The joys and woes of turning Pro

Over the past few months on PKR.com there have been numerous threads and discussions in the forums and a lot of great advice offered to those looking to take their social poker playing to the next level. The latest issue of Stacked magazine has just done a big article on the merits of turning pro. I would like to expand on this topic slightly in this rather long article.

Various players and quite a few personal friends of mine have taken the leap over the past year with mixed results, and I hope to go over exactly what the pro lifestyle entails… It is not all the glam and glitz that is portrayed, but if you can crack it, it will lead to a very happy, prosperous career.

The daily grind

The first thing to realise about being a pro player is that poker becomes more than just a way to raise your adrenaline levels and have fun. It becomes a job, nothing more, nothing less. When 97% of players play poker, be it for one hour a week or 40 hours a week, they are playing because they love the game, whether they win or lose. You would not voluntarily do something you do not enjoy doing if you did not get one of two things from it: pleasure or financial gain. Therefore, those players who aren’t doing it for solid financial gain (like a pro does) are doing it because they enjoy it.

Usually the happiest players play poker with money they can afford to lose from their day job, and use poker as a release from the stresses and strains of everyday life, rather like playing football with mates, or going to the pub for a beer. As soon as you decide to make the leap and turn pro, quit your job and make poker your sole form of income, you transport the stresses and strains of your normal job into the game of poker. This means that instead of playing poker as a form of release and fun, you now have to find something else to help you unwind from a day at work (at the tables). With no regular paycheck to fall back on every month, the financial strain can really take hold of you.

So far I have been very negative about taking the leap, but as any ‘successful’ player knows, it’s not all doom and gloom. Play poker for a living and you get to work to your own hours, do what you want when you want, travel the world, meet some great people and earn much more than you ever could in a regular job. Now that I’ve got the positives out the way, I shall move on to the decisions you need to make when deciding whether you have the ability to turn pro.

How good are you… really?

So you can beat the $0.50/$1 no-limit games, and have taken down two large tournaments recently for over $25,000. Poker is easy, it is coming to you naturally and you are playing like a genius, aren’t you? You have never made money so quickly or easily! Well, this is great and you may well have just what it takes, but this sort of a run is what is called a ‘heater’ and will probably hit you maybe three times in a given year. The other six months you will probably run averagely and the remaining three months of the year you will run cold as a Siberian winter. Are you sure that during the average months you are going to play equally as well as when you are on a heater, and can your bankroll withstand the losses you will accrue when you hit your losing streak? However long you have been playing before you are contemplating turning pro, I would suggest playing for at least that amount of time again before making your decision. If you have played and won for eight months, play for eight months more before making your decision.

After this period of time, if you are still consistently winning, and have a bankroll that is high enough to sustain you at the stakes you are playing through all your rough patches, then you can move on to the next factor of the decision-making equation. As a rough guide, I started playing poker when I was 18 and over the first six months or so I lost money. I then started making money consistently for six months. This was when I first thought about turning pro. Instead I waited for another year until I was 20 before taking the plunge. Even this was too soon, as I almost went broke within the first four months!

Do you want the lifestyle?

The lifestyle of a poker pro is glamorous, isn’t it? Well yes, to an extent. There are two different types of pro: those who want to be the best, and those who are very content with how much poker is making them and just want an easy life with no financial worries. If you feel as though you will be the latter, and you have proven that you are a consistent winner, then I would say skip the next few paragraphs and read the last section in this article titled ‘Preparing for the worst’. If you relate (as most will) to the first type of character, then you need to take advice from the next couple of paragraphs.

‘Why can’t I have a Hollywood lifestyle?’

You can, definitely, but with this glamorous lifestyle comes a few downsides. Say you will be earning $10,000 per month playing poker. If you are reading this paragraph, it means you are the type of person who wants to be the best, earn even more than that and show everyone that you earn this sort of money. This means when you go out, you will be the one buying the drinks, paying for the table service, staying in the hotel suites instead of the normal double room. You’ll be the person who buys a watch for $7,000 and doesn’t even blink – after all, these material items are what proves to everyone that you have money and are successful! I made this mistake, many times over and let me tell you, nearly every high-earning poker player has done, or is still doing the same!

In a 12-month period over 2008 and 2009, I spent over $100,000 in hotel costs alone! I spent $5,000 on nights out and spent all the money I had earned to make myself feel good. In my career I have earned over $800,000 and most of that is now gone, spent, and disappeared. You could say that you would never spend that much that quickly, but I assure you all the little things add up and you will. Say you spend $7,000 of your $10,000 every month without saving. Your wages are now only $3,000 and this is not taking into account the amount you need to put aside for building your bankroll gradually. Now a bad run hits you, and it hits hard. Your bankroll is running super low and you have to sell off your $7,000 watch for $2,000 to add a quarter to your bankroll! Things are bad, now you will not be living the Hollywood lifestyle you have become accustomed to, and it will be hard.

‘I will get a sponsorship deal…’

I have been extremely lucky to have picked up a great deal with PKR.com, but I am one of an elite few who have been lucky enough. For every sponsored player, there are 50 equally good players who have not managed to secure a deal, purely through the luck of the draw. Even those who do get picked up by a site do not have the world at their feet. Often deals will consist simply of 100% rakeback and being paid a small amount to play at the site, in return for continual promotion of the site. Some deals consist of entry to big tournaments, but for a 50% return of any winnings. In return for this financial aid, the player is required to write articles, continually endorse the site wherever they are, make social and financial sacrifices to the site and hardest of all, make continual profit to prove they are worthy of the deal. When you are on a bad run, this is extremely hard to do, especially when jealous people make your life hell by putting you down at any point.

Backers are another form of sponsorship, but without the endorsement aspect. In return for full entry to poker games, you have to give back 50% (usually) of all your profits to your backer to make it profitable to them. This means that although you do not have the stress of losing all your own money, you have to give away half of what you would normally earn with your own money. When playing in a ‘make-up’ deal (if you run badly and lose $30,000, you have to firstly make back the $30,000 before making any profit for yourself) you can find yourself going for months without getting paid, as you attempt to earn your backer back the amount you lost.

Both of these types of sponsorship can be very stressful at points, although any form of financial aid makes your poker life a LOT easier than a normal pro.

‘What are my overheads going to be?’

Overheads are not exactly something you link with being a pro poker player – after all the costs of owning a business are a lot more than sitting at home playing poker on your computer, right? Well yes and no, and to find this out you have to take into consideration a lot of factors that you would not at first think about. Your home is now going to be your office so you will need a nice fast computer, usually with two high-resolution screens to make your playing easier. You will need a very fast and secure broadband connection and preferably an alternate temporary power source linked into your system, in case of power cuts (they always come during big hands!). You have to become a computer geek and invest in more computer parts than you actually need, and preferably a second computer for emergencies and a large hi-resolution laptop for travelling. Travel costs per tournament can change depending on the location, but look to spend a minimum of £200 per day (including food, taxis, etc) as a complete minimum, plus the cost of travel to and from the location. Playing a live tournament even somewhere as close as Europe can start to cost upward of £1,500 before you even start to play poker.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, and more unexpected costs occur regularly that mean a simple trip to a live tournament can cost more than the actual Main Event buy-in itself! If you are trying to get a name for yourself as a big winner, to help aid your chances of hooking a sponsorship deal, you cannot skimp on these things, which means you have to start increasing your win-rate even more, to pay for all these ‘costs’.

Preparing for the worst

So you still want to take the plunge? That is great and as well as offering you the best of luck, I can also offer you the following help. Turning pro is easy: you hand in your notice to your job, get yourself a nice fast broadband connection and start playing… Done and done! Now comes for the realisation of what could happen in the future.

‘What if it goes wrong?'

If the worst happens and you should fail at your choice to become a successful pro, what will your future employers think of your decision to ‘gamble for a living’? This is something that will usually detrimentally affect a employer’s decision to employ you, and if you have a two-year gap of unemployment and choose not to tell them your gambling adventure, what will you say you have been doing? Making the decision to turn pro is as much a lifestyle decision as it is a financial decision. You will find it very hard to go back to a normal lifestyle after tasting the wonders and glamour of the poker world.

‘What if my bankroll is not big enough?’

If you have reached this point, then you should be sure enough with yourself that you have enough money to last you through your bad patches. The only thing that might affect this is a lack of discipline. Even if all your new poker colleagues are playing in those crazy $25/$50 games, you must have the willpower to stay where you are, at the stake you are beating, until you have enough money to take a few stabs at raising your stakes. Remember, this is your business now and it DOES matter if you lose, unlike when you were playing socially and you could afford to take shots and lose a bit of money. You really CANNOT afford to lose large amounts of money when this is your sole income.

‘How much support do I have in the poker world?’

In the poker world, money flows freely, and amounts of money exceeding five figures are loaned to other players without as much as a blink of the eye. Trusted players can always rely on their poker friends to help them out during tough times, and despite thinking that you will never go ‘busto’ or have financial worries ‘because you’re the best player ever’, anything can happen. I myself have been close to bankrupt twice and almost a third time, but because of my strong relationships with friends in the poker world, I have never had a problem getting access to money to help me rebuild. If you keep yourself to yourself, don’t speak to others, and don’t help them out when they are in need, you will find it extremely hard to get help from them – and the bank will laugh at you when you ask for a loan! Take time to familiarise yourself with poker friends, treat them as you would like to be treated, and you will secure good financial relationships if your road ahead gets tricky.

‘What if i I cannot handle the pressure?’

Taking a leap into the world of the pro is stressful. I have said this numerous times, but friend after friend has ignored this and found it out the hard way. When you are feeling stressed out, have lost a lot of money and are running badly so cannot make it back, take a break! If you are losing $2,000 per week and your bankroll is reducing drastically, you may feel the only way to recoup it is to play more, concentrate on plugging your leaks, read books and watch poker videos. Wrong. No strategy article or poker book will help you get back into a winning mode like taking a break. Spend $5,000 on an all-expenses trip to the Maldives or Caribbean. Relax, chill out and make the most of your time with no laptop. It is an expensive holiday, and you may feel like this is a complete waste of your already depleting bankroll, but think of it as a sabbatical. You are going to be losing the amount this five-star holiday is costing you in two and a half weeks, therefore why not just take a few weeks off from poker, go on holiday and at least spend the money you are losing on something you will enjoy? Apart from enjoying this holiday, it will completely relax you. You will no longer have sleepless nights and you can start to play profitably again. You will forget all about that sick quads-vs-quads hand from three weeks ago, and everything you do now will be a completely fresh start. I cannot emphasise enough how important taking breaks is to every poker player!