LOL my first thought was: you think people working at Coca Cola are thinking about how many kids they lead to obesity and diabetes and how many adults they lead to disease and death with their products?


I definitely see your point tho especially being a role model.

Good post, good info...not trying to nit-pick...but how exactly was this "Poker kind of screwed me before"?

I see that. Coke, Marlboro, Smirnoff, etc. I'd like to believe that those individuals have less of a choice WRT career choices. Unless you're pretty high up, your typical employee of places like those tend to have no college degree, probably a high school diploma, and needed the highest paying job available to them IE factory worker, driver, rep.

I don't have to choose poker. There are many career options available to me, and poker doesn't necessarily deliver much in the way of goods and/or services to it's patrons.

Bad wording on my part. Poker didn't screw me. I just chose poker over college, which I'd like to think I wouldn't have if I didn't know poker.

Don't regret one bit and every morning I do a journey entry on how grateful I am for making this sort of money with poker. You know what the best time to be a poker player? Always at the current moment. You don't need to hire or figure out how to play poker correctly yourself but instead got solvers that teaches to play poker correctly for cheap. The more time I invest in studying the more money I make per hour. Being efficient with my hourly grind I can reinvest in learning other similar concept by reading tons of books on philosophy,habit,mental models,businesses that increase my edge in life. If you are a good poker player in today climate that means you probably already doing some sort of meditation/self awareness type working on your emotion. You will also realize how luck do play a part in life and appreciated it. I owe everything to poker and it has always been true to me.

The thing with this post is most of the pros that failed are long gone and not on this forum anymore, tons of the bad ones left after Party shut down, and the rest left after Stars shut down. The casinos got 10 xs harder after black friday.

This is perhaps the best long term reward I got from poker.

This is a surprisingly good thread.

I think you get a bit of a biased view reading 2p2. Pretty much every long term successful poker player I know rarely posts and I've had numerous conversations with them regarding the negativity of the forum and how that drove them away.

17 years. Overall, no regret. Poker has provided me opportunities and a life I would almost certainly never otherwise had.

There are some comments that poker doesn't equal freedom. If your idea of freedom is smoking weed and playing video games whenever you feel like it, then poker won't give you freedom. Poker takes a lot of time and effort. I've likely averaged 60 hours a week, but I still feel I'm free. At most I use an alarm clock a few times a year to catch an early flight. If I want to watch a movie on a Thursday afternoon I do. If I'm feeling burnt out and want to take a vacation I do, albeit rarely. But I still get my hours in.
The freedom to take time off is just one aspect of freedom. A much more important aspect is freedom from constraint. I don’t have to deal with the whims of a demanding boss or client. There's no office politics or backstabbing co-workers. I don't have to deal with a commute. I can live where I want. I do what I want. No one controls my destiny except for me. That is incredibly valuable to me. I also have the freedom-both time and financial-to explore opportunities.

Some have written about a lack of fulfillment. That being a poker player adds nothing to society which leaves them feeling empty. I've never thought that the method I use to make money as a path to fulfillment or believed that work MUST add to the greater good. Very few people have the skillset which offers the opportunity to do work that is interesting, adequately compensated and adds to the greater good. For me, it's enough that my work is interesting and pays well. I'll find fulfillment and add to the greater good in other ways.

That's not to say that poker is a good choice for most. Of those who develop the core skill to win at poker many either don’t have the discipline to be truly successful (inconsistent grind, run good spending, a constant cycle of shot-taking and rebuilding, etc) or have skills that would be better compensated doing something else. You give up a lot playing poker vs a more traditional career. With a traditional career you move up the corporate ladder, you have benefits like insurance, stock options/ownership, perhaps you have retirement benefits. If you go through a rough patch in your personal life you can still maintain your job for the medium term. The resume gap, if poker doesn't work out, is a huge deal. Psychological issues will be magnified with poker. Social standing takes a hit and your potential dating pool will be smaller.

Given the chance at a do-over, I'd choose poker again. My only change would be less risk-averse and play higher.

Really good post.

I played full schedule professionally for 3 years and semi-pro for 2 years before that. Now I play semi-pro again after not playing for a good long stretch.

During that time I went back to business and rose quick up the corporate ladder reaching the VP level. Which is where I hit the glass ceiling and realized that to advance further I would have to compromise myself ethically in ways I did not want to, and my only option was to either quit or find a new job at a lower level position that I'd be considered overqualified for now.

To people saying that they grew tired of poker because of how degenerate the people in it are, high level business is quite literally 1000x worse. If you think staying on the game is eating at your soul because you see other pros leaving to go take key bumps in the bathroom to stay up during a 30 hour session that is the most watered down level of degeneracy that is going on in business. If you have a serious problem, to the point it keeps you from playing, with knowing that people dumping racks in your game are getting the money from selling drugs or pimping I don't even want to talk to you about what goes on in banking.

Now that I've seen behind the curtain enough times in the business/investment world I wish that I'd kept a virgin brain and just kept playing poker with the common street scumbags. It's like going to Oz. Sure you can click your ruby red heels and go home whenever you want, but is home the same place as when you left it? Are you the same person as when you left it?

There's a level of carelessness and naivete I would say is invaluable that you can have in poker while making the same amount of money that you can in positions where that isn't an option. To make the same amount of money and still stay ethically pure I'd say you'd have to be a surgeon or a high powered lawyer and in those positions you're going to be exposed to the worst of the worst on a way more visceral level and dealing with much more high stakes situations, literally life and death, so to compare that to the stress of PLO makes PLO look like child's play, and it is, but it's child's play you can make out a good living if you're good.

And if you want to come at me with "not all X business is like that" don't bother with your exception that proves the rule, and most likely your exception defines the rule you just don't know about it. Most of you probably think construction is the definition of honest work, don't get me started on what cement mixing companies are up to, you don't want to know.

I do want to know. Just to see an example of the type of stuff you're talking about. Something as non-existent in most of our minds as cement mixing companies.

Yes do tell...my friend owns a concrete company, please tell me how terrible he is lol. There are bad people everywhere, but games where money is made bring the worst.

Well, consider this, if you want to bury "stuff" so that it never ever gets found, who would be your best friend to have?

Consider also that there is actually a patent in the US for mixing blood into cement, and that it was held by one of the biggest cement companies on the planet (it expired today actually): https://patents.google.com/patent/US4203674A/en

So not only do a lot of buildings have people in them, they have people in them.

That's the kinda stuff I was looking for. Spicy.


Surely Jimmy Hoffa is in a foundation somewhere.

Such a refreshing, balanced, and thoughtful post from someone who’s clearly worthy of an opinion on this topic. As someone who’s made 100% of my money from poker for 13+ years now, I couldn’t have said it better.

great post

respectfully disagree with this though