Hey there. Long term 2p2er, decided to post under a throw away account due to this being personal.

It feels like it may be time for me to leave poker after 10 years. It's pretty much been my life for the time that I played. I took it extremely seriously, got a ton of coaching, basically every poker tool and video series I could get my hands on. Despite all my efforts, the games are just getting drier and drier, and my hourly is getting smaller and smaller. I play online cash games fwiw.

Unfortunately, I left college (undeclared major) after my freshman year. So I'm now 29 with only a high school degree, and my last employment as a bus boy. Fortunately I built up $1.2mm from poker, with all of my taxes paid on it. So I have that to work with.

Any recommendations on where I should go from here? Start undergrad basically from scratch? Any good alternative route that I can go with the nest egg that I've grown? I like problem solving and am pretty analytical, if that helps.

Any and all input is really appreciated!

Dude, I think you are in a great place. I also dont think you have to "leave poker." You can just realign your priorities and play less.

I played a lot in college and got away from it with slow transition into trading and now graduate school.

Definitely get your undergrad. I think computer science is the place to be. And you should pair it with something else. ESE, Chem, History, Business, I don't really even think it matters.

You are in a great spot to school / play as much or as little as you want. You could sign up for the full load first semester or just take 1-2 classes to start.

I'll do my best to answer any questions I can.

When you say games are drying up and hourly is down, are you playing live or online? Are in the states or abroad?

Also, you probably have a good idea how about risk and capital but please do not just leave your $1.2M in the bank and trust in whatever authority has issued your currency.

You could even buy like $100k gold, $100k crypto and leave the rest in the bank and I'd say you are way better off than you are now.

I'd also suggest you try and buy a 4-family (at least if you are in the states) w/ an FHA loan and a fixed rate mortgage. Live in one unit, go to school and let the tenants / ABNBers pay your mortgage. This set up basically lets you build equity and live for free.

Also, at least at my university, and I would imagine at others, there are a lot of really cool 3/2 programs. Where you do three years of undergrad then 2 years on like an MBA or an MS.

What do you want out of life?

Girls? Travel? A family? A good career? A fun career with great earnings? Substantially more money? A place to call home and a life to build for yourself? Would you enjoy running a business? Do you enjoy responsibility and stability? The Kwan?

Thanks for the advice/help, Rand!

Here are some details: I play online cash games. For most of my career I was a steady winner at $5/10+. I am USA based and now playing on ignition + global, where I am currently only a steady/solid winner at $1/2 or a very marginal winner at higher stakes. Next august I'm moving to San Diego with my girlfriend and have thought about the idea of playing live cash in the card rooms there, although from what I see, it doesn't look like much above 2/5 or the weekend 5/10.

I like the idea of not leaving poker completely, but starting something else. The 3/2 idea sounds really good. I'm going to look into schools in the San Diego area today. I'm also going to look into the 4-family home idea today. While I've been brain storming ideas, real estate was one that I figured might be possible for me in my current spot. One thing that I'm worried about is being accepted to a decent school. My freshman year I did decent at a really easy state school, and then I dropped out early in the first quarter of sophomore year. Nothing very impressive.

Right now investment professionals at Merrill are holding on to $1mm of the 1.2, with most of that being pretty liquid if I did need some for school or real estate or whatever direction I go. Their fees are pretty low at 0.75% per year and they seem good. I have about $70k in BTC and the rest in high interest savings. It all sat in cash for a long time but at least now it's somewhere.

Good questions. This has changed a lot lately. I would be pretty happy if I had a job that I enjoyed, and could use the money from that to pay all of my expenses while the money I have made from poker grows. I'm not really trying to amass a huge amount of wealth, and happiness in my work would be way more important. I don't think I'd enjoy running a business. I'm pretty introverted, and not great at networking. I'm moving to San Diego with my girlfriend next year, once she finished grad school, and we'd like to really set down roots there.

Also to add to that. I want to be happy in my work and I'd rather be happy in my work than earn a lot more money while being unhappy. However, I don't mind hard work, and enjoy it if it's hard work on the right project. I really enjoyed working on poker. I also really enjoyed the flexibility of my schedule, and not having a boss. Maybe I could like running a business if I was passionate about it.

Plenty of introverted people run businesses. It's a great way to put down roots in a community, get wealthy, have some standing. It's not really personal interactions when you run a business, it's actually a good escape from personal stuff. The freedom and earning potential of a business is unparalleled. It's a good start in life for a kid as well to have a parent with a business, they learn so many practical things and have better ties to the community.

If you just want a decent paying job and you're introverted and analytical, programming is a nice option. It's basically problem solving and you'll always be in demand and have a great paycheck. You also don't need a degree, although it helps.

Apart from that, introversion makes a lot of jobs out of reach. You'll deal with people less as a business owner than you would in many jobs. Law sucks, real estate sucks, sales is out, management is out, medicine is out, politics is out. Leaves accounting/finance or something creative like architecture if you have the skills. Accounting is a nice gig if you have some business savvy and don't mind numbers, lots of chumps out there whose money you can manage.

edit: Wanting your own schedule makes a business or a eventually building up a consultancy almost a must-do imo.

Would you suggest getting an undergrad, and then an MBA to go in this direction?

You can if you want. It depends on what you want to do for the next five years, and your personality. Businesses are something where you can easily learn by doing.

If you want the college lifestyle for a while, want to take some time out, be intellectual, if qualifications are important to you, then sure, spend the next 5 or so years at college.

If that would bore you to tears then just jump in. Plenty of unqualified dumbasses running businesses, you learn to be competent soon enough. You can also buy into a small business so you have something all set up and the current owners train you/show you how to do it. Have a look. Lots of different businesses you can buy into for $50-$300K, turnkey, with $40K - $130K/year profit:

https://businessforsaleinsandiego.co...esses-for-sale

I'll bow out of the thread now so you get other replies.

I worked there [Merrill] the summer of '07. The people around me lost so much money, millions in net worth. They overweighted their holdings in Merrill...which was ******ed given they worked there... I was like aren't you guys supposed to be professionals?

Right now they are losing your money and charging you to do so. Im not trying to get too into this with you. But I think you should take responsibility for all that cash. Figure it out. Especially since you are a poker player. Having $1m (if you still do....) might be reason enough to study econ / finance.

One of my lab parters is a PhD student from UCSD, so I bet they have a pretty good engineering program.

Also, there are a lot of good schools in LA and plenty of live action at Commerce & around town. Live is far from dried up. Vegas isn't far.

FWIW, I think you will be happier if you get out of poker. I know I am (of course I played mostly live after Black Friday, and after a while that can be about as fun as watching paint dry...).

Also, if you are worried about getting into a good school, you could always play live and go to a community college for a semester or a year. Its not a bad way to earn some credits (not that you really have to worry about the cost of university). But if you get straight As and a CC for a year youll get into to plenty of places.

You can also take classes at a university without being enrolled. Get As in a couple of classes at the university of your choice and a letter of rec from a professor and your good to go.

#1 on your list should be this...

Juk

As a field of study, sure. But perhaps the worst thing a wealthy person can do is to try their hand at investing or trading. Along with gambling and women it's the quickest and surest way to lose wealth.

This. You can feel free to post what ML has you invested in for feedback, but don't listen to a bunch of guys telling you on a forum to try trading your own money. If you want to move it to Vanguard/Fidelity or something and put it into a good mix of index funds, sure, cut the .75% fees that way.

As far as what to do next...also agree with TS...you should try and figure out what you would enjoy. Then you can investigate different paths to get there. IMO, education is pretty overvalued in terms of correlation to actually accomplishing something. Unless you just WANT to do it, I would never tell you to go do a MBA. Even undergrad just needs to be something you want to do or an intentional step on a path to what you want.

Since you have a lot of financial flexibility, I'd try to go spend time exploring things you think are interesting...take a class, shadow people, etc.

He's not a "wealthy person." He has risked capital for decade and succeeded... All things considered its a relatively easy transition.

Im not saying trade, I'm saying put it in a bank, or 5 banks (FDIC up to $250k?) until you can figure out how to effectively deploy it.

Me neither - I was suggesting that he do some research and look into putting it into a less-costly passive fund to save himself 80-90% of fees he's currently paying now, eg:

https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/fees

(it won't let me see Vanguard's US fund pages as I'm from the UK, but Vanguard UK's fees start from about 0.06% and even the self-balancing "Life Strategy" funds only charge 0.22%)

0.75% might not sound like much, but over a lifetime it makes a huge difference when you subtract inflation from your compounded gains:

plot 1000000*1.02^x-1000000 and 1000000*1.0125^x-1000000 between 0 and 50

Juk

The highest percentage play is to get into coding. You can either teach yourself, and contribute to some open source projects to build your credibility, or go to a 4-year school and get a degree, or do something in between with bootcamps and such. Coding is really the last place where you don't need a BA to get a great job. Then you have the choice of getting a full-time job, or freelancing, or doing contract work. There's a lot of flexibility and a ton of demand right now. Severe supply/demand imbalance, such that businesses are hiring people they wouldn't have considered a few years ago.

re: MBA, the value of an MBA is the network you leave with, not the knowledge you gain at school. If you want to run your own real estate co or car dealership, you don't need it. If you want to become a senior VP at a Fortune 500 company, it is almost essential.

you're in a great spot imo because you've built up a warchest and you have a gf (so we know you're not a mouthbreather).

First Q to ask is what do you actually like to do? Probably from your background the best bang for your buck/time would be to learn coding and/or data analytics but don't go studying something you don't like.

Congrats!

Have you considered the cannabis industry? I work on the media side and the opportunities are endless outside of growing (that is one side, Id stay away from).

+1. Vanguard Personal Advisory Service will charge 0.30% plus the cost of funds which likely won't run higher than another 0.15% or so. All in cost will be around 0.45%. You will mostly be invested in index funds with them, so the tax drag on your portfolio will be minimal.

I am certain that your all in cost at ML are quite a bit higher than 0.75%. I'd wager they are closer to 1.5-2% after the tax drag is factored in. If you are in a balanced portfolio with an expected return of 6-7% nominal, it is likely that 20-25% of your return is being unnecessarily lost in fees and taxes. It is extremely unlikely that anything ML puts you in is going to outperform a portfolio of index funds in the long run. This is particularly true for investing in taxable accounts, which I'm assuming is where most of your assets are located.

A good place to start reading up on this stuff is here: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Getting_started

Hey guys, thanks for more input. I spent yesterday clicking around on the businesses for sale page that TS posted and researching what it takes to buy an established small business, and I could actually see myself getting my feet wet in that area in the future.

About the Merrill investments: A couple years ago I got really interested in investing/trading and lost a bunch of money. This time around I considered doing a passive indexing strategy or going to classes on financial planning at a local school. I ended up going with what I felt was the safest route. Even if the .75% ends up being a lot of money when compounded over a long time, my thought process was that I am not really giving up .75% since their investment strategy will be superior to mine, and I also could take over my finances if I become more educated on them.

Their current investments are:
~$450k public equities
~$50k international market linked investment
~$50k sp500 market linked investment
~$200k hedgefunds (blackstone real estate income trust + partners group)
~$250k cash
We are even since I gave them funds 6 months ago.

Coding boot camps are something that has been suggested to me and that I should probably look a little further into. I was under the impression that the supply/demand for coders has balanced out more since there are so many of those things churning out coders, but I could be mis-informed. My worry about coding is that it falls into the category of something that would yield more money than the average field but be more tedious / not fun / very similar to grinding online cash games. It could be possible that creating something and contributing to something could make it feel more rewarding and interesting, though.

It sounds like an MBA would not be for me, and if I were to go the business route, learning it on my own would be a much better play.

The cannabis industry probably isn't for me. I smoke maybe twice a year and am probably less excited about the legalization of weed than most people in the USA. I'm not really sure where I'd fit in to it.

Hey, what's up?

I was going to send this in a pm but you don't have PM ability yet.

I'm currently on the other end of the spectrum. I'm currently a bike messenger (which may be something for you to consider while you invest your money...) looking to possibly start playing poker.

While poker may not be suitable for you anymore... what would you say to someone thinking about getting into poker. Would like to be making at least $75,000 a year or so after taxes.

Would you say it's still worth going for? Any suggestions on the best coaches or training videos?

I really can't offer too much advice in return unless you'd like to know more about being a courier. In terms of your money I would probably invest in like a 4-plex and rent out or airbnb the other 3 units like rand suggested. Then take the rest an invest in a portfolio that makes sense with your risk appetite and the rewards you are seeking. I would suggest Vanguard for the lowest fees.

I like to use https://portfoliocharts.com/ for comparing different portfolios. (no it's not my site)

Other than that, just spend some time exploring some different options and see what works for you. Kind of figure out what you want like Tooth recommended.

I'd consider programming as well but like you I figured that market was super oversaturated at this point. (perhaps we're wrong?). I wouldn't bother with an MBA. If going your own business route I would just learn by doing and seeking out advice from those already doing it.

Anyway, kind of interested in hearing other suggestions as I've been in a transition period myself (without as large of a bankroll) trying to figure out what to do with no degree and unsure of what I want (and have trouble figuring it out). I love the messlife but after 12 years of it, I'm thinking it may be time time to do something else.

-Kelsey