Hello All,

So, haven't posted in quite some time. Long story short, I started poker very young because my family was a bunch of degenerates and I idolized one of those degenerates.

Started at 18 because that was the youngest time I could legally start playing live. Of course in the beginning it was awful, losing $500+ in a night and going through those thoughts of "Wow, I coulda bought XYZ with that..." You remember those times guy?

Anyway, after a while I got good and was able to build a bankroll to put myself through college + living.


During this undergrad grind I was always curious what it would be like to try out becoming a professional poker player. But, life had other plans for me.


Now and then I go back to my local casino/track or visit a out of state casino/track when I fly out for an onsite with a client.

I very rarely see the same regs/professionals that stick to the professional poker career. The past 6 years I've been playing I can literally count the amount of regs that are consistently playing at my local casino on my hands.

To tie it all up I was curious if anyone here has grinded poker for more than 3 years, and if so do you still enjoy it? Was there any regrets for the opportunity cost of the time that was invested learning the game?



TLDR: If you've played poker for more than 3+ years successfully did you enjoy it? Was there any regret investing that opportunity into learning poker compared to learning other skills?

I'm asking this because I was always curious what would happen if I went pro instead of going to uni and landing a finance gig.

Yes and No.
Till this day I still use skills I obtained playing poker in my "normal" career.
I regret spending so much time a toxic environment.

After 4 years of playing professionally I realized that I wasn't the person I would want to be. Personally I had massive mood swings that didn't only correlate with my sessions but also by the environment I was spending my time.
They key turning point for me was WSOP 2015, I had a great summer poker wise but still felt miserable.

Basically what im saying is that playing poker professionally is not only about beating the game by a certain rate but all the other factors involved, the environment you are in, the travelling, the people in general etc..

Now I really enjoy playing poker again because I do it semi-pro. I play when I want to, I dont depend on it anymore.

EDIT: to add: I also had amazing experiences and a lot of fun before and during my time as a pro which I will never forget and cherish, also still have a few close friends that I met during this time, its not all bad

online poker (only a hobbyist) legitimately saved my life. the virtues of the game are practically limitless.

The truth is that most pros survive in the game for 2-3 years at most. Some are a bit better and survive 5-10 years, but they are few and far between. Games get tougher, people figure out your game, your results revert to the mean over a large enough sample size. Almost no one has longevity in this game, not even the very best players.

The ones who regret it are usually the ones who got burnt out and realized there was a huge opportunity cost to them being a poker pro (i.e. they would have been better off having a real career/business).

Also many pros remain in the game by getting staked (and getting into huge makeup), borrowing money, scamming people, covering their losses from sponsorship money, covering their losses from outside businesses etc. How many stories have we heard over the years of pros who we thought were winning players, but who actually turned out to be broke degenerates?

Only every day. It screws your future unless you play nosebleeds and even then you might still be screwed soon enough. I still have to pinch myself that after all these years I still pay the bills with poker but I would never recommend it to anyone.

I have yet to meet a professional poker player, who's only source of income is poker, that is actually happy.

I would very much recommend the 'Sessions' podcast by DGAF to follow the story of a long term poker professional trying to get out of the game if you want to learn just how much somebody can regret playing professionally... and if you want to cheer for and be entertained by an excellent story teller!

I played professionally for 11 years, decided to quit and look for a job and play on the side once I got settled. It took me almost a year to get a job (that I wanted, I didn't apply anywhere I couldn't eventually make what I made playing poker). So needless to say money was pretty thin for a bit and I didn't play any poker on the side.

Now I'm doing fine but have had no desire to play poker. The last 5 years I have played poker less than 10 times (always when a friend wanted me to) and have pretty much hated the entire time at the table when I did.

I don't necessarily regret playing poker professionally but even though I'm doing better now (making a little more with a good healthcare plan). I would have been much better off getting a career in what I graduated college for or even what I'm doing now with an additional 10 yrs seniority.

edit: The only way I would recommend it would be if you were successful enough that you can make a legitimate passive income off of the money you make

I played full time online from about 2005 till black friday in 2011
After black friday i started playing about 600-800 hours live per year and the other half of my play was online , mostly bodog/bovada
That lasted a few years and for the last 3 or so years my play has been 99.9% live

I've mentioned in some other posts how I try to play a ton of hours during tourmement series when good cash games are plentiful and i'll often have week to month long breaks after playing a ton of hours in a short period of time

This is what works for me but might not work for someone else

I could make more money if I really pushed myself but quality of life is important to me.
Imo the games are best during these tournament series, so forcing myself to play an extra 300-500 hours a year in games that aren't as good with basically make me burn out way faster and be miserable. It's simply not worth it.

It definitely is a toxic environment
Poker rooms are filled with degenerate scumbags and frauds

It can also be really fun sometimes

There have definitely been times where I think I really don't like being in this environment- what's really bad is when I have these thoughts despite winning a lot leading up to it.

Imo poker is best as a profitable side hobby.

I have been playing poker - mostly online - professionally for over 8 years now (European player). In those years I struggled to graduate university because I focused to much on playing poker. Eventually I managed to get my diploma despite my focus still being on playing poker.

I have always loved the game and the ability to play at home at times and days of my choosing. The first years the money wasn't great, but more than enough considering I still lived with my parents. Luckily I kept improving my game and climbed up the stakes over the years reaching a point where it really pays off being a professional poker player.

The last bit is the reason I don't regret becoming a professional poker player. If I would make the same money with poker as a normal job, I would never consider it doing for a living. It would just not be worth the risks (unsure future, no work experience, not being able to build a good buffer, etc).

So, to answer OP's question: No regrets at all. Becoming a professional poker player is one of the best things that could ever happened to me.

I don't regret it for myself, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else. I've seen a massive % of my friends get burned out, go busto, and go off and find traditional jobs. You have to be the right mix of degenerate and fiscally conservative to survive, and even if you do it's still pretty hard. When you run hot, you have to convince yourself to keep going out and grinding the same stakes with the same effort. When you run poorly you have to figure out how to not tilt and mentally get over the fact that even if you have a good day today, tomorrow, and the next day, you'll still be down for the month/year. That's hard to do, and takes time and experience to even have a shot at figuring it out, and a lot of times you just...run out of money.

I'm lucky that I still enjoy poker. I find the game fun and challenging, I find the risk/reward to be motivating and exciting. I can't grind for 14 hours a day 6 days a week anymore like I did when I was 22, but when I take a week away from the game I end up getting pretty amped up to play a session. And finding the balance of learning how to be ok with not playing 80 hours a week was pretty key to me enjoying not just poker but also life.

I don't think there's an opportunity cost to learning poker...it's still a fun game and I'd want to have learned how to play well even if I didn't play full time. There of course are times when I wish I could generate income in a way that didn't bring financial risk, but those feelings are often short lived. Especially when I think about it and realize that I couldn't be happy working a typical desk job unless it was something that I was really passionate about, so poker is the realistic ideal for me as a person.

Good point! I was actually pondering on whether anyone beats poker in the long run. I work in finance and it's kind of the hush hush secret that no one beats the market in the long run. Larry Livermore one of the greatest speculators of all time said

"“I have been in the speculative game ever since I was fourteen. It is all I have ever done. I think I know what I am talking about. And the conclusion that I have reached after nearly thirty years of constant trading, both on a shoestring and with millions of dollars back of me, is this: A man may beat a stock or a group at a certain time, but no man living can beat the stock market!”
Conclusion; when you run good milk it and invest wisely.

Trading stocks and beating poker are not the same things.

It really just depends on the rake. Apart from that, if there's any element of skill and your opponents aren't playing 100% perfectly, then any game will be beatable in the longrun. And the variance in many game types flattens out in a realistic timeframe, especially multitabling online. There are many players that "beat poker in the longrun".

i dont regret it, its a pretty wild story that pretty much no one in my life ever experienced.

but i have moved away from the game and i am in the process of trying to get an electrical engineering job. got a bachelor's in 2008 (played online in the glory days) and a master's in 2017 (but this is kind of a lie since i finished in 2017 but all but 1 class was taken in 2011-2013)...
fast forward to today and i have 0 work experience, but okay knowledge of the material. so getting to the interview point has been a little difficult.

ive always thought there was an end to when id no longer play for a living and just randomly play live low stakes and have a few beers but kept saying that would happen next month, then that turned into years

my one huge regret is just not caring about getting a job or internship while in school. i just didnt care enough and always thought it would be so easy to find atleast one position.

regret no, but wish i had planned a little better

Playing poker, even as recreation, takes a LOT of time. I know some very successful pros, but could not see playing professionally as anything other than a J O B, regardless of financial returns.

The environment and lifestyle also are often very poor. The dynamics of playing against other folks constantly, rather than ever engaging any cooperative or mutually beneficial activity, is pretty grim relative to other ways to make a living,

Might as well be a litigator, if that is the type of life you seek.

It's a silly regret because you should know pretty quickly whether you're getting what you want out of it (online at least). The regret should be not doing something else. But would people really do things all that differently if they knew then what they knew now?

If i knew hourly potentials would drop so dramatically I probably would have played more if anything.

These kinds of regrets are silly because at some point it just becomes akin to whinging about not having invested in bitcoin / picking the right lottery numbers / etc.

A guy who blew his fortune twice over and then committed suicide over his failures is probably not someone who'd make a short list of greatest speculators of all time.

The mystique of old timey clothes in black and white photos may lead one to overestimate a persons business acumen.

Yes to regrets. I had no interest in poker to begin with, and was pursuing music. A band I loved at the time expressed interest in recruiting me to tour with them; they played poker, and I learned through their singer.

Things fell through, and I continued to play since I was quickly earning more through cards than at my job. The illusion of being afforded time was appealing to me, but that doesn't exist when you're an obsessive that is bad at prioritizing.

I find myself feeling like wasted potential when not pursuing creative outlets that have always brought joy and pride into my life. I have come to love competing at cards, and am fortunate for friendships and a certain degree of success, but I'm positive I would've been better off never playing cards to begin with.

That said, were it between poker and a desk job, I would for sure choose the former.

You're not that old, is there not still time to work on music related passions and see what you can accomplish?

What's it called when someone articulates something perfectly that you didn't know you weren't able to find the words for?

The biggest problem I have with this game is that the amount of luck involved is insane. You can be at the top of your game and run like ****/BE for so long and it feels so painful to know that your performance is so slightly correlated to your skill on short/mid term.
I wish It was more of a steady grind, slowly building up. The truth is you will mostly go through phases where you win a lot or lose some/BE.
You are never prepared for the variance that you are going to encounter through this activity and how it will test your nerves.

Finally, it's painful to know that you need to get better for less and less money while a clueless regfish at the moment would be making a ****load if he was to go back in time 10 yrs ago.

I was a pro for 5-ish years. Making 6 figures each of those years.

I regret nothing but the very end when I decided to go for broke. And went broke. I burned out. I wasn't doing it right most of the time anyways. I was printing money, but not studying, focusing, trying my best. I became complacent and lazy. I took it all for granted. And in the end I went busto. I am totally ok with it though. I had an amazing 5 years of playing and traveling. It was a little tough to get back into the rat race, and I never fully did.

But I do what I want. I always have. I always will. So I started a business and forgot about poker entirely for 4 years. I just now got back into it. And am going to try again. A little older and a little wiser.

I don't have any advice that hasn't been said a million times before. Keep your BR up, your health comes first, and variance will kick you harder than you can anticipate. GLGLGL

There's def a crazy amount of short term luck and of course that will greatly fluctuate based on your winrate and the game type. I agree it can be very painful and will test you. That being said, if this wasn't the case than there wouldn't be so much money to be won. Gotta take the good with the bad. If people didn't underestimate variance so much and had proper bankrolls it'd prob take a fair bit of the stress away. But no matter how big your roll is it's always going to be super frustrating when you go through a month or two straight of just getting your head bashed in no matter what you do.

Your last point is something that is super overlooked and not even thought about by many though. There are times where a new app or game comes along and your hourly is boosted up for a bit, but ultimately things should be expected to mostly be on a downward trend. It's def possible to work very hard and continue improving but see your hourly go down to do factors outside your control.

I'm curious, how did you go broke?