f2f2s |

Since Tuesday night pretty much, I’ve done nothing but lay in bed and watch tv. No poker, no exercise, 1 meal a day, and not much else. It sucks to be sick. But, it did get me to thinking about something.

Everyone who talks about playing poker for a living always tries their best to figure out how much more they’ll make with fewer hours of work. There are a lot of fallacies in their thinking though, and I might as well point them out:

1. Insurance The smarter aspiring pros are better about this, but realize that insurance is going to cost a fair amount and it won’t be provided by your company any more. I won’t even go into how bad an idea it is not to have insurance.
2. 40 hours of Play… Playing multiple tables of poker for 40 hours a week is a trying exercise. It’s an easy recipe for burnout too, and I promise you that better players than you have burned out over time because of it. This isn’t so much a factor for B&M pros, but even Dynasty talks about burnout in his 4th year as an almost exclusively live pro in this thread.
3. …Equals 40 Hours of Work Wrong. If you’re actually planning on doing this for a living, you should expect to spend at least 50% as much time away from the tables working on your game, as you do playing. Whether it’s going over hands you played, commenting on other people’s hands, or talking about things with a coach/friend it should and will take up a fair amount of time.
4. 401k Again, the smart pro-to-be’s have thought about what they are losing here, and it should be pretty obvious, so I won’t expand much. I know you say you’ll move money over into a retirement account, but it’s a lot harder when the money isn’t being taken straight from your paycheck. Remember all the times you told yourself you’d go to the gym? Yeah, you didn’t do that either.
5. Sick Days Salary is nice, because even when you’re too sick to work, you have some sick days you can use. For the past 3 days, I’ve been too sick to move and have played exactly 0 hands before tonight. Granted, I don’t play for a living in such a sense, so it doesn’t hurt as much, but if you’re trying to grind out a living, getting the flu, or going to the hospital for something can really drain you. It’s another reason why you really want to have 6-12 months of expenses saved up as a minimum to go with your bankroll.

So really, that’s all. There’s a lot more reasons you wouldn’t want to do it. Obvious reasons like: non-steady income, isolation at home, good work hours are usually when other people are free to hang out, etc. Of course, for some people none of this is an issue, and they live a great life. However, I think it’s better to list the negatives to something, and then try to decide if it’s still something you’d want to consider, rather than the delude yourself into thinking it’s a rosy situation, when in reality you’re just going to end up 3 years older, 30 pounds heavier, having lost contact with some friends, and now looking for a job with a huge gap in your resume because you’re either not winning any more, or you aren’t making enough money to cover all the expenses you didn’t account for.

Anyway, I’m hopefully done feeling sick for a while, and that’s what I was thinking about whenever Win Ben Stein’s Money or Law & Order wasn’t on for the past 3 days. Just for fun, I realized that I hadn’t been to the doctor in 3 years too, so I guess I was due for a real sickness. Also, it’s probably not appendicitis, which is really cool too.