compuease;271711 wroteAs most of you know I've been around here a long time, have seen dozens of poker "prodigy's" come and go. There are quite a number on here that a lot of us admire for their results and perhaps aspire to emulate... but should we?
I'm not going to name any names but I have spent a few hours over the past few days compiling some MTT results (only from Stars and Tilt as they appear to be the easiest to gather) and analyzing as to hourly rates etc..
I basically went back to the beginning of 2009 only and it seems to me that no one really makes much per hour compared to a decent job. It appears to me that unless someone gets really lucky and makes a huge score (like Kirk Caldwell did live for example) then they would be much better off with a job and career that has a long term future.
It also seems to me that those that have full time jobs and play casually part time as a secondary income and taking shots, have it right.
This may be heresy to some of you but the more I look and think about it the more it makes sense to me.
Discuss......
There's def a lot of truth to this, it's really no secret that a lot of "pro's" just went on a heater, or crushed hard 3 years ago, but now aren't even winning players. I agree that most people would be better off with a job, for a variety of reasons, but mostly variance is sick and you really need to understand how harsh swings can be in this game in order to make playing poker > working. You either need some really good life management, or very few requirements for how much you make in short-term (me). I have the luxury of still being a student, and still being young, and not having anyone who depends on me financially, and still being completely fine if I were to go completely busto (which would never happen anyways, but if it did!). I think that setting out to become pro or make a living is a bad idea, and if it's a good idea for you to do that, it will happen naturally. Obviously if you're making 2x more playing poker and you have your life straightened out and if you breakeven for 2 months you will be completely fine, then it's probably a good idea to run with it.
Although "
no one really makes much per hour compared to a decent job" is a bit of a stretch. I don't know what my hourly rate is, but (pardon the upcoming thinly veiled brags), I'm up >250k in the past year, and I didn't play full-time from september-april due to school. I don't know what my hourly rate is, but I know that there's literally zero jobs I could get right now where I would have even made 1/4 of that in a year. Also, I'm not even in the top few hundred of most profitable tournament players in the past year, let alone SNG and cash game players.
Hopefully that helps a bit. Also you can never underestimate tournament variance, it's true that some "pro's" aren't really pro's at all anymore and can't beat the games anymore, but also 2-3k game breakeven stretches are common, and it's entirely possible that some players could be killing it on all sites other than stars/FTP, and breaking even on those 2. I've seen heaps of players with like 500k profit on stars and breakeven on FTP or visa-versa, and it's not because they play better on one, or their style suits one better than the other, it's just insane/weird variance.