I don't think he's trolling; he probably had a nice session of getting his nuts kicked in all day and hasn't figured out how to leave it at the table. When he has a good session, he'll come in and talk all about how monetary goals are important with the conviction of a door-to-door salesman selling biodegradable cleaners.

For OP, go back to school. You don't even have a high school education. Gain some life and work experience. The reason you want to leave your job for poker is because you're working a **** job because you left yourself no outs by dropping out of school.

I have a degree, and I quit my job in my early 30's. If it didn't work out, I could have easily gotten back into my field, as I was one of the top performers in a narrow field. If you can't put that kind of dedication toward a career or school, don't expect that kind of dedication toward poker. Everything I've ever done that seemed important, I've put my best into it, and I've had to put more into poker to stay up with the evolving climate over the years than in anything else.

^ 3,240 hands of poker I played today, winrate was +12.46bb/100 AND I was running a buyin below EV.

Such a sad and stressful day! Clearly!...

Blah, i did have a degree and a decent job. I still hated it.
And life is full of opportunities without a degree.

Fairly confident that the video games don't involve spending potentially hours just making the decision not to play repeatedly.

haha degens ITT seriously.

Poker is one of the more interesting games as long as you keep studying and analysing your game instead of just mindless grinding. When you lose your interest and fall into just mindless grinding it is time to quit imo. Or at least not too long after that.

RPG games are however worse than mindless poker grinding. Thats mindless grinding for useless random drops instead of usefull money.

Yes, that's my point. Today, you're all inspirational again; yesterday, you were apathetic.

I didn't say a degree and good job will make you enjoy your job, but it's better than dropping out of school and hoping you can make a living gambling. People are so backwards on this site that I'm speechless. Crush your current income by a significant amount and then consider playing for a living. Myself and everyone I know that's been able to do it for a living for more than 10 years did it this way.

I don't really enrich people's lives by taking their money, but I did in my previous occupation. It's something to think about, and something you think about more the longer you've been doing it.

I give up on some people!

This x10

sorry but I don't understand what you mean here

Think he's talking about live poker... 'hours'

Just this.

How to become a poker pro.

1. Have a job that pays your bills.
2. Play poker on the side.
3. Due to unhampered bankroll growth (no withdrawals) work up to play at limits where you make great hourly
4. Wake up and realize that job is least profitable part of day.
5. Search soul and find that you could enjoy the poker full time and that you won't miss job.
6. Look at liferoll and bankroll and determine that you could live for a year without touching BR.
7. Check one more time and make sure your WR isn't artificially high due to playing super-premium hours.
8. Quit job, become poker pro.

I know people who followed that list who found going pro difficult, from the mid-stakes. The idea of playing at low micros and suddenly going pro is amazing. Even considering it is .

True. OTOH, if you're doing anything for a living, at some point you get back to hourly. In the real world, you care about $ hour.

This is like super concerning to me. It is a giant red flag, and props to you for admitting that 60% of your lifetime earnings are from a single score. You aren't talking hourly or RIO, just a bulk profit number. Real world with a very good job, $15k is a good month. You want to replace a good job, you make this much profit every month playing poker and then you're crushing it. If your poker trajectory is such that this amount seems reasonable and doesn't require a big score, let's definitely talk about going pro.

The thing is...if I felt like I could make a good living playing poker and made that my plan for the future, I would feel like I should be practicing poker as much as possible. This would mean:

- Finish my degree
- re-locate to an area that has a relatively low cost of living
- Get a part-time job (25 hours/week) that pays a decent wage, say $25/hr. Ideally this job would involve minimal time commitment outside of work hours and minimal stress that would affect my thoughts and moods outside of work.
- Play/practice poker 40 hrs/week.
- Rinse and repeat until I've built up a large bankroll and have a good hourly over a significant sample (idk what this is tbh, 100k hands?)

This plan is in contrast with what you seem to be proposing, which is working 40 hrs/week and playing poker 15-20 hours on the side.

The upside to your poker journey is:

- if poker doesn't work out for whatever reason, you still have your full-time job and all your work/business contacts in your field of expertise
- much more financially conservative
- probably much easier to have a girlfriend/wife (boyfriend/husband) and family this way

But the downside is that it might take you five years to be good enough at poker to go pro. In my plan, I'd be trying to get there within 2 years. My (hypothetical) plan would require a lot of self-confidence, I know...

100k hands isn't really a big enough sample to consider going pro. Very easy for a long-term loser to win over 100k.

These two points don't really seem to go together.

The funny thing with poker now is that winrates at good stakes take so long to properly reflect that we are doing well that by the time you have that sample the games have moved on. Unless you're putting in a tonne of hands which has negative implications on our development as a player.

Basically getting into poker now sucks.

why not?

Places with low costs of living tend not to pay high wages, which $25 an hour for a part time job is.

$25 is about £16 which in a full time job in the uk equates to about £31k a year. Which is more than the average person working full time earns. If you want a job like that which requires minimal effort outside of work, is low stress & is in the proximity of somewhere with a low cost of living then just lol.

Cost of living is generally proportionate to average income.

Sure, I mean I understand that's generally the case. I said "relatively low cost" which just means living in the cheapest part/suburb of the city you work in, e.g.

Maybe I should have said $20/hr. That's a reasonable average wage for a college graduate in the U.S., comes out to about $40k/yr.

At 25 hrs./week, comes out to close to $25k, which should be fine for living in a "relatively low cost area" and having no dependents.

day trading is much worse than poker, its a 0 sum game like poker but instead of jungleman and sallywoo you are playing vs billion dollar hedgefunds. 95%+ of traders lose money

I disagree, first playing tons of hands makes you better if you are the type of person thats able to make it online. ie isildurr, otb _redbaron. Second even in canada making 10k usd a month=13k cad tax free, that is top 1% income.

Well, for me it took about ten years, but I was also playing 75/150 limit live at the time and games on Planet and Paradise until Party came around. It also was 2002 when I left my job, so the games went from having a decent win rate against good players (relative for the time) to having amazing win rates online.

I had no aspirations to play for a living; then the boom happened and it was a birthday party everyday with the gifts being bales of cash, so we discussed it many times and came to the decision after the games just kept getting better and better and more and more players were being brought to PartyPoker via Sexton's .COM commercials.

Having 5+ players to the flop in the biggest game on Party at the time (30/60 limit), 24/7, was a money tree bearing endless fruit. Then Moneymaker hit the following year, and things got sick crazy good.

Since I can't play online, where are these super loose games online now? I dabbled in NL when Party started to first open these games up, and I remember open shoving a full stack with AA utg in a 100NL cash game for the **** of it and got called in two spots by KJo and a crappy suited paint like Q3s or Q4s. I don't even think anyone heckled in the chat because most of them probably thought they were reasonable calls.

The amount of time I've put into the game to evolve with the online games over years, I couldn't imagine one wanting to put all that time in just to get started at doing it for a living.

Basically, between 2000-2006, it was a viable alternative for many as the job market (poker) was very promising, even for white collar workers. Today, it's more like getting a medical degree.

Can some of you young tykes tell me what is the attraction with wanting to do it for a living, and I'll tell you if your perception is accurate.

right out of college I guess a nice job at edward jones, however im an anti authoritarian ****tard and told my boss to suck a dick the 2nd time he slighted me.

choose poker right

LOL

thx, helps to hear what other people did.

In my case, long story short I'm not sure what I want to do in life yet and if I could make a boatload of money right off the bat instead of making $40k a year and hating my boring-ass job, that would be swell. It's hard to explain though -- it's mostly not a financial thing that makes me want to play poker. Like I don't care that much that the game is way harder than it was a decade ago, because it just presents even more of a challenge now. Also, other things in life just kind of bore me. I did an internship in NYC last semester and it was just like endless paperwork, boring and un-challenging work. I need something that challenges my mind or I'll hate my life.

Poker isn't something you choose to do for a living like becoming an engineer. It doesn't work that way, and anything you do for a living becomes nothing but a job at some point. If you really think playing for a living is a world of fun and freedom, you've got some hard lessons to learn.

That said, what is your plan in poker to "make a boatload of money right off the bat" in poker?