It's probably a direct result of the popularity of televised poker and its glorification of the poker elite, but I've noticed people I know and play with talking about playing poker professionally a lot more in the last year. The number of emails I've gotten from people asking for advice has steadily increased since I started this blog too.

My advice, always, is - don't do it. Not really because I think they should not do it, but because I think being a successful professional poker player requires a grit, determination and self-motivation that should not be deterred by asking someone for advice and hearing them tell you not to do it. So if the person takes my advice, they shouldn't have been considering playing poker professionally in the first place, and if they ignore my advice, they probably should have ignored it.

I've never done it, but I do genuinely believe that playing poker professionally is a horrible way to live for 99.999% of the population. From what I've seen of professional poker players - let's call them PPP's, the main personality traits that help you enjoy the life are being highly solitary, not requiring a lot of human interaction in your life, not caring about directly bettering society through work, being highly self-motivated and disciplined. Not ever indulging in alcohol or drugs appears to help too.

I guess this post is sort of a counterpoint to my post yesterday about pokernerd, and was inspired by Josh Hoptay's post in which he describes his six months as a successful PPP, after which he realized it was not for him.

Since I have started, my skin has paled out, I've put on some weight (I don't know how much is bad weight though: I started a workout program a month and a half ago and I'm hoping its all muscle), and I have begun to experience small bouts of depression and loneliness.

Poker offers such a unique oppurtunity to make it big doing little, but it comes at a significant emotional and mental cost. Working a 9-5 job may not be the most magnificient thing to do, but for the most part, no matter what job it is, doing it performs a service or benefits society in some way. Admit it or not, that gives us, or at least me, some sort of satisfaction. I lack that satisfaction with poker. Unless its a live game, I don't have any communication with anybody while I'm "working" and when you boil it down, all my "job" consists of is taking other people's money and giving them an ass whooping in return. There is something very unsatisfing about that.

His post is somewhat depressing, but 100% required reading for anyone who is considering life as a professional poker player. Good luck Josh. Link

Anyway as we go over that, the WSOP main event is down to near 100 players remaining, and Raymer continues to kick butt, including busting someone out on the first hand of the day! Winning the WSOP main event twice also seems like a pretty good justification for becoming a PPP :)

I also need to append my observations on Sam Farha from two years ago... he's not just a cool mutha, he's my new gambling hero. Last night according to Pauly he lost $25k on $1k coin flips. That's quality. He displaces my good friend Hamslice, who was previously my hero for losing $1600 at rock-paper-scissors. Good work. (Mental note: bring stack of $1k chips next time I hang out with Sam Farha.)

(Update: Dan has some extra detail on the $25k coin flip here.)

It's a hard way to make an easy living.

Posted by: MikeK628 on July 13, 2005 05:15 PM

Ultimate paradox, no? If you must ask, you were not meant to be struck by that which prompted the very question itself...

Great point!

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I haven't seen you blog about it so I was wondering if you caught that the attorney general of Texas finally gave an opinion that free tourneys in bars were perfectly legal.

http://www.oag.state.tx.us/opinions/ga/ga0335.pdf

So that asshat wanna be law clerk that wrote that opinion earlier can bite it.

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