Quitting the full-time poker scene

I played back during the glory days of 2000-2004 and through the net-teller shutdown for America. Back then the money was absolutely absurd, because the game was very new online and very few people understood basics. This combined with the massive amount of marketing that was going on for television, tons of people were addicted to the thrill of the game.<p>Every single year the game became more difficult as more people studied and I continued to move up into higher and higher stakes. At one point I looked at how much money I had made&#x2F;compared to how much I hated what I was doing and decided that I was done. People around me never understood why I quit because they knew me and the amount of income I had made, but the thing is no one can understand what it is to live on a grinders schedule like that.<p>I would get up at 10-11AM study the hands from the previous day to make sure I was playing correctly mentally, read over new material, review a partners hands as we both did each others to confirm playstyle and decisions were correct, around 3PM I would start scouting tables across various levels looking for soft players that I had datamined information about. Around 4-5PM I would start playing and continue to add tables with soft players and immediately leave any tables that didn&#x27;t contain any soft players or they had busted. This table hopping and monitoring is absolutely exhausting, but critical to being as profitable as possible.<p>Repeat this until about 11PM. Then go to sleep until 4AM, get up and play against the players on the other side of the world as they were starting to play loose. Play against them until about 7AM, then go to sleep and get up around 11. Repeat. Do this for 4 years and almost anyone will decide enough is enough even with the amount of income I was making back then. The only rest I took was on weekends, just to remove myself mentally from the exhaustion.<p>Of course poker is much tougher now then it was then. I wouldn&#x27;t even dream of trying to play now. I was maybe upper 85-90% player, now I would be in the lower 50%.

I find interesting that no one (yet) in OP or in the comments has talked about my main complaint about playing Poker as a living: it&#x27;s a zero sum game where you basically only take money from other people. It&#x27;s not productive. For me, that in itself is as depressing as the grind. But it appears most players don&#x27;t really care about this, maybe because life oftentimes is not fair and thus being productive is not seen as important as it ought to be? Idk but I find it an important question, culturally.

I was involved in poker for most of my adult life - first as pro player and then as a poker software developer. I was very lucky to be able live off poker winnings as a player and then become financially independent thanks to the success of my software (I am PioSOLVER founder and one of the two original programmers along with my close friend).<p>I agree with about everything the author of the post said. It&#x27;s a lonely and destructive game. Success if meaningless and comes at expense of others. It&#x27;s bad for your health both physical and mental. Gambling is fine as an entertainment in moderate amount for people who don&#x27;t get addicted to it. I don&#x27;t see any value in professional gambling though. I think almost everyone is worse off in that world. There is a lot of potential lost creating winners and losers in a negative sum game while game organizers make out like bandits luring addicts to their games (both online and live).<p>Professional poker is a very effective trap for smart analytical people. You can find success there faster and easier than in other areas and then you face a dilemma the author talks about: money is great but you feel like your are not building anything and opportunities to become involved in productive and rewarding endeavours slowly drift away. Switching becomes more difficult (and costly) with every passing year.<p>I am one of the big winners of the poker world - not only I made enough money to never worry about it again but I&#x27;ve met a lot o interesting people and learnt a lot of interesting things during work on my poker related project. I have one advice for smart people, especially those similar to me (ADHD, maybe slightly on autistic spectrum who can&#x27;t imagine working a 9-5 job) - don&#x27;t get involved it will lure you and chew you out. If you feel you have trouble holding a job or completing your degree which is not caused by your intellectual potential - seek help and maybe medication. After more than 15 years in the industry my biggest professional dream is to one day have enough discipline and energy to start a project in an unrelated area and create something more useful than a tool to help winners beat losers at a gambling game.

&gt; Poker has the best hourly rate for any job in India. The money is simply un-comparable to any job a 20 year old can get and is close to VP+ level in unicorn&#x2F;FAANG companies<p>&gt; Imagine sitting in front of a screen for 12-16hrs a day, clicking buttons<p>&gt; The 95th percentile Poker income is about $200-250k.<p>I knew quite a few people who went through poker phases in college and their early 20s, back before it was heavily regulated. Back then, it was common for random people to join online casinos without any real skill to go along with it, so they were basically milking the average players all day long. They all had similar ideas about how they were going to get huge incomes by applying basic principles and scaling it to as many simultaneous poker windows as they could.<p>Some of these were very smart and talented people. A couple wrote scripts to track and graph their progress and statistics, which they shared online for extra motivation. Honestly, it became depressing to watch the growing dissonance between the high incomes they thought they were going to generate and the actual progress of their balances.<p>Also, staring at poker screens for 12-16 hours per day is soul crushing. Doing that to have a 5% chance of earning $250K (if those stats are correct) is even more depressing.<p>And then there&#x27;s drawdown periods: Some times odds would align against them or they&#x27;d be off their game for some reason. They could go through long periods where their net balance was either flat or in slow decline, which could turn into a self-reinforcing cycle that worsened their play.<p>I don&#x27;t know anyone who continued for more than a few years.<p>I did recently talk to someone who left their tech job to play poker for 5 years. He was at a level where he traveled to tournaments and got lucky a few times, but realized it was no longer fun nor sustainable. He was having a huge difficulty getting back into a career job. Most interviewers looked at the 5 year gap in his resume to play poker and passed. Those who did give him interviews asked a lot of questions about his career goals, likely because they assumed he was just falling back to a real job for a while before he went back to poker again in a few years. Last we spoke, he still hadn&#x27;t landed a job.

As a part time live tournament grinder who has a full time job it&#x27;s always sobering to hear from full time grinders who end up quitting due to how tough the grind is. A couple of observations to add:<p>1) There is absolutely a huge edge to be had playing live tournaments, even for buy ins in the $1k - $5k range. If you are playing outside of Vegas it is very common to end up at a table where at least half the table are &quot;recreational&quot; (i.e. players who are bad and are likely to make large mistakes).<p>2) The downside to playing live tournaments is that it is difficult to get reasonable volume in and the variance can be brutal. It is not that unlikely to go on a 20+ buy in downswing even with a decent edge.<p>3) Having an income source not tied to poker is huge and allows you to not have to be conservative with bankroll management. If you&#x27;re pulling in mid 6 figures from a day job you don&#x27;t have to worry about selling action or going down in stakes when you go on a downswing because you can always supplement the bankroll with your income. This, obviously, can be taken too far, but you don&#x27;t have to be as worried about the variance from shot taking a higher buy in tournament where you know you have an edge like the $10k WSOP Main Event which is by far the softest $10k that exists.<p>As the saying goes, being a professional gambler is the hardest way to make an easy living.

Back in the mid-2000s some places had crazy incentives like PokerStars. They had a form of rakeback where you could sit and grind out hands while playing break even&#x27;ish poker but still net $100,000 a year back then. The idea there was you could play ~16 tables at a time for ~25 hours a week making robotic decisions based on odds or a quick glance at PokerTracker&#x27;s HUD.<p>There&#x27;s a write up about it here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pokernews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2010&#x2F;08&#x2F;making-supernova-elite-with-team-pokerstars-online-pro-leath-8670.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pokernews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2010&#x2F;08&#x2F;making-supernova-elit...</a><p>There were other places as well. There were so many stories posted on the 2+2 forums[0] of people making really good money doing this. That&#x27;s one of the most popular poker forums. It&#x27;s interesting because it&#x27;s a different type of skill. Tile a bunch of windows, have a lot of mental fortitude and grind it out. It&#x27;s a completely different strategy than trying to become a &quot;winning&quot; player.<p>I used to play microstates back before online poker was banned in the US so I didn&#x27;t participate in that. What&#x27;s funny though is even back then at the 5c-10c ($10 buy in) or 10c-25c ($25 buy in) NL tables you&#x27;d have folks 4-6 tabling while looking at a PokerTrack HUD which gathered stats about players and displayed them above their name plate. I can&#x27;t imagine at how much the game must have progressed since then.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forumserver.twoplustwo.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forumserver.twoplustwo.com&#x2F;</a>

I played for a living during 5 years in the early 90&#x27;s. So before the Internet took off. Of course there were some differences with OP&#x27;s situation, e.g. because games were scarce I didn&#x27;t play only poker but also backgammon, and basically any other game that had any skill and could be played for money.<p>Like OP, I decided to become professional because of the freedom, but also because I just liked games. But after a couple of years these advantages start to fade away. First of all, you are not really free, especially when games are scarce: you have to be always available because if you miss a good game, it can take days before another one comes along. Also, the fun in playing games erodes if you play them day in day out. Also, like OP points out, variance is brutal. The downswings can wear you out, sometimes I had to take a few days to recover.<p>But the main reason I eventually switched to a career in IT was something that OP also mentions: the main skill in making a lot of money, especially in live games, is not how well you play, but how good you are in finding wealthy suckers that want to play against you. This part really put me off in the end, it just wasn&#x27;t me.

Yesterday I read a post here on HN about gambling and online casinos and went &quot;pffft, people can&#x27;t control their actions, isn&#x27;t there accountability anymore?&quot;. Then I remembered that in 2006, while employed at the world&#x27;s top company in 2006 I got into the poker craze and more than once a week worked from home so that I could multi-screen work e-mails with poker.<p>It was great that I noticed this before degenerating into a full-time addict. I used to grind at $15 9-player STTs and the variance was downright depressing. I cannot imagine what people playing at higher stakes go through. Just out of curiosity, I looked up many of the hotshot professionals of the day, almost none are still playing today. The games became tough and eventually everyone gets surpassed by the new guy using real-time assistance.<p>People starting this grind today simply shouldn&#x27;t do it. Odds are that the game will become zero-sum at planetary scale given everyone and their mother is using GTO solvers now.

Poker is my favorite turn-based strategy game and I play it very often. That said, it’s extremely time-consuming, and, while it can be profitable, not extremely so unless you are 99th percentile. For most profitable players, it’s nice money usually but never anything lifechanging. Part of the problem is that it takes huge amounts of time to accomplish anything; most of poker is waiting (and knowing when more waiting is warranted).<p>It’s much, much better as a hobby than a job.<p>Software is a much better gig, with much higher returns in your late-stage career (as the author notes well in TFA). If you are really good at software (but still well below 99th percentile good) you can still earn lifechanging money.

I&#x27;ve played my share on-line.<p>Honestly, I can&#x27;t see it as a job. The skill at the high levels is insane, the variance is insane.<p>There is a reason people have said &quot;No professional will win the WSOP again.&quot; Even if you are 5-10% better than everyone else... There is many, many, many trials to survive, and you only have to lose once when you are right.<p>There&#x27;s a reason Phil Hellmuth folded KK early in the WSOP. And when you understand why... It speaks volumes of his thoughts about himself. Right or wrong.<p>The fish are out there. It just ain&#x27;t worth frying them. Go have fun playing. It is a fun game. But a living... for just a few.

&quot;I learned another skill and I probably can always find a way to support myself in dire situations&quot;<p>I think this nails it. As a grinder you know the work you put in. And given the game has been around lifetimes, during your life if dire shows up, like any skilled profesional, you do what you know.

I loved poker but it was too all-encompassing for me. I fairly quickly noticed there was just nothing much else going anywhere in my life. I was still getting better at poker, but not at the same rate as when I started, and I wasn&#x27;t learning or making or consuming anything else.<p>I really did love it. But I really couldn&#x27;t imagine not learning anything else.<p>I think video game streaming is the same. Not much room left for yourself.

Author here. Happy to answer any questions.<p>@dang please replace the above link with the original: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rnikhil.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;11&#x2F;12&#x2F;quitting-fulltime-poker.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rnikhil.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;11&#x2F;12&#x2F;quitting-fulltime-poker.html</a>

I used to play PLO (pot limit omaha) full time and made very low 6 figures over 2 years. I quit in 2015 and went back to school for a CS degree, doing much better now financially, and the work is actually usually more interesting than poker, but that might be due to me burning out back then.

Why is this on an indian car forum? Is it like bodybuildning forum where its a lot of unrelated stuff?

One of the best HN posts I’ve ever read. Thanks for sharing your story. I don’t have any doubt you’ll be happy about your pivot and successful in your next phase. Good luck.

A few of my friends at uni were into poker. I started to get into it myself. But what really put me off was the game does not work without money. People can&#x27;t seem to play poker just for fun and that makes it a thoroughly inferior game in my opinion. Also, I couldn&#x27;t get people interested in anything except Texas Hold&#x27;em despite the fact 7 Card Stud is clearly a much better game.

I&#x27;ve played a few hands of casino poker, just for fun (although I once won several thousand dollars when I was bored at the end of the night and went all-in with 4-7 offsuit and then flopped a full house). After maybe 10 hours spent in casinos I cannot even fathom spending my whole career in stinky windowless rooms late at night with that bunch of degenerates. Absolutely sickening thought

Playing poker for a living sounds very boring.

I have to say I can&#x27;t see how $200k a year is a bad idea. I would do it if only I could make half of that. Is the grind boring? So are many jobs. At the end of the day, if I am going to be making six figures I can spend some money for enjoyment

I was addicted to gambling online via Texas hold em poker for a period in college. I mastered the statistics and broke about even. I should never have done it though, extremely destructive to sleep and healthy mental patterns.

Whenever there&#x27;s a large financial incentive to cheat and low consequence for getting caught, it&#x27;s safe to assume that there will be sophisticated attempts to do so.<p>I think both these preconditions are met (in spades) when it comes to online poker.<p>As far as I can tell, there&#x27;s no way to stop collusion in the following form:<p>- Create a large remote team of cheaters<p>- Have them all multi-table PLO at the same online casino<p>- Each participant randomly chooses tables to avoid anti-collusion tracking<p>- With a large enough pool of cheaters, you will inevitably have multiple colluders at the same table<p>- Sharing knowledge of your whole cards with other colluding table participants will give you all a huge winning edge<p>Since there&#x27;s no way to stop the above, and there&#x27;s a large incentive with low consequences if caught, I assume cheating is a huge problem in online poker. Wondering if anyone can confirm&#x2F;deny this?

I used to play a ton online before Black Friday shut it down, and I wasn’t really profitable, but learning the game…it was one of the most fun and frustrating things I have ever experienced. And it basically disappeared overnight…

I played microstakes for a while 10c-25c, 25c-50c and was an OK grinder in my teens and could steadily increase my bankroll only to tilt away all the profit (and more) every time. Those were not good times.

A +EV decision by the O.P

What does this mean, I can&#x27;t tell if it&#x27;s a poker term or keyboard term<p>&quot;without tilting&quot;

I was under the impression that online poker rooms are low key rigged and at the very least just cycle through preexisting card combinations rather than doing even a programmatic randomization (let alone using a true external source of randomization).