Hard Realities about Playing Poker Professionally - Part 1

Being a professional poker player is kind of like being an astronaut or a rock star to most people. I would either find a way to mess with them or just avoid the subject altogether. After all, it's an exceedingly rare vocational path and most people still consider the game to be straight up gambling (or luck) anyways. So I know that they don't mean any harm with their ridiculous line of questioning. It's just a genuine intrigue with something that is incredibly foreign to them.I am not going to say anything about live poker either. Obviously the incredibly slow pace of the game and the fact that you can only play one table really sucks for an online player like me. However, this is mitigated by the fact that the worst players on earth love to play live poker in casinos. This is the workload of a full-time grinder playing 5 hours a day, 24 days a month (5 x 24 = 120 hours).I will also factor in some rakeback. These will be rough estimates based off of my experience with the Pokerstars rakeback program. However, it leaves a fair bit to be desired for people who plug away at the very lowest limits. I rode through extravagant highs and abysmal lows, financially and emotionally. Some parts of the ride were pretty inadvisable for a young twentysomething. I was thrust headfirst through a unique range of stupidly fun times and odd situations and expanded my palate of life experiences in short order during my crucial early adult years. I have seen nearly every human emotion played out in its purest natural form over a game of cards. I myself have felt like I was on cloud nine and rock bottom at various points. I have seen people so euphoric they have cried tears of joy at the poker table. I have seen people go from the verge of homelessness to paying six figures in taxes per annum. I have seen people crash and burn, crumble in defeat, go into debt, and look back on the whole thing as an ephemeral dream. Playing poker for a living is a roller coaster in every metaphorical way. It has provided me with raw elation and sheer depression. There is a sincere form of human nature that is brought out in every person when they engage in a game of poker. A part of you is bared for all to see. It brings out the very best and absolute worst in everybody. Poker was not invented as an occupation. At times, it felt like I was trying to bend the laws of physics. Sometimes, I felt like a visionary, and sometimes I felt delusional. You cannot just interview for a position and start on a Monday; there is an exorbitant amount of groundwork required to even try playing poker for a living and have any glimmer of hope of coming out ahead. A beginning poker player is terrible for a long, long time (sometimes, forever) before seeing any progress. Touch." You can make a year's worth of rent in a few hours (I've done this many times), or you can go months of full-time play and break even, or even lose (I've done this many times as well).When I began, I never expected to make a livelihood out of poker. I was largely unacquainted with, and I wanted to unveil it all. I enjoyed the competitive nature and the creativity required to play, just like Scrabble or chess or a reasonably fun video game but with layers upon layers of further elements. I liked the rush of triumph. I loved the mind games. I even loved the torture of not knowing what to do in a certain spot and fruitlessly contemplating the strategy for hours and hours. It gave me the same rush akin to competing in athletics but without having to sign up for a league or do any cardio. Unlike a game such as checkers, trends and tactics fluctuate fast. One must constantly adapt. You can't just get it down pat one day and profit off your knowledge ad infinitum. Best believe that when money is at stake, your opponents will be evolving rapidly. Your shots have the loft they are supposed to; they draw or fade in the wind as intended and fall gracefully back down to Earth and it just feels great. Something similar can and does happen when you start with poker. You start forming plans during hands, against certain opponents, and they start panning out more often. You start noticing what worked or didn't work the last times. You start identifying certain situations coming up again and again and they don't surprise you as much. You start noticing differences between your approach and your opponents. Of course, this was after countless days failing miserably on the virtual felt, with no clue what I was doing wrong or how I should be playing differently. What online cash game poker entailed was me playing on a large, secondary monitor to my laptop with multiple poker table windows cascaded and tiled on the screen. I got scarily adept at clicking a mouse accurately and quickly. Sometimes I would play something like two to four tables, which is obviously more than you can play at once in Vegas. But most of the time I would play somewhere between 12 to 16 tables at once. Each table may harbor between 1 to 5 percent of my total bankroll. This kept my "risk of ruin" to a minimum. The most I ever played was 28 tables simultaneously. If it sounds hectic, it's because it was. There isn't much time to mull over decisions. This is especially true once you get comfortable enough with the game that maybe 90 percent of all decisions would file under the classification of "standard." A guy at the casino can see maybe 30-40 hands per hour in the flesh if they are lucky. At my peak I was easily seeing 2,000-plus hands per hour. So even if I am making less-optimal decisions here and there, so long as I am not sinking to negative expected value, I am largely increasing my profits over a constant time frame. It was legitimately exhausting on the brain.I focused on cash games for many years, playing when I felt like it and not playing when I didn't feel like it. This was one of the more profound benefits of playing poker professionally: no set hours. Some days I would wake up and want to play all day, and so I did. Other times I would go a week without wanting to even get dealt one hand. And so I didn't. It is hard to schedule your work like this in a traditional American corporate career.

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This includes cookies from third party social media websites if you visit a page which contains embedded content from social media. The 12-year-old Roland would play cards on the school bus and make wagers with his friends.

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