Quote:
Originally Posted by Siculamente
This is the go to excuse for poker players. "I only have two choices. Play poker or pump gas" really, it's pathetic.
It varies by the person obviously but your situation of being able to just "get a better job ffs" as a solution to having to consider money in free time is hardly standard, even in America.
Again you seem to be talking about poker as a job rather than a hobby.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Siculamente
life isn't perfect. It's full of compromises and tough choices, each having their own pros and cons. Most people choose somewhere inbetween what they like doing and what pays the most.
If somebody has a job they really like but is poor and ends up stressed out irl because of it, and one their main concerns as to choose a hobby or not is how profitable it is- yeah id say that person is doing something wrong / making life more complicated than it has to be (but at least they have a job they like!)
You're talking about an edge case though if the person is stressing about money - George Orwell makes your argument very well over hundreds of pages in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, about a man who gives up his job writing advertising copy to become an impoverished poet, and spends his time worrying about money and finds he can't write - obviously more conventional employment was better for him. People who are not stressed shouldn't take your advice though
I was a computer programmer in financial markets until I went to Eastern Europe to teach English as a foreign language. I don't stress about money but of course I don't have the same choice of hobbies I had before. The fact that you can make the occasional withdrawal when you play poker is an extremely positive benefit compared to e.g. chess.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Siculamente
And tell me, how many new players out there are playing a few hours a week online and making decent profits? Close to zero. Don't be ignorant. They are the fish. I think a good guess is they would have to put in somewhere around 20 hours a week and treat it as a part time job in order to actually get anywhere.
What are "decent profits" but still less than part-time earnings then? I don't play anything like 20 hours per week fwiw.
Nobody restricted it to online. When I started I read the stuff on the pokerbank.com and then Kill Everyone and I could beat the local nightly tournament which is played for hobby stakes, even by local standards.
That doesn't mean I was actually good - I remember one time I raised pre-flop with KJo and it was K high, and I bet pot 3 streets and got called by K2 - and I remember thinking "yes, it's right what they say about K rag being dominated a K like mine with the strong, broadway kicker" - it just means I was good enough to beat other people who were also at the casino playing for hobby stakes after work.
Most of the 100 million people in the world who play poker (or chess) don't do it seriously and if you study a little bit you can beat most of them - (in the case of poker) not by enough to make a living, but for something, because most of them quite sensibly aren't playing with enough on the table for you to make a living off them.