Quitting the full-time poker scene

> Poker has the best hourly rate for any job in India. The money is simply un-comparable to any job a 20 year old can get and is close to VP+ level in unicorn/FAANG companies

> Imagine sitting in front of a screen for 12-16hrs a day, clicking buttons

> The 95th percentile Poker income is about $200-250k.

I knew quite a few people who went through poker phases in college and their early 20s, back before it was heavily regulated. Back then, it was common for random people to join online casinos without any real skill to go along with it, so they were basically milking the average players all day long. They all had similar ideas about how they were going to get huge incomes by applying basic principles and scaling it to as many simultaneous poker windows as they could.

Some of these were very smart and talented people. A couple wrote scripts to track and graph their progress and statistics, which they shared online for extra motivation. Honestly, it became depressing to watch the growing dissonance between the high incomes they thought they were going to generate and the actual progress of their balances.

Also, staring at poker screens for 12-16 hours per day is soul crushing. Doing that to have a 5% chance of earning $250K (if those stats are correct) is even more depressing.

And then there's drawdown periods: Some times odds would align against them or they'd be off their game for some reason. They could go through long periods where their net balance was either flat or in slow decline, which could turn into a self-reinforcing cycle that worsened their play.

I don't know anyone who continued for more than a few years.

I did recently talk to someone who left their tech job to play poker for 5 years. He was at a level where he traveled to tournaments and got lucky a few times, but realized it was no longer fun nor sustainable. He was having a huge difficulty getting back into a career job. Most interviewers looked at the 5 year gap in his resume to play poker and passed. Those who did give him interviews asked a lot of questions about his career goals, likely because they assumed he was just falling back to a real job for a while before he went back to poker again in a few years. Last we spoke, he still hadn't landed a job.

> That behaviour quite likely lands everyone involved in jail in regulated (think big name entities with licenses in Malta types) companies.

I wouldn't trust these Maltese companies either. They've been embroiled in lawsuits here in Germany for ignoring gambling laws - and after a lot of gamblers won said lawsuits and demanding their losses be repaid, Malta actually passed a law limiting asset seizure orders from other EU nations, in a move likely to be brought towards the EU court system [1].

[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/malta-gluecksspiel-100....

I played back during the glory days of 2000-2004 and through the net-teller shutdown for America. Back then the money was absolutely absurd, because the game was very new online and very few people understood basics. This combined with the massive amount of marketing that was going on for television, tons of people were addicted to the thrill of the game.

Every single year the game became more difficult as more people studied and I continued to move up into higher and higher stakes. At one point I looked at how much money I had made/compared to how much I hated what I was doing and decided that I was done. People around me never understood why I quit because they knew me and the amount of income I had made, but the thing is no one can understand what it is to live on a grinders schedule like that.

I would get up at 10-11AM study the hands from the previous day to make sure I was playing correctly mentally, read over new material, review a partners hands as we both did each others to confirm playstyle and decisions were correct, around 3PM I would start scouting tables across various levels looking for soft players that I had datamined information about. Around 4-5PM I would start playing and continue to add tables with soft players and immediately leave any tables that didn't contain any soft players or they had busted. This table hopping and monitoring is absolutely exhausting, but critical to being as profitable as possible.

Repeat this until about 11PM. Then go to sleep until 4AM, get up and play against the players on the other side of the world as they were starting to play loose. Play against them until about 7AM, then go to sleep and get up around 11. Repeat. Do this for 4 years and almost anyone will decide enough is enough even with the amount of income I was making back then. The only rest I took was on weekends, just to remove myself mentally from the exhaustion.

Of course poker is much tougher now then it was then. I wouldn't even dream of trying to play now. I was maybe upper 85-90% player, now I would be in the lower 50%.

I used to play PLO (pot limit omaha) full time and made very low 6 figures over 2 years. I quit in 2015 and went back to school for a CS degree, doing much better now financially, and the work is actually usually more interesting than poker, but that might be due to me burning out back then.