So, You Wanna Be a Poker Pro - Part I

by Lou Krieger | Published: Nov 19, 2004

With the incredible interest in all things poker-related on television, it's no surprise that big-time tournament players are getting recognition similar to what's accorded professional athletes. Even Hollywood stars like James Woods, Mimi Rogers, and Ben Affleck can be found playing poker tournaments when they're between movies. Finding a game is easy. It's no further away than your neighborhood casino or the Internet, so it's no wonder that many new players are shouting out to anyone willing to listen that they plan to become professional poker players after the few short months they figure it will take them to master the game. Few of them, however, have really taken stock of what the life of a professional poker player is like, and fewer still have done the math necessary to assess just how their chance of success pans out based on nothing more than the numbers alone.

Try as one may, the top of the food chain is extremely competitive, and not just anyone can elbow his or her way in there. It takes more than most players realize.

It's easy to get excited about the upside to playing poker for a living. Work for yourself. Set your own hours. Play when and where you want, and the earning potential is incredible if you can work your way up to the top echelon of the game.

I don't think a single reader needs prodding about the upside of this business. It's the downside that so many refuse to examine logically. So, let's take off our rose-colored glasses and in this two-part series we'll look at some of professional poker's downsides and examine the differences between playing tournament poker versus specializing in cash games as a way to make a living.

One major deterrent to playing poker for a living is that professional poker is one of the few jobs where you can go to work and lose money. Even commissioned salespeople, who earn money only if they make a sale, don't really suffer financial losses if they fail to close a deal. While commissions aren't earned without making a sale, at least no one reaches into the salesperson's pocket and takes money away if he or she is not successful. But that's just what happens in poker. You can go to work and lose money. It happens all the time.

Professional poker players are also responsible for their own health insurance, as well as for squirreling money away for the future. Playing poker is not like holding down a job in corporate America. There's no health insurance, no deferred compensation, and no stock options available. If you don't create your own benefits, you won't have any. Many players ignore these safety-net factors. When first starting out, especially when relatively young, the thought of saving for one's retirement is often too remote for consideration, and health insurance seems a redundancy when one is fit and healthy. Still, no one is more than a single misstep away from catastrophe, and saving for the future is something everyone ought to do. If you're wise enough to pay yourself first by living a bit below your means and saving a dime out of every dollar earned, and began doing this at age 20, you'll be financially secure by middle age. The secret is investing and reaping the benefits of compound interest, the eighth wonder of the world.

Life as a tournament poker player can be difficult even under the best of circumstances. Let's do the math and see why. Using the 2004 World Series of Poker as a guide, an event with 400-500 players paid 45 participants, which works out to somewhere between 9 percent and 11 percent of the field. While that might sound good to you, it's important to realize that all tournaments are front-loaded. In a WSOP event with 450 players, more than 50 percent of the prize pool is paid to the first three places, and a staggering 81 percent of the prize pool goes to those making the final table. Finishing anywhere from 11th to 45th earns you bubkes, which is Yiddish for not very much, but it sounds better.

Once you figure that you really have to make the top three for a decent payday, it's important to figure out the cost of entering tournaments. Once you begin adding up the cost of buy-ins, you'll quickly find that you'll need to earn at least $200,000 annually, and possibly more, to pay your way into most of the big tournaments. On top of that, you have all the expenses of traveling and living on the road. With fields so large, it's entirely possible for even the very best players to go a year or two without cashing in any meaningful way. When you consider this, it's no wonder that many well-known poker players seem to take turns being broke, living a constant cycle of borrowing when things aren't going well and then staking others when they're flush with cash.

If you're not one of the very best, but only a marginally successful tournament player, you might find yourself clinging to one of the bottom rungs of the ladder. Many marginal tournament professionals eventually slip off the ladder entirely and find themselves forced to earn a living outside of poker. Other professionals have outside sources of income. Regardless of whether it's a trust fund or the result of a stunning business success, many poker players have a steady income stream to smooth out the incredible fluctuations endemic to playing poker for a living. That's not to be sniffed at, either. It's a lot easier to take a big loss or suffer a protracted losing streak when you know that a check is coming in at month's end.

Because of this, it's difficult to assess whether a player is successful at poker or not. With outside sources of money to buoy them up, players can go for a long time without anyone else – and sometimes not even the players themselves – realizing they're losing at poker but surviving through other sources of income.

Top-notch players realize the implications of this, and the majority of the best pros invest some of their winnings in order to diversify their income stream. I probably qualify as a poster child for this kind of behavior. I've never earned more than 40 percent of my income from poker, and created diversity by investing winnings, earning money by writing, and for too long a time, had a (gulp) real job. Thankfully, the job is long gone, but the other sources of income are still there, and because of the current poker feeding frenzy, my books sell so well that the percentage of money earned by playing poker has dropped way down by comparison.

To all of you who aspire to play tournament poker for a living, my advice is to have a backup source of earning a living – a "Plan B" – firmly in hand. Just in case all goes south, you won't find yourself destitute and on the rail, looking to put the touch on friends who probably will begin avoiding you like the plague anyway.

Next time, we'll look at some of the issues related to playing cash-game poker for a livelihood.