Quote:
Originally Posted by chinz
It doesn't really matter if your working or going to school or whatever at the same time, it's completely different/independent at least for me. I'd estimate 80 hours of poker without work roughly as hard as 80 hours of poker while working 160 hours. I have no problem working 8+ hour days at normal job, but I couldn't imagine keeping up that kind of volume at poker, regardless if I was doing it on my freetime or as my main source of income.
Have you ever tried to play 150+ hours of poker in a month?
The main problem at poker is that if you are "forcing" yourself to put in a lot of volume, you're probably not playing your A game. What that means is worse hourly, or in some cases possibly even negative hourly. And my mood is highly dependent on my results, even if I know I shouldn't be result oriented, and know that 50bi downswing doesn't really effect my economy in any way, it still stresses me A LOT.
I'm probably in better situation than >95% of my peers wrt money and I don't even need to make a living from poker, but still downswings have always been really hard for me to handle.
i still disagree, and no, i have never had the energy to play 150+ hours of poker since i never had the energy to do that after work. the original question was about 100 hrs of poker or 200hrs of work per month, nothing about 150+ hours. i have played a handful of 100 hr months.
i have to be at work 8:30...no way i can leave before 18:00. normally from 8:30 to 19:00. every working day minus vacations. ~8hr working days are a walk in the park, try working ~11 hours per day for a couple of years in a row and you'll get the idea. playing poker you can choose to play when you want and you can choose your own schedule. that is something that many poker players have trouble realising how huge that is. you can play 3x 1hr10min sessions per day every day of the month as you choose, when your alertness and energy is the highest. some days you feel like playing more, some days you feel like playing less. not really so with normal work.
the steady salary from a work certainly makes it a lot easier to sit there for 200 hrs, but if i'm consistent winner at stakes where i can make a living, i don't see how too stress levels could be intolerable. in general i think poker players are remarkably lazy and whine way too much about everything and overreact to both downswings and upswings (definitely don't mean you personally, quite the opposite). depends where you work at, but you will most likely stress A LOT at work too. i certainly do.
regular job's strict schedule and looong working hours will wear you down a lot more than 100 hrs of poker even with downswings (again, given that your brm is solid). that's the case at least for me. interesting to see if i will have a different opinion in 2-3 years.
for a 5 year period with my current experience and knowledge, i would definitely take 100 hours of poker over 200 hours of work.