Off Topic Poker Forums

+1 to Kulk's post above. You don't always have to get a degree, but something outside/along with poker is really important imo. I teach at a community college, went through a bunch of school myself and really enjoy what I do. That being said, I see a lot of students struggling through their degree programs, banking on the promise that there will be a good job waiting at the end of the road. The truth is though, a college degree (of any type) doesn't mean what it used to and doesn't automatically give you a career. Maybe think about some type of trade school that you might enjoy......

Realistically, playing poker is a terrible way to make a living. You get no benefits and accrue nothing toward a pension / retirement income. If you are making six figures a year playing poker that's one thing, but there are very few people capable of doing that. Also, the amount of money you make at poker is a function of the difference in skill level between you and the competition. The poker ecology is subject to the same laws of natural selection that govern real world ecology -- the weakest players are eventually killed off in the player pool because they lose too much.

You need to be thinking about a long-term career and what you need to do to achieve it. I don't know your situation exactly, but if you honestly self-assess your poker skills and the poker economy, there's a very high probability that you will realize it is not a very attractive career option. (And that shouldn't be surprising, because poker playing provides very little value to society. You only get paid by bad players who want the entertainment value of playing with you, but the popularity of poker has likely already peeked, so there's not much on the horizon in terms of additional wealth opportunities.)

Find something that you can get passionate about and pursue it. On the one hand, you have to be realistic that people aren't going to pay you money to play a video game. But on the other hand, there are lots of different careers and you should pursue what appeals to you with vigor. You're not going to get a lot of job offers if all you can show on your resume is that you flunked college classes because you couldn't motivate yourself to go and spent your time at home playing poker on the internet.

One of the worst effects poker playing can have on people is to numb their motivation for other aspects of life. It sounds like that is happening to you and I can only emphasize that you need to take control of your life and change that. Grinding a living at poker is NOT a good long-term plan for many people and going down that road will affect your future job prospects, social life, and overall happiness. As much as I am obviously trying to argue against pursuing poker, the most important thing for you to do is to honestly self-assess your situation. Take seriously the arguments against poker as well as those for. But keep in mind that the arguments for poker tend to be based on short-term gratification while those against are based on longer-term gratification. And humans have a HUGE bias toward short-term gratification.

I hope you are able to make the choices that are best for you. Good luck in whatever you decide to do.

Good post, Sweetjazz.

Nice work sweetjazz! Some good advice!

Realistically, playing poker is a terrible way to make a living. You get no benefits and accrue nothing toward a pension / retirement income. If you are making six figures a year playing poker that's one thing, but there are very few people capable of doing that. Also, the amount of money you make at poker is a function of the difference in skill level between you and the competition. The poker ecology is subject to the same laws of natural selection that govern real world ecology -- the weakest players are eventually killed off in the player pool because they lose too much.

You need to be thinking about a long-term career and what you need to do to achieve it. I don't know your situation exactly, but if you honestly self-assess your poker skills and the poker economy, there's a very high probability that you will realize it is not a very attractive career option. (And that shouldn't be surprising, because poker playing provides very little value to society. You only get paid by bad players who want the entertainment value of playing with you, but the popularity of poker has likely already peeked, so there's not much on the horizon in terms of additional wealth opportunities.)

Find something that you can get passionate about and pursue it. On the one hand, you have to be realistic that people aren't going to pay you money to play a video game. But on the other hand, there are lots of different careers and you should pursue what appeals to you with vigor. You're not going to get a lot of job offers if all you can show on your resume is that you flunked college classes because you couldn't motivate yourself to go and spent your time at home playing poker on the internet.

One of the worst effects poker playing can have on people is to numb their motivation for other aspects of life. It sounds like that is happening to you and I can only emphasize that you need to take control of your life and change that. Grinding a living at poker is NOT a good long-term plan for many people and going down that road will affect your future job prospects, social life, and overall happiness. As much as I am obviously trying to argue against pursuing poker, the most important thing for you to do is to honestly self-assess your situation. Take seriously the arguments against poker as well as those for. But keep in mind that the arguments for poker tend to be based on short-term gratification while those against are based on longer-term gratification. And humans have a HUGE bias toward short-term gratification.

I hope you are able to make the choices that are best for you. Good luck in whatever you decide to do.

Thank you for writing something intelligable regarding professional development, I thank God every day that I had already graduated from university and started my first job before the Moneymaker effect, because I had to develop my playing skills as a hobby instead of as a professional persuit and can say I'm both a 6 figure earner in real life and online over the course of ~10 years. The reason you see so many unemployed people with degrees is because they chose a poor degree for employment and personaI development from a career and financial standpoint, not because the educational system has failed. It may have taken me a lot longer than I would've liked in order to become successful at poker without having the free time of a student, but I look back at all of the poker players I met along the way and see how few of those poker players managed to succeed at poker, let alone life, and the survivorship bias is extremely disturbing. Likewise, I think the notion that persuing a degree, a career and a family completely interferes with your ability to progress at Poker is just complete and utter bullshit spoken from the mouths of lazy, unmotived teenagers with obsessive compulsive disorder and a modicum of talent only spent on taking advantage of the lowest common denominator.

A degree is not something you persue in case you fail at poker, poker is something you persue as a hobby until you're making so much money that you can't rationalize going to work anymore, and that amount is much bigger than you think it is.

Go to school, go traveling or open a business if you don't want to go to school, poker is not a life persuit.

dreams coming to die itt...

fwiw, being a poker pro and the lack of benefits and whatnot is the same as being a pro trader (sort of a "real job"). very few in either of these fields survive long-term, dire warnings that there's no edge and "everybody's solid," and they both get the same arguments for adding nothing of value to the world. and just because a company doesn't give you a pension doesn't mean you fail at retirement. you can do that on your own. however, health care is another thing, depending on your country.

but people get into trading to make a lot of money and parachute out. if you can't see that with your poker career, pursue something else and keep it as a hobby as others have said.

One of the worst effects poker playing can have on people is to numb their motivation for other aspects of life. It sounds like that is happening to you and I can only emphasize that you need to take control of your life and change that. Grinding a living at poker is NOT a good long-term plan for many people and going down that road will affect your future job prospects, social life, and overall happiness. As much as I am obviously trying to argue against pursuing poker, the most important thing for you to do is to honestly self-assess your situation. Take seriously the arguments against poker as well as those for. But keep in mind that the arguments for poker tend to be based on short-term gratification while those against are based on longer-term gratification. And humans have a HUGE bias toward short-term gratification.
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This whole post is spot-on, but I really want to highlight this section. In 2006-8, when it was probably at it's peak, 2p2 was absolutely littered with people who had managed to win 1k in a week (once, on a hot streak) and determined that they could therefore never work in the real world again. Because they had this amazing hourly (again, only calculated during that one hot streak), how could they lower themselves to a 30k/year office job??? For a very select few - a good number of which are the people with their pictures up on our coaches page - it may have been a realistic statement because they were amazing players and dedicated to their craft. For the overwhelming majority, however, delusion + small sample size = a complete inability to see life through an appropriate lens. THAT is the true worry for anyone in this field, to think the the world of poker is such a better/different reality that the experiences of everyone just don't apply. For 99.99% of us, poker is not a lifetime of employment. If you want to pursue it to the fullest, that's completely fine, and we're all here to help anyone do that. But unless you're already at the top, I really think you need to have other things in mind. Those other things don't have to be going to a 4-yr university by any means, but they need to be something other than poker.

If you want inspiration to do poker while keeping your other interests going, you don't need to look any further than DC! Just to give 3 easy, public examples, KRANTZ blogs all the time about his screenwriting pursuits, Joe Tall has been involved with a number of other ventures in the worlds of fantasy sports and being a dad, and Vanessa is in law school.

Also consider the following scenarios:

(A) You have a full-time career that allows you a comfortable living and some ability to save for the future. You have time to play 5-10 hours of poker a week if you choose. You don't have to manage a strict bankroll, as long as you don't play crazy high limits since you have savings that you can afford to lose if you run bad. You can choose whether you want to play or not and you will generally really enjoy the time that you do have to play poker. Plus, assuming you continue to work hard at it, it may turn out to give you some supplemental income in the long run.

(B) You decide to play poker for a living. Over time, you become disillusioned by the long hours of grinding and the psychological beatdowns of constantly dealing with the downswings. You lack the motivation to play, so your number of hours go down. When you work up the energy to play, you feel the pressure to make money quickly and have difficulty to stay focused on playing your A game. Your hourly rate drops. Playing less hours with a lower hourly, the effects of variance and inevitable downswings is even more brutal. In the worst case, it leads to a night where you take shots at tough games in higher limits with a tilted mindset and cripple your bankroll. In the best case, you remain lethargic about playing poker and only feel motivated to play high volume at your best when you are upswinging. The baller lifestyle doesn't look so appealing when 3 out of 12 months of the year are losing months and averaging $2500/month turns out to be a lot harder than it initially seemed.

Nobody who decides to grind for a living ever envisions scenario B. And for the rare few who are among the most talented and most hardworking and most disciplined, they may largely be able to skirt confronting these issues. But the vast, vast majority of players experience Scenario B, and many of them will lose their entire bankroll before they acknowledge what has happened to them.

That "hard way to make an easy living" quote is now a cliche, but it's fairly accurate. But poker is also a pretty awesomely fun hobby that can actual result in you making a few bucks at the end of the day.

Stay in school, you need a back up plan for an eventual 2nd black friday.

This is old advice handed down from parents to our children.

People who are successful these days - most of them didnt get university qualifications and move their way up through a company. Most of them were being smart and probably most importantly creative. Doing what 95% of other people isnt going to make you super successful. Sure youll be comfortable but youll be doing time consuming work.

The way I see it, poker has taugh me to be different. To think outside the box. To take a different outlook on things. Be smart. Not by filling yourself with information, but applying info correctly.
I believe thinking smart > being smart.

spot on ^

however, if you're unable to think smart, then having some qualifications is always a good 'Plan B'

thinking smart > being smart.

This should be on the T shirt.

O snap! must not miss opportunity to show how hip and smart i am on forum!!


"2% of people think, 3% think they think, and the other 95% would rather die than think."
- Dr. Ken McFarland

"The trouble with most folks isn't so much their ignorance, as knowing so many things that ain't so."
-Josh Billings

"We think the best way to seem smart is to know all the answers, when in fact the best way to become smart is to ask the right questions."
-Dorothy Leeds

They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); [but] in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).
- Nassim Taleb

"To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day."
- Lao-tse, Tao Te Ching

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
- attributed to Sigmund Freud

"I confess that I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false."
- F. A. Hayek

"They constructed a very complicated scenario and insisted on calling it highly probable. It is not--it is only a plausible story."
- Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

"Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others."
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories."
- Karl Popper

"The falseness of an opinion is not, for us, any objection to it. The question is how far it is life furthering, life preserving, species preserving and perhaps species creating."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Some of the monkeys think
that they have it all worked out.
Some of the monkeys read Nietzsche
The monkeys argue about Nietzsche
without giving any consideration to the fact
that Nietzsche
was just another fucking monkey.
- Ernest Cline, "Dance, Monkeys, Dance"

"The beginning of philosophy to him at least who enters on it in the right way and by the door, is a consciousness of his own weakness and inability about necessary things."
- Epictetus

"'Que sais-je?' 'What do I know?'"
- Montaigne

Was he a clever man or an idiot? Well, he could not at this time claim to be clever. He might once have had the makings of a clever character, but he had chosen to be dreamy instead, and the sharpies cleaned him out.
- Saul Bellow, Herzog

"The only true knowledge is in knowing that you know nothing." So-crates
"Hey, dude! That's us!" Bill S. Esquire
- Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

[/know-it-all]
[/quoting-it-all??]

This is old advice handed down from parents to our children.

People who are successful these days - most of them didnt get university qualifications and move their way up through a company. Most of them were being smart and probably most importantly creative. Doing what 95% of other people isnt going to make you super successful. Sure youll be comfortable but youll be doing time consuming work.

The way I see it, poker has taugh me to be different. To think outside the box. To take a different outlook on things. Be smart. Not by filling yourself with information, but applying info correctly.
I believe thinking smart > being smart.

If you have the opportunity to go to a good university, there are a ****ton of ways to earn $100k++ really quickly if you get decent (not necessarily great) grades and are somewhat motivated. And then there is the opportunity to earn order(s) of magnitude more later on if you have real talent (and of course luck).

If you don't get a degree, you have to be exceptional to attain anywhere near what ^^ gets while being utterly unexceptional.

If you think achieving success via a nonstandard route is any less work, you're severely misguided.

Now, doing your own thing is obviously far more fulfilling and I wouldn't discourage it on the basis that it probably has a lower financial EV. I just wouldn't want someone being put off getting a degree on the idea that it is just as easy to *make it* without one.

Yo

Spent the last few months grinding a decent amount murdering the games up to 400NL, and more importantly, thinking about my life and where it is going.

I watch a video that forced me to change how I think entirely. It's a lecture by Sam Harris on death and the present moment. The entire video is amazing, but the part hat impacted me the most is from 17:50 - 20:20. I can't think of a way to paraphrase it that doesn't detract from the profundity of the message.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITTxTCz4Ums

My new outlook on poker/work is that it doesn't matter. When I can no longer make a living from playing poker, I'll find something else I can make money from that I can enjoy. The real tragedy would be to spend my life in the petty pursuit of money. The "if only I made $200k/year; then I'd be happy" thinking.

I'm moving to a ski/snowboarding town next week with some grinders, so I should have a blast this winter there. I'm going to do a lot of thinking/research about what career would be exciting and fulfilling to me. Thanks for all the good advice!

thank you for the video. It was great, especially the part you pointed out. great!