Sound advice in vegas imo

Agreed - this dumb thread should be replaced by "When and How to tell Them"

As much as you.

To be fair, their parents and siblings don't pay close to 50% for the same amount. Social security is like 30%, isn't it? And then income taxes are what, 25% of the remainder? Being "self-employed" carries ridiculous taxes.

In my case, Poker has been succesful when I play part time and am focused. I have very little attention span and can rarely play 8 hours straight. My best times came in from whenever I was travelling (zero losing sessions, clear mind) and worst when I was "grinding out" ABC textbook Poker for long shifts.

Basically I am the kind of person that freerolls life until I am "hungry" and need to hit the tables. So I am basically playing as a "hobby/investment" part-time. Really hard to say what I do for a living.

You can read 30 consecutive posts on any page and get the gist of it

my dad who watches me multitable once in a while who has clashed with me before plenty of times, asks 'why you looking at pocket fives, I know you'd never hold on to 5s, i've seen you play'.

i was like just frozen there with the Ivey mouth agape stare.

while sitting around the lunch table at work yesterday, surrounded by five people or so, it was brought up that i play poker.

one of my coworkers, with whom i get along great, couldn't seem to comprehend that poker is fundamentally an intellectual, skill-based game. i kept trying to explain that poker, while played with money, is, at its core, about skill, strategy, math, psychology, and making decisions based on information and expecting those decisions, if they're correct, leading to a return over the long run, much like investing. money, i said, is just how we keep score. i only got "WAT?"

this argument was then met with a counter argument that we poker players essentially justify our degen behavior by labeling poker with those terms i mentioned above, because we're "embarrassed to be considered gamblers."

/sigh.

I made that mistake of mentioning online poker to my family and got the speech from my grandmother on how gambling is "just like flushing money down the toilet". I stopped trying to explain that it's a game of skill after about 10 min and regretted bringing it up.

Edit: Your avatar rocks. Moment the bear realizes there is a lion standing in front of it...... priceless

The stuff I always get at school is:

how is there skill involved? surely its just whoever had the best hand wins?

where do you play?!
online
but then they can't see your face, so how is there any skill involved?

The first questions are pretty reasonable questions , if you ask me

Whenever I say I play poker, people who don`t play look at me in a way `you are a moron and you will lose your house and everything`

because you are a moran and yell at your damn computer. It annoys her and try to blame her for that. She just want you to stfu and tells you any thing so you'd just quit screaming at your pc.

Don't you think it's ironic that you get mad at her for not 'understanding' that being 93% is a good thing, yet you scream about that same thing to the computer? why would you scream if it was a good thing.


i know you probably never read this because you posted this months ago and you're probably bust by now, but still. All the egocentric, condescending responses itt wich are totally out of line, even in context of this thread, aggravate me a little bit.

Most of the pros don't play 8 hours straight, in fact, some pros spend as much as half of their time doing things like posting on 2+2, reading poker books, or going over their hand histories to review their play.

LMFAO

Ye i argued with somene some days ago, i forgot i shouldnt do this but i thought everything is going great so why not...

Anyways it ended up...

We saw a tournament on tv once and this full time pro went out to a new guy in the first HAND. And you say its a skill game ?

Im like ****...

One tournament, and especially one hand, mean absolutely nothing.

Poker is a long-term game for the serious player. AA is going to lose to 32o 13% of the time. Does this mean that the guy with 32 got lucky? Of course. But it also means that the guy playing AA in that situation is going to win 87% of the time.

I won't go into that math about what constitutes long-term in poker, but the point is that, OVER TIME, your aces are going to win at showdown against crap hands like 32o almost 9 times of out 10.

I have read a lot of posts where people post their results, and if they have less than 10K hands posted, much of the time they are told to come back when they have enough hands for the results to mean something. In mathspeak, they have to have a larger sample size for the results to be mathematically significant).

Here's another perspective: I have seen posts where a player claims to have never had a losing month. I have never seen anyone claim to never have a losing week.

I never had a losing day

level?

Oh, yeah? I have never lost a hand.

Which part do you think is a level?

Wow, you must be really crushing the PokerStars 10¢ 360-man turbos!

I bet you never even cash out.

Perhaps it was the part (whole post, actually) where you misinterpreted what the person you quoted was saying and then went to great lengths to explain something which everyone here (including the person you quoted) already knows.

This is such a great thread. I thought I'd add a few of my own. Some of these might have been mentioned in some manner already, so sorry for repeats...

1. A couple years ago I'm on a date with a girl who was in law school. Assuming I'm dealing with a reasonably intelligent human being, I go into how poker is played and how you rely on math, psychology, pattern recognition etc. The discussion goes for about 5-10 minutes and then she says, "So, you basically play online blackjack for a living? You know the casino always wins at that, right? You're just going to end up broke. Plus it's illegal..."

Not surprisingly, there was no next date.

2. At a bar with some friends and friends of those friends. I'm talking to some girl about poker and she had actually played before so sort of knew what I was talking about. Giving her the usual spiel and how I play for a career. We go on for another couple of minutes when she stops and says:

"Well, you don't play for real money though, right?"
Me: .....

Yeah, I pay all my bills with the play chips on PokerStars and FullTilt (I wish).

3. Buddy's co-worker is at my place hanging out. First time I've met this clown. My buddy brings up that I play poker for a living so this guy starts acting all shocked and looks at me with a completely serious look on his face:

Him: "How have you not been arrested yet? That sh*t is illegal, bro."
Me: "(thinking to myself) I want to shoot you in the face right now."

I'm not sure what tilted me more. Him asking how I haven't been arrested or him calling me bro.

Although, as annoying as it is to talk about poker IRL, poker was the primary reason I was able to get my current position at a trading firm. Now whenever people at work ask me about it it's cool because they actually understand that poker is beatable and they all think it's awesome.

However, the downside is when people IRL who know that poker was my primary source of income find out that I'm a trader now, I occasionally get the smarmy, "so...that whole gambling thing didn't work out for you did it??"

ugh.