I'd say your chances of making a decent living ($60,000+ profit per year, each year) from going pro are extremely slim. I generally think the term "poker pro" is an oxymoron. Without sponsorships, there are only a handful of people in the world who could survive financially just playing poker. You say it's a low percentage of making it as a poker pro, but i'd say the % is more like 0.001%. Saying you have a chance to make it as a poker pro is almost like saying you have a chance to win the powerball jackpot.

Most people would say Negreanu is a great tournament player and from live tournaments, he's only profited $3000 (not including expenses for travel/lodging) this year so far. If you factor in travel/lodging, he's lost tens of thousands of dollars so far this year.

Most people say Phil Ivey is currently the best poker player in the world. He's only lost $2,200,000 online so far this year. Maybe he'll turn it around but there is no guarantee he will.

I liked how you used the word "only"

Ur assuming op is talkin about live play


And if u have low overhead , and put in the hours, of course u can

Let's remember poker pro, short for poker professional, means u earn income from poker

Like any skill, it can be learned

There are many full and part time pros in these forums

Not at all like the powerball

You can too

Gl

U can look at sharkscope to get an idea of what guys r making monthly

And that's not incl rakeback n bonuses

Lotta money out there to b had.. Go get it

Also depends where you live, winning at 25NL in Russia could be considered "semi-pro" because it's better than flipping burgers.

Lots of 2/5 pros in the US make 40k-60k a year..

But yeah start from the micros and grind to the top, as you put it, is going to be really tough nowadays.

Clearly this is absolute nonsense.

I'd say it would require as much time and dedication as any competitive career and the vast majority don't have the time, or don't want to put the effort in. Personally I'd fall into both categories, as would most in the forum.

But if you think of the 'process' to become, say...a lawyer. You've got 3 years at university then a year of the LLP for 4 years in total. Or maybe an accountant. 3 years at uni then 2 and a half years of accountancy exams after graduation.

If someone spent 4 to 5 years studying poker, and I mean proper studying, not just watching a few episodes of PAD each week, then I'd expect them to be able to make a decent living from it. If we say you can start making 'decent money' online at 100nl, I don't think 5 years to go from 2nl beginner to 100nl winning reg is at all an unreasonable goal.

When trying to go pro you have a 50/50 chance of making it: either you go pro or you don't. Much better odds than lottery.

No, making 60K plus a year is not 1 in 100,000. Maybe out of all poker players, but that's not what we're really talking about.

It is a very long hard slog. Most folks won't/can't do it and quit trying. A few make it and a few claim they have made it on forums, but have not. It is a better hobby than it it is a job for most folks. If some one is determined to try it , I think they should. After all, there has been plenty of warning and advice on places like this thread.

I was exaggerating a bit with the powerball reference, but for every Daniel Cates there are probably 100,000 people who failed trying to rise up the levels like him.

Your comparison to being an accountant or lawyer is flawed. Once you become an accountant or a lawyer, you have the ability to earn $ because you are qualified for those positions. You could study poker for 10 years and there is still no guarantee you will be able to profit. Even if you are successful as a poker pro one year ($50,000 profit), you could have a down year the next year and lose $50,000. How many people calling poker their job can afford to net $0 after working 2 years? Once your bankroll gets low or completely busted, you can no longer work at your poker job unless you borrow (assuming you could get a loan), which makes it even tougher to be profitable. Borrowing is very common amongst poker "pros" but often leads to problems with repayment and huge financial trouble (see erick lindgren & brad booth).

Even if someone is deemed a successful poker pro at certain levels, moving up levels can be a quick way to go broke. If a player plays 1/2 and 2/5 and nets $15000 over 6 months and then jumps up to 5/10 and 10/20 and loses $25,000 over the next 6 months, is that poker pro successful because he could beat 1/2 and 2/5 or a failure since he netted $-10,000 for the year.

There just aren't many jobs where you can end the year making no money or losing your own money despite "working" all year.

So at this rate I'm very likely to have a year after uni in which I won't have a job (i.e. I won't be able to start my career for a year). Pretty confident I'll be able to live with my parents for that period, but that's in a pretty poor area of the country so a job for a single year there would likely be minimum wage (or close to it), and I wouldn't just want to freeload for another year. Essentially what I'm seeking is advice on an hourly expectation at poker to make it more worthwhile quality-of-life wise than a job at £6.50 ($11) per hour. I realise everyone has slightly different utility curves but I doubt there's enough deviation that answers here won't be useful. I should note that I have absolutely no desire to play poker 'professionally' beyond that year.

My personal general rule of thumb i a 50% markup on a job to make poker worthwhile. Everyone has different circumstances but that's my personal target. So if I were in your shoes I would be wanting $15/hour from poker to make it better than the job.

The point was, claiming becoming a 'pro' is as unlikely as winning the lottery was a wild exaggeration. Much as every winner at the tables likes to act as though it's the hardest thing in the world to do, this isn't premiership football or NBA basketball. It's about as tough as any other 'professional' career.

Yep, you could make nothing for 12 months (really, really unlikely mind you, assuming you're putting in 30-40 hours a week like a normal job). You could also be laid off by your firm in 'real life' during an economic downturn and spend those same 12 months looking for work.

You could fail the accountancy exams. You could fail law school. There's no 'guarantees' of anything in any profession where significant money is on offer. If you want a guaranteed job that's impossible to screw up, go apply to do some shelf stacking in Tesco. FWIW I'd have thought the overwhelming majority of people who put 4 or 5 solid years into poker...i.e. devote the same time to it they would a 'tough' degree subject and/or a full time job, would be able to beat 100nl, perhaps even higher.

Hardly anyone will make it, but that's not because poker itself is harder than any other competitive career. It's because the overwhelming majority don't want to put the effort in. Because after you've worked for 8-9 hours in a day, you don't really want to put in 4 more hours at the tables, another 16 hours at weekends, plus studying and improving your game. It's too much work when most people have social lives, families, girlfriends etc to attend to.

But if for whatever reason someone decided to put the same level of effort in that they did for their 'real job', I'd be absolutely shocked if they weren't beating 100nl in 5 years.

As much as several of us have come in this thread to throw some cold water on excited people wanting to be pros Day 1, you're completely wrong here. It is possible to be a poker pro. Several people in this thread make their living playing cards. It isn't powerball. It is a difficult career. Way back in the day, I believe it was Abdul who said "anyone who can making a living playing poker could make more money doing something else". That's more true today than then, however, making a good living playing cards is possible.

Sponsorships effectively don't exist at this point. If you're a North American player starting today, don't plan on them. Don't think about famous people. They don't relate to the business of making a living playing poker. If it were to happen, great. Your business plan can't involve any of it.

You don't understand the reality. You confuse famous TV players with actual working pros. A) I would never consider playing full time for $50K/year. B) RoR calcs exist for a reason, and established winning players should be able to understand variance.

Everything about this example is wrong. You're either rolled or you aren't. You can either handle the swings or you can't. Agree that shot taking/playing too high can make you broke.

You've never run your own business or been self-employed. There are jobs that aren't "salary man".

Again, playing poker for a living isn't easy. The majority of people posting ITT shouldn't consider it. However, you are making definitive-sounding posts about things where you don't have experience. That's fine, but I just wanted to call you on it. Go read z4reio's posts to see how a real pro sees the world. Dgiharris. Most people who reasonable go pro are just making more money from their hobby than their day job. It is that simple. They have a big sample, a decent BR, and a big BR. Basically, everything you've learned about pro poker from TV is wrong. Ignore EDog and DNegs as role models. Eli and Doyle and Chip shouldn't be on your radar. There are tons of hardworking full time pros who post in various strat forums. Get to know them, and understand.

Here is a totally old-guy take on poker.
So, starting salary to replace any decent job for a poker pro should be $100k/year. Your business plan should include how your expectation is to make $100k playing cards year 1. You should have one. This would make you decent working pro as a single guy. Your expenses should be low enough to pay taxes, health insurance, and build your BR based on this.

Your plan soon should be to be making $200k/yr from your poker job. I don't care how you do it. Your reasonable expectation (EV) should be to make this or more.

Then you're a poker pro and not a small stakes grinder who is miserable.

My 0.02 and I could be off base. I have a career, experience, and degrees, and maybe I underestimate how easy it is to get a day job that pays well. OTOH, most people don't understand that knowing basic math it would be pretty easy to get a job as a CnC machinist with on the job training, good starting salary, benefits, etc. People who know math have opportunity. Write code and prosper.

Generally I'd agree with the need to make significantly more at poker to. But that is when it comes to an "adult" career. The opportunity cost isn't present here, there is no risk (living with parents, should he go busto he hasn't lost much of anything really and can get a tesco shelve-stacking job if needed).

Basically I think you'd need to weigh what you personally value. Will you be able to actually put in the hours at poker (can you actually play 40 hours/week? it's much harder than it sounds), or will you need to be responsible to someone to actually put in the time?. How much do you value the freedom that comes with poker compared to being a peon somewhere (do you mind having a boss telling you what to do?). How will it affect you socially if you play online poker and don't get to have social interactions through-out the day? how will you cope with the stress of not having a guaranteed salary?.

There are plenty pros and cons and I think you need to weigh them based not on your finances, but on how you think it will affect your overall quality of life. The money you stand to gain or lose compared to a low-wage job isn't something that will have any effect on the rest of your life (assuming you don't bink the sunday million), so focusing on finances seems wrong to me.

Finally, you should also keep in mind that poker winnings are tax free in the UK so you don't need a very high hourly to be better of from poker financially. A lot of otherwise good advice from Americans tend to apply strictly to Americans. In the rest of the world we don't have to worry about not having an employer-paid health insurance, and in some cases we don't even have to pay taxes on poker winnings making a $50k year in poker much better than a $50k year job financially.

As a full time job or a part time job?

If you're expecting to play poker and earn even close to what you could in a minimum wage job full time I don't think that's realistic. Upping your volume so much and actually having to put in a lot of time is just too big of a leap imo.

If you mean instead of a part time job then I don't think your hourly needs to be that much better than what you'd expect from a part time job because you are just doing it for some extra cash and if you do mess up it's not going to be the end of the world if you're at home and the ability to pick and choose your hours is a huge bonus. Especially when most part time jobs are taking up huge portions of your weekend which when I suspect most of your mates are in more normal 9-5s these days losing that weekend sucks for your social life.

I would say that you probably need to be doing something in this year though apart from just playing poker that doesn't just look like you've done nothing for a year.

DougL - good post

I'm not trying to dissuade people from attempting to play poker for a living, i'm just stressing that it's very difficult (and even more so since black friday) and that the overwhelming majority of people who attempt it, fail.

I haven't seen too many graphs that are straight up (actually, pre-black friday, I played recreationally on FTP and Stars and would always check out the PTR's for others at 9 handed SnG's ($10-50) i'd play... There would generally be 6 or 7 losing players at the table and 2 or 3 winning players (I was a "winning" player even though my graph was slightly above break even but I didn't have high expectations so I was ok with that). It was very common to see big loser graphs and extremely uncommon to see a big winner graph). There were several times where the other 8 guys at the table were all lifetime losers.

As far as pros go, some people will have a great looking graph for one year or several years and then have a graph that looks very different for the next year or few years (Phil Ivey, up $19,000,000 for several years, now down $5,000,000 for the last 1 1/2 years - Everyone says he's a great player but how can the difference in his graphs be explained...is it variance? Is 110,000 hands over 1 1/2 years not a large enough sample size? Is it possible his graph will eventually get to the -$19,000,000 mark? At the rate Ivey is losing, he will be a lifetime online loser in about 3 years. He's the greatest of all time, he clearly knows how to play the game and has put in tons of time studying the game, he's put in a decent amount of volume yet he can't seem to win...how is this possible?)

I just don't think it's realistic to make $200,000 a year from poker without sponsorships. Even if you pulled this off, there is no guarantee you wouldn't lose some of all of the $200,000 playing the next year, even if you're a solid player. I don't have any interest in trying to become a poker pro because I have a career and playing poker for a steady living, to me, just isn't realistic. I go to the casino once in a while and play for fun but it's depressing to see guys lose their money there and then act like the few hundred dollars they just lost was their life savings or money they needed for their mortgage/rent.

If you live in a country where you have to pay taxes on your winnings, there's no point even trying to make it.

Thanks guys, will have a think. Re this:

In this case I'd already have a guaranteed job at the end of the year, if not I wouldn't dream of trying to play poker for a year.

It's pretty easy just to lie and say you went traveling for a year too, especially after uni.

How is it different than any other self-employment career? You have pay taxes on your income from those businesses, right?

Disclaimer: The preceding should not be construed as a defense of the taxation of income of any kind.

Again, you're an outsider who doesn't know the business. That's fine/good, but you just don't know the economy. There are people playing at Commerce who have the EV to make this. They play high stakes. They're playing 10/20 and 20/40 NL, or they're playing white chip limit games. This isn't the luck based $200k score. It is the "I make about $100/hour in the games, here are my results for the last 5 years" guys. These are the guys who moved to Mexico and Canada and make > 0 BB/100 while hitting SNE. I agree that the poker business has shrunk.

Again, you talk about sponsorships. They literally don't exist for most of us. You're talking about the pretend world of HSP and PAD and 2008 WSOP re-runs. That's TV and not 2014 poker playing. Forget tournament trail grinding. Profitable poker is (and maybe always was) cash game play by skilled people who you've never heard of, with a very few exceptions.

So, what I'm saying directly is you need to be able to do one of these things.

• Crush online NL400 or NL1K+ for a good win rate in a place where you have access to sites that spread it
• Crush live 5/T NL in a place that offers 10/20NL and something higher at peak times
• Beat for a big rate at least 40/80 LHE in a place that spreads 80/160 or 100/200+ regularly
• Play on Stars as a consistent SNE who also wins pre-RB

If your poker business doesn't have that on the horizon, be concerned about your business plan. There are very few places in the US that this can be done. There are probably a few MN guys who supplement online who are in this league, but most people shouldn't move there to try.


All this tl;dr to say, yes playing poker is hard. I wouldn't recommend it now. However, it isn't winning lotto. It is a business with variance. It can be done, but is harder than most think. Your statements are not correct, though the general message is true.

Don't play tournaments, nor do I know about making a living playing $10-$50 ones. I assume some SNEs make a living at it. Could be that the stakes aren't high enough, so anyone who wins moves up to pro stakes. There aren't a lot of happy NL25 or LHE .5/1 grinders, either. People who crush 10/20 online have different looking graphs.

Looking at your posting and watching your vids, I believe you're someone who could make it as a pro. You have a long term history as a winner, right? Is poker better? That's a much harder question.

Think about pro poker as a business. You're investing time and money to play. You're doing that instead of some other business. Would you enjoy living at home replacing your minimum wage job? I know guys who loved fly fishing who got guide jobs and then hated their hobby. Could happen here.

You seem like a young smart guy. Could you find training to write code? Seems like everyone is writing web pages. Being a machinist these days isn't dirty/loud standing over a machine, it is programming an automated one. The job market has changed. It favors smart people, and you seem on the winning side of that. There's an oil boom all over the US, and I assume other places. Finding a job that isn't minimum wage should be possible, if you're willing to try something new.

If playing poker for a year and seeing what next sounds fun, take an honest look at your results and see if it could work. If you're just doing it because you have no other ideas, look harder for other ideas. Very few people in their early 20's know what they want to do. That's standard. IMO, just have a thought that what you're doing could lead to something good -- have some outs. You might read this.

It's pretty easy to make a few hundred weekly online playin poker.. Between profits, rb n bonuses etc.. To get to the real $ is a lil tougher.. Not all of us are like Owen (mamacoolj) and can 30-40table 25nl-200nl , 40 hours a week ( but making like 10k month.. He's a Beast)
But he is an extreme example of what can be made.. Plenty sne sng players are making great money too... But if u decide to solely play poker... Deff have 6mos life roll saved, and make sure u still interact other real life ppl.. It's very easy to turn into a hermit, playin 8hours a day.
Gl luck man... Sky's the limit