The Ups and Downs of a Professional Poker Players Life / Verification
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.
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?
Verification:
It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get.
What was the first thing you learned to cook?
Thanks for the introduction, Manig. I was an avid online poker player a few years back, before the site that I used banned my account due to it being illegal in my state to online gamble.
Do you stick to a specific type of poker, such as texas hold'em, or do you play different variations?
I look forward to reading your future topics on poker. Perhaps you could do one on pre and post-flop winning odds from various starting hands - how to get to a point of calculating these probabilities on the fly and how this figures in to betting strategies and bet-size?
That's a topic that interests me, but I'm not sure if that's too big of scope to cover inside of a post and without taking too much of your time.