In this feature, three lesser-known pros talk about their lifestyles, the reasons behind their decisions to quit their day jobs, and what it takes to go the distance as a professional poker player.
A joke that did the rounds a couple of years ago says a lot about public opinion of poker as a career choice:
"What do you do when a professional poker player comes to your door? Thank him for the pizza and give him a nice tip!"
One of the main reasons why so many young men - and, yes, they are almost exclusively all men - are now turning to poker full time is that they are clever enough to realise that they do not need to be exceptional at it in order to use it to pay the bills, and while the bulk of society still find it difficult to see poker as an acceptable career choice, this negative view is changing rapidly. The bottom line is this: Like any professional career, candidates need to be suitably qualified, and poker is a pretty simple way to make money, with considerably more benefits than many other lines of work.
Angus Dunnington, 40, is from the UK. He began playing poker professionally in 2005. He has been a professional chess player since leaving school and earned the title of International Master, and has written more than 1,000 chess articles and 18 books. He was a coach for some of England's juniors at the world championships, as well as for adult teams of Botswana and Nigeria.
"I was partway to the Grandmaster title when my publisher asked me if I'd like to be involved in his branching out into
gaming, which allowed me to spend more time than necessary investigating online poker. I did reasonably well, had been growing increasingly tired of chess, and the arrival of our daughter in 2002 meant that my wife and I would no longer be able to travel around together, so I made a gradual and ultimately total transition from chess to poker. Incidentally, chess players have been swept up by the poker boom more than any group.
"The stakes vary; $50-$100 is outside my bankroll, but I've played that level occasionally, while $25-$50 is becoming rather interesting. I'll play anything, although the appropriate stakes at the moment are perhaps $5-$10 or $10-$20. I tend to average at least 25 hours per week online.
"Most of those who take poker seriously come from conventional careers and must adopt a poker-oriented mindset almost from scratch (which is a lot more problematic than it seems, especially when switching to poker as a career), whereas I not only have been immersed since a young age in a complex game, but also in a professional context.
"I have carelessly allowed my ego to damage my bankroll, my overconfidence and impatience manifesting themselves in the same way that they do with most players at some point in their careers. I would advise others to nip such freefalls in the bud early, and use their energies addressing their problems rather than continuing to fight their way out at the same levels; the oft-thought slow-rebuilding/downsizing process leads to recovery much quicker than most players believe.
"Too many young players seem to think that sticking to the same stakes for a week is grinding, and they have absolutely no intention of steadily plugging away for a year or two.
"Not surprisingly, I don't subscribe to blindly following a conventional career path; rather, I believe that people should endeavour to find something that makes them happy, and poker is an option. Ultimately what matters is whether someone is good enough, and herein lies the problem for most aspiring professionals. Unlike chess, in which skill is definable by results against others, and the lack of a luck element means there is no hiding place from reality, poker's boundaries in terms of success and failure are sufficiently blurred to render any but the most honest, brutal self-assessments quite useless, and, unfortunately, too many allow emotions to gloss over the facts.
"Ironically, the most obvious 'rewards' of poker - fame and fortune - tend to attract the kind of person who's least suitable to what in reality can be a rather monotonous (online) and frustrating (live tournaments) profession. There always will be those who manage to rapidly rise through the ranks or win big very early, but, in the main, success - whether simply using what was hitherto a hobby to pay the bills or planning to be the next Phil Ivey - will come only from patience. If you're not content to progress without recognition, poker's not for you."
Fortune Favours the Knave
Not every professional poker player plays for high stakes. In fact, the vast majority play low to medium stakes, between blinds of $1-$2 and $5-$10. Some make a solid living from single-table tournaments, risking only $55 at a time. Most professionals don't play very many big tournaments unless they qualify cheaply through a satellite, which is why so many pros fly under the media radar. Only a handful of players appear regularly on television, and most of those who do are already independently wealthy by other means or are sponsored, which is how they afford the buy-ins. Also, most of the players on TV are put there purely for their entertainment value, and are not nearly as talented as thousands of unknown players online.
Daragh Thomas is 27 and has played poker professionally for more than two and a half years. He is a well-known player in
Ireland and respected as one of the most talented. He plays online no-limit hold'em cash games with blinds of $1-$2 and $2-$4, and puts in about 25 hours a week.
"I found it very hard to adjust to a 9-to-5 job after college. I don't like long hours, I get bored easily, and I can't work at something I'm not passionate about. It was a struggle to succeed in work, because when the work interested me, my results were brilliant; when it didn't, they were subpar or nonexistent. When poker came along and I was certain I could make more from that consistently, I didn't really have a choice at all.
"I have a lot of other interests; however, none of them seem likely to ever garner me a fortune, so I have to leave that up to poker. My ambition is to be as successful as I can be, and to me that means money rather than TV appearances. I find it quite hilarious when a young guy who obviously had never heard of hold'em four years ago drones on about how much a bracelet would mean to him.
"A consistent problem I have is that people don't view poker as real work, and constantly intrude on my time when I should be playing. I'm not great at managing my time, and often let my personal life intrude on my career. Since I left my job, I have had more time to pursue my other interests, which are mainly making music, reading, and playing pro evolution soccer.
"I've had several bad runs and almost went broke twice. I got out of it by dropping down in stakes, playing tight, and putting in long hours. Discipline, patience, and bankroll management are all very important, and failings in those areas make it very hard to play for a living for any extended period of time."
The Going Gets Tougher
Coping with "tilt" is something players need to learn to do pretty quickly as a professional. It's fine for an amateur to deal with a losing month when he still has the wages from his day job coming in to pay the bills, but when poker is a player's only means of paying them, how does he react? Every player has a losing month now and again, and sooner or later runs worse than he ever had before.
The two key elements to surviving these periods, and ultimately to your overall success, are having a heavily padded bankroll and a well-balanced, happy life away from the felt.
Mika Paasonen, 29, is from Finland. He began playing poker three years ago and turned professional after just one year.
One week after talking to
Card Player, Mika finished fourth in the
European Poker Tour Barcelona Open for a prize of just more than €300,000.
"I earned four to five times more from poker than my regular job, so it wasn't a difficult decision to start playing professionally. I play $5-$10 and $10-$20 shorthanded no-limit hold'em, and higher than €1,000 live tournaments. I play only one or two hours a day online. On Sundays, I spend seven to eight hours playing the major online tournament.
"My goal isn't to be best player in the world. I just want take care of my family. I take my bankroll management very seriously, as I want to see myself playing poker for many, many years to come. I recently appeared on a poker show called
Pokeritähti 2007 (Pokerstar 2007). The program is coming out on Finnish TV later this year, so I can't say how it ends, but it was lot of fun to do.
"When I have a downswing or I'm in a bad mood as a result of poker losses, it can have a negative effect on my relationship with my girlfriend, but playing with my 2-year-old daughter is good therapy for this problem. I have a so-called tilting problem, and I have had some mental help for that. Top athletes also use the therapy known as autosuggestion. This (or the related autogenic training) is a process by which an individual trains the subconscious mind to believe in something.
"Poker is a hard way to make an easy living. In the future, I don't see the current trend of many young players turning professional continuing. I see games becoming many, many times harder in the near future. Too many players are arrogant and do not manage their bankrolls properly. They just want to play as high and as fast as possible. They go broke at times when proper bankroll management would have given them a fairer chance of beating the game."
