The Ups and Downs of a Professional Poker Players Life
Hey everyone,
my name is Manig and I'm a 27 year old professional poker player from Germany living in London UK. I spent the last 7 years travelling and participating in poker tournaments, according to hendonmob.com winning $1.6 million in the process. Truth is, as a tournament player only a small fraction of that actually stays in your bank account. Living expenses are massive (paying rent, staying at hotels 200+ nights a year, flying, eating at restaurants almost every day adds up quickly). Also swapping pieces (exchanging shares of your action versus shares of someone else playing the same tournament) and selling pieces (having investors that pay part of the Buyin for part of possible profits) to decrease variance are very common and will affect the end result.
The variance in tournaments is enormous, in 7 years of playing poker I only have 3 official tournament wins. Of course, there are close calls and heads up chops (when you are on a final table you have the option of chopping up the prize money with the remaining players and only play for title & trophy), but fact remains that the days on which professional tournament players think "this day of poker couldn't have gone any better" are very limited. Most of the times you enter a tournament you are gonna leave the casino disappointed.
1st win 6 years ago, Bulgaria. Time flies and winning big cheques is fun?!
Just got a facebook reminder that this happened exactly one year ago, tournament win in Czech Republic.
I spent the last 3 weeks at my girlfriends house in Canada, she is a professional poker player as well so 90%+ of the time we're travelling together. We played a little bit of online poker and 3 cashgame sessions at the local Casinos, but mostly tried to recharge batteries after staying in Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker for 2 months, where she had a big success. Right now we're on a flight from Toronto to Barcelona for the European Poker Tour where we're going to stay for 2 weeks. I'll be competing in the first tournament of the series tomorrow, which is a €10,300 Buyin Highroller. Other tournaments on the schedule are a €1.100 Buyin, the €5,300 Mainevent and a €2,200 Buyin. Besides that I will try to get as many cashgame hours in as possible while trying to eat healthy (very tough while travelling), work out (also tough on little sleep) and enjoy one of my favorite cities in Europe with my friends (best part).
Day off in Canada 2 weeks ago
I have a couple ideas for topics for the next blog posts, is there anything specific you guys would like to read about?
If you are wondering the reason why you didn't get upvoted very much it is because you didn't show verification of your identity.
Hey, thank you very much for the info, sorry about that!
Is this sufficient or do I need to do anything else? Can also provide receipts from the 10k tournament today etc.
I think you should put this in your original post. You are allowed to do do-overs as you didn't really know the protocol before. I recommend doing another introduction post.
Thanks will do!
Thank you for sharing, it's a nice insight to the life we viewers may never see
well said
Thanks for sharing! I wasn't aware it was a thing for poker players to "swap pieces", but it makes a lot of financial sense. It's the same reason why bitcoin miners form mining pools: To reduce the variability of earnings.
If you're going to make and average $200,000 per year, but 1 year you make $10,000 and another $500,000, it's highly beneficial to reduce that variance.
exactly!
Enjoyed your post and it sounds like an enjoyable life, but is there a lot of stress involved?
Yes, there is. Many people can't handle the pressure and the variance, especially in tournaments . There is way less variance in cashgames for example where you can roughly estimate how much you are gonna make in one month / year if you keep on playing the same stakes. In tournaments you unavoidably have very big swings no matter how good you are.
Sorry I just found this blog now. Good to see other pros on here, I hope you keep posting so we can get the poker section full of better content.