you have you have to pay for. I have a friend who's salary is 95k I believe - take home after all the deductions is 55k, while if you make 100k at poker your net is going to be much higher. I agree casinos suck but not having to be somewhere if you don't feel like it is a great feeling - either way though 100k is not much money these days so I wouldn't advocate either route.

I'm so sick of RE investors saying rentals are passive income - can you hire people to make it passive? Yes of course, but that eats into your bottom line. Even when you have a management company how do repairs work? Do they not have to run these repairs by you? Do they handle evictions that are inevitable? Anyone who uses a management company has to manage them which takes time - the idea that you're going to sit around watching TV and the paychecks just come to your mailbox is not reality. Sure you can hire upper levels of management to the point where it truly is passive, but this all eats into your bottom line to the point where it's not worth it. SP500 investing is truly passive - you can auto deposit on there and that's it. Great liquidity vs RE, truly passive, no management companies. The gurus will fool you on RE investing - either you pay someone to do the work on it and have a low return, or you take it on as your new job.

Not the best example. A tax calculator I used showed a single person with 95K income in my state (higher state tax) would pay 26K in tax, leaving 69K. Where is the rest going? 7.6% social security/medicare. I’m sure there’s some benefits he/she would be paying for. I’m also guessing that they are contributing to 401K/retirement of some sort….would guess at least 3%. So while not in take home pay, the social security and retirement are his/her $$ for a later day….not all for taxes.

The 18-25% I referenced are costs above and beyond salary that employer pays that don’t appear on a W-2. PTO, portion of benefits employer does pay, 401k match/contributions by employer. For a 95K salary that’s $15K+ in value per year.

If a self employed poker player files taxes honestly, net take home can be less. A self-employed person pays the entire FICA and Medicare cost, not just the seven or so percent employee portion. Plus no PTO so if you don’t feel like being there, you don’t have the option of getting paid - in addition to added benefits, etc.

Someone should be able to have a decent life making 100K if they’re not an idiot with their spending. That’s a whole,different discussion.

Are you brain-dead, or just a tax cheat?

If you make 100k at poker, you must pay even more in taxes, because as a self-employed person you owe both halves, the employer's as well as the employee's, of your Social Security tax. Plus you have no benefits, no employer contribution to 401K, etc.

(On the other hand, you do get to write off those Las Vegas junkets as business trips.)

Are you saying you pay over 50% in taxes? I think you might be the brain dead one if that's the case.