Being a WINNING Professional Poker Player is NOT as Glamorous as it Sounds - My 8 Year Experience

This is not going to be a story about someone losing his ass playing poker. I did well for 8 years, went out on a high and I’m proud of my accomplishments. But that doesn’t mean it was all worth it! I included the word “WINNING” in the title because this isn’t an extensive bad beat rant. I had a good run, but I was never really happy.

It's not like this every day...

After having played online poker professionally for about 8 years, I was able to switch to doing YouTube full time 3 years ago. 8 Straight years of playing had mentally drained me. Poker is a daily grind of dealing with upswings and downswings and even though my downswings were very manageable compared to what can be expected, I never really got good at dealing with them. Playing poker for a living sounds very glamorous to most people but it’s really not, it’s hard work and unless you surround yourself by peers, it can be very lonely.

I started playing on Partypoker when I was 15, which obv. wasn’t allowed but I was using someone else's account. I played low limit cash games and lost small amounts of money over long periods of time, which, you know, isn’t too bad when you are just getting started. I won my first multi table tournament when I was 16 for about $700. My mom already wasn’t having it and would get really annoyed about me playing and much to my surprise, did not end up jumping up and down in the living room with me. She was just pissed I had missed dinner.

I have always found this to be pretty accurate

When I was 19, I started studying law and I started playing a bit more and a bit more seriously. By now I had moved to $5/$10 limit cash games but I also started playing No Limit Heads-Up sit and go’s where you both buy in for X amount, get Y amount of chips and then battle it out. I quickly fell in love with this format. I was decent at it and I liked the battling aspect of it.

In 2007 I got a lot more serious after I switched to Pokerstars where the player pool was a lot larger. I won 10K in a little over a month on Stars and about $40,000 in my first half year on the site, playing mainly $100 Heads-Up Sit and Go’s. These were insane amounts of money to me and I obv. felt like I had the world at my fingertips. I went on to break even the next year after which the doubts started creeping in of course. The mental aspect was always my Achilles’ heal and I was quickly becoming aware of that. I’d go weeks without playing and was getting very frustrated.

Some players study, read, watch and rail a lot but I never did and without making any major changes to my game I started winning again. I was at it for another 7 years before my YouTube channel started to make enough money where I was able to live off of it. I could go into detail about those 7 years but I don’t want talk on and on about it. Maybe I’ll do that in a separate dedicated post.

My lifetime graph, very few serious downswing but even the smallest ones would get to me

I just didn’t enjoy playing anymore so there wasn’t really any decision to make when I was financially able to quit. Somewhere along the line I had also gotten into coaching and even though I still enjoyed coaching, if you don’t play, you obviously have to stop coaching too and that was just a small sacrifice to make in order to get my freedom back and to regain happiness in my life.

The reason that poker isn’t as glamorous as it sounds is that it’s not residual income. Unless you have a specific mindset or are willing and able to work with a sport psychologist (an idea that I often toyed with). The swings have an effect on your mood on a day-to-day basis. When you are winning you feel great, when you are losing you feel down and I always questioned myself, even though the numbers showed that I was just running bad that day, week, or month. After all there is a lot of variance in poker. It’s a game of skill, but there is so much luck involved that even the best players can go months without winning.

An example of an unlucky day: $2000 below statistically expected value in 1 day

When you are running bad and the numbers show that you are (as opposed to people complaining about how unlucky they are when in fact, they are just making bad decisions), you HAVE to keep playing or you are not going to be making any money. Being forced to play when you are not mentally up for it is rough. There are very few professional poker players to begin with but only a tiny % of that small % is able to maintain their lifestyle without playing, so almost everyone HAS to play, there is no mental sick leave in poker…

You don’t really know if you have the mental mindset that it takes until you are forced to deal with multiple downswings, and I’m not discouraging people to play poker or to even aspire to become a professional. I’m not even trying to warn you about what you are signing up for, I only wrote this because many people seem to envy professional poker players and trust me, you don’t have to. You’re probably better off doing what you are doing and you should consider yourself lucky to be reading this blog on Steemit because it means you didn’t miss the Steemit boat!