Well hello there!
Buffyslayer has the overview right. I retired in Summer 2016 so I could start doing something more meaningful with my life. I played poker (mostly) professionally for 12 years, and it was time to move on.
Poker showed me the future of AI and computers solving problems, so I decided to dive in. I moved to San Francisco that fall and enrolled in a coding school called Holberton. The first six months were super crazy and reminded me a lot of the early days of online poker: A lot of people who don't know **** trying to figure stuff out. There are a
ton of people trying to make it and what seems like an endless stream of job opportunities.
By the spring I was at least good enough to interview at major tech companies and ended up landing a job at LinkedIn. So yea, I've been down in Silicon Valley for just over a year working as a Software Engineer.
The team that hired me does a lot of statistical work and I think poker on my resume may have been an asset. Interestingly, I occasionally get contacted by recruiters asking specifically about my poker background. I was always afraid it would be a liability, but it seems like it could be an asset for my career, at least within fields that are computation heavy.
Feel free to fire any questions.