A Foolproof Plan to Becoming a Professional Poker Player

I think the most important aspect of dealing with kids like this is to have an honest, coaching conversation with them. One that illustrates the complexities involved in making a living gambling. It is the statement that will guide you during your career. The next step is to get a little more specific and quantify what abundance looks like for you. A concrete yearly income you are hoping to achieve. HOW. The real plan. Drawing from our vision statement, we need to make sure that our plan is financially responsible and that we are continuing to develop our skills away from the table. Bellagio. It’s important to know how much that game is worth to you. The best place to start would be to ask around and see what the best player in that game can expect to make, then deduct about 30% from that total. To make the math easier, let’s just make it $20 flat per hour. Since our goal is to make $100,000 a year, now we can have a rough idea of how many hours we actually need to spend at the table playing poker. Ken Lennaard has been around the professional poker circuit for almost 20 years. Among his numerous accomplishments are Swedish Championships both live and online, three WSOP final tables and over $1.5m in live earnings. During that year, I realized that the way the profession is portrayed in all the poker shows on TV is a steaming crock pot of bullshit. You're not playing against machines; you're playing against humans, who are always getting better. Matt recently went to dinner with a bunch of poker friends. They decided to play credit card roulette for the $2,000 dinner tab -- everyone tossed their credit cards into a pile, and the server picked one at random to charge. Matt's card got picked, and the only reaction it elicited from him was an annoyed chuckle. Vegas nightclubs and plowing through four $500 bottles of Grey Goose at a VIP table. The next day, you're wondering if skipping breakfast will leave you enough money for dinner. That's the thing about poker: it's not like a business, where a customer gives you money and in return you give the customer a car or a TV or a hamburger. Poker is a zero-sum game, which means that every dollar you win was lost to you by another person. I realized I could never be a poker pro long-term: I was playing at the Orleans in Las Vegas. Everyone at the table was friendly, and I was having a great time just chatting up my tablemates. I don't know if he was playing with retirement money or extra spending cash. I don't know if my busting him out meant that he would be short on money for the rest of the month. However, in certain states this is not the case – and sometimes different rules apply to card rooms. Those you can read, those you can't read, those who stick to the same strategy, those who have no strategy at all – have your opponents run the gamut of personalities. Know how to play Omaha, 5-card draw, and 7-card stud, too. The more variants you know, the better your skills. You’ll be playing in the tournaments with the big boys. Or you can stay local and chug away at it slowly. To be sure you’re made of quality stuff, play when the going gets tough. Sometimes even good players get nervous and end up doing something they'd regret. You don’t need to travel circuits around the world to be a professional poker player – you just need to make it your main source of income. If you find a place or two you jive with, stick with those places. People may start not wanting to play with you, or worse, recognizing your habits and strategy. If you sense this coming, you may have to widen your circuit and play unsuspecting strangers. I am saying it takes some thought, introspection and honest evaluation of your talents, motives and determination to assess whether you are resilient enough to succeed in this unusual life style. Remember, if you’re playing low stakes and beating them like a drum those winnings will probably not be able to support you. You need to determine how much money you will need to earn in order to support yourself and, if not single, your family. If you have been keeping solid records, then you know your hourly earn rate over a thousand or more hours. Here is a sobering fact – if you determine that you will need to play higher stakes to earn enough money to live on then the competition just became stronger and you will need to prove that you can still win against stronger opposition. The best way to accomplish this is to identify the stakes you will need to win at in order to live well and begin playing while you still have an income stream. After each winning session, put half of your new found wealth in a locked up kitty until you have the requisite bankroll to start your business. Using the above bankroll examples should mean that by saving just half your wins you should be able to amass a $12,000 bankroll in about four months. If you’re going to be successful then forget about a bruised ego that may occur as you envision others seeing you dropping down in stakes. There are only two ways to do that – one is by cutting back on your expenses thereby adding to it weekly and/or by adding to it through another income stream. If you do not ardently protect your bankroll you ultimately will go broke and be out of business. They dream of doing something that they would enjoy or would be inspiring such as becoming a doctor, social worker, teacher, soldier or a member of any number of other professions. One day they question what they do for a living, thinking it has no redeeming social value. They wonder how they became trapped in this job – and yes, it will be a job. Many play professional poker their whole lives, enjoy it immensely, cherish the friendships they have made through the game and never have a second thought. I had a post some time ago on a method that I was shown by Jennifear (of P5s fame) that works brilliantly. Also, the extent of a professional's career varies. Most poker professionals view their poker-playing as a temporary job. They may be between jobs or expect to enter a higher-paying occupation in the future.

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Eldorado in Shreveport also garners plenty of attention where poker players like to go. Then in New Orleans, Boomtown casino is the most well-known, giving those a break from Bourbon Street to come in from the bar and on to the poker tables.

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On your first deposit Party Poker offers you a max bonus of $500 and is one of the most popular online Canadian poker sites. That way you know your personal payment information is safe and secure.

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Many times in no limit play there is also a maximum buy in as well. This is actually a form of protection for the players. Players get to play more hands than in a full game and play their hands more aggressively.

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And to think that he only started playing because an injury shattered his dreams of playing football professionally. Ivey is also known as the guy who beat up on the table Andy Beal, the mathematician who had achieved fame challenging the big names of the poker world.

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The American Spellbound is a story of greed, politics and the illusions that allow us to get through the day, based on Katya G. Cohen\'s decade in the high-stakes, fast-paced, blindly gluttonous financial industry.