Poker Winner Blog

To most recreational poker players the idea of playing professionally seems like a dream. Get up when you want to, work when and where you choose, and ply your trade almost anywhere. From London to Las Vegas and California to Costa Rica, casino poker awaits you there. So what’s stopping you? Only the answer to this critical question, “Can I make a living as a poker player?”

Poker Isn‘t Like Most Jobs

For one thing, if you’re a poker player, you won’t have a steady salary coming in. Even commissioned salespeople don’t lose money if they fail to make a sale. But poker players do lose money whenever they have a bad day. It’s one of the few jobs where you can go to work and lose money. Imagine that. An entire day of poker — under stressful conditions — and all you’ve got to show for it is less money than you started out with. Not a pretty picture, is it?

Still, people take up poker as a profession every day. Some do so after years of deliberation. A few do it on a whim. Others pursue it as a second career — after retirement — when they have alternative sources of income to steady the ship in a storm. How successful are they? There are no statistics handy — but we’d be willing to venture a guess that the majority of newly hatched professional poker players go broke, and probably do so within a year.

So how do you know if you can make a living playing poker? For a relatively unstable profession, there seem to be quite a few indices available to the seasoned player who’s thinking about earning his living at the tables. Here are a few we’d recommend:

Considering Your On Results

Anyone seriously considering poker as a career needs to keep his or her poker diary up-to-date, and do it assiduously. Never mind that you were tired, just had a fight at home, were stuck in horrible traffic on the way to the casino, and didn’t play your best. When you’re playing for a living, no excuses are allowed. Only reality counts, and wouldda, shouldda, couldda doesn’t mean a thing.

Playing When You’re Not at Your Best

Part of being a professional player is how well you play when you’re not at your best — and you won’t be at your best all the time. But professional poker players need to play their best game every time they walk into a casino. If you don’t feel you can, you shouldn’t play. Remember that playing poker frees you from a time clock. You don’t have to play. And if you’re not up to par, it will cost you far less to go see a movie than it will to visit the tables.

Keeping Good Records

If you haven’t been keeping good records, you are not ready to play professionally. Oh, you can give it a go. No one’s going to stop you. But without a foundation in data of your results, you might be deceiving yourself about your ability, and that can cost you more than money. If you have a career, a family, or other responsibilities, then going broke playing poker will take its toll on them all. If you don’t believe us, just look around. Casinos are littered with broken souls.

Deciding Where to Play

Let’s look at the bright side. Suppose you have been keeping good records, and furthermore, you’re a winning player. What should you do now? That’s easy. You need to decide where you want to play for a living. Perhaps you are living in an area where there are only small limit games — too small to provide the kind of livelihood you want — and you decide to move to California, or Las Vegas, or Atlantic City, or even Europe for that matter. Before you make the leap, do yourself a favor. Take the time to go there for at least a month to six weeks.

There might be a big difference between the games where you’d like tolive and those in your own backyard. And if you’re moving up to bigger limits because you can’t earn enough money in small limit games, you can be assured of this: As you move up the ladder, the players get better. Part of becoming a professional poker player is finding your rung on the ladder. It’s a question of striking a balance between the betting limits, which have a major impact on how much money you can earn, and the quality of your opponents, which will have a huge impact on how much you will earn.

Smaller games are more easily beaten, but lower betting limits constrain the amount of money you can expect to win. Big limit games usually have tougher players in the lineup. But if you are good enough, there’s a limit you can beat that offers the best balance between your theoretical earning power and your actual win rate. When you’ve found that limit, you’ve arrived. That’s not to say you can’t move up. But that’s where you belong now.

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