Am I Better Because of Poker? - Finantial
This is the first in the series of posts about the impact of poker on my life. I'm looking at the following aspects of my life:
Financial
Career
Hobbies
Physical Health
Intellectual
Psycological
Marital Relationship
Friendships
The financial impacts of poker on my life may be one of the easier aspects to address. It's fairly black and white and doesn't involve too much soul searching. An easy one to start with, then. But first, a brief background to my life and how poker came into it:
My life prior to university can be glossed over somewhat. I grew up in a rural lower-middle class family in the middle of buttfuckcestershire. I got sent away to boarding school from the age of 10 on various choral, music and academic scholarships. After school I took a year out and spent half of it teaching and travelling in Kenya before heading off to university at Oxford the following year.
At University I read Biochemistry. At the outset I was confident that I wanted to spend my life doing research and winning a Nobel Prize. It didn't take too long before I realised that I didn't really want to spent all my hours sat at a lab bench not really making any significant progress and I started considering a career in medicine.
In the meantime I met Mrs. Pink and it was quickly very clear that we were going to spend the rest of our lives together.
I discovered poker in the middle of my third year (of a four year course) only a few months before finals. It quickly took up a lot of my time and I deluded myself that I'd be making thousands before I knew it. I lost all interest in working for my degree and I began to loose interest in perusing medicine as a career.
I did as badly as expected in finals ending up with a middle 2:2 which would require quite a lot of effort in my fourth year to turn into a 2:1.
My fourth year was largely research and dissertation based, although there were a couple of exams at the very end. I continued to play a lot of poker and my study continued to suffer. I actually managed to do pretty well and get a 1st in both my research and dissertation but then refused to work for the final exams again and so walked away from university with the 2:2 that was inevitable overall.
After university I married Mrs. Pink and we moved down to London. She had a job lined up in journalism and I played poker and worked odd jobs while trying to figure out what to do.
After about 9 months I took the job that I'm in at the moment and I've been doing that for just over a year whilst playing about 15-20 hours a week of poker in my spare time.
It took a while after starting to play poker before I noticed any financial benefits. In the beginning I thought I was invincible and as my role grew I moved up stakes until I got out of my depth and gave most of it back. After about 9 months I made my first cash out after a good run of form at $15/30 limit and a nice tournament cash. During the course of my final year at uni I made a couple more cash outs and managed to have saved enough from poker to pay for our honeymoon to Barbados.
We moved to London immediately after getting married and at that point I had a pretty meagre roll. It certainly wasn't big enough to be able to make a decent income from.
Once I took my current job and had a steady income I was able to use any winnings to build the roll and I gradually moved up stakes. I'm now playing anything up to $1k no-limit and in the happy position of earning more from poker than in my current job.
So am I better off financially because of poker? Well, the simple answer is yes. Without poker we'd be living a much more frugal existence.
But what about in the long term? If I had never discovered poker there's a good chance I'd be studying medicine at the moment. In the long run with my current job I can probably only expect to make about 40-60% of what I could make doing medicine. Whether poker will be able to make up the difference 10 or 20 years down the line is pretty much impossible to say. Who knows how the games will be then and how my game will be. But for now we can chalk this up as a victory for life after poker.
The next post in the series will look more into how my career has been affected by poker.
Financial
Career
Hobbies
Physical Health
Intellectual
Psycological
Marital Relationship
Friendships
The financial impacts of poker on my life may be one of the easier aspects to address. It's fairly black and white and doesn't involve too much soul searching. An easy one to start with, then. But first, a brief background to my life and how poker came into it:
My life prior to university can be glossed over somewhat. I grew up in a rural lower-middle class family in the middle of buttfuckcestershire. I got sent away to boarding school from the age of 10 on various choral, music and academic scholarships. After school I took a year out and spent half of it teaching and travelling in Kenya before heading off to university at Oxford the following year.
At University I read Biochemistry. At the outset I was confident that I wanted to spend my life doing research and winning a Nobel Prize. It didn't take too long before I realised that I didn't really want to spent all my hours sat at a lab bench not really making any significant progress and I started considering a career in medicine.
In the meantime I met Mrs. Pink and it was quickly very clear that we were going to spend the rest of our lives together.
I discovered poker in the middle of my third year (of a four year course) only a few months before finals. It quickly took up a lot of my time and I deluded myself that I'd be making thousands before I knew it. I lost all interest in working for my degree and I began to loose interest in perusing medicine as a career.
I did as badly as expected in finals ending up with a middle 2:2 which would require quite a lot of effort in my fourth year to turn into a 2:1.
My fourth year was largely research and dissertation based, although there were a couple of exams at the very end. I continued to play a lot of poker and my study continued to suffer. I actually managed to do pretty well and get a 1st in both my research and dissertation but then refused to work for the final exams again and so walked away from university with the 2:2 that was inevitable overall.
After university I married Mrs. Pink and we moved down to London. She had a job lined up in journalism and I played poker and worked odd jobs while trying to figure out what to do.
After about 9 months I took the job that I'm in at the moment and I've been doing that for just over a year whilst playing about 15-20 hours a week of poker in my spare time.
It took a while after starting to play poker before I noticed any financial benefits. In the beginning I thought I was invincible and as my role grew I moved up stakes until I got out of my depth and gave most of it back. After about 9 months I made my first cash out after a good run of form at $15/30 limit and a nice tournament cash. During the course of my final year at uni I made a couple more cash outs and managed to have saved enough from poker to pay for our honeymoon to Barbados.
We moved to London immediately after getting married and at that point I had a pretty meagre roll. It certainly wasn't big enough to be able to make a decent income from.
Once I took my current job and had a steady income I was able to use any winnings to build the roll and I gradually moved up stakes. I'm now playing anything up to $1k no-limit and in the happy position of earning more from poker than in my current job.
So am I better off financially because of poker? Well, the simple answer is yes. Without poker we'd be living a much more frugal existence.
But what about in the long term? If I had never discovered poker there's a good chance I'd be studying medicine at the moment. In the long run with my current job I can probably only expect to make about 40-60% of what I could make doing medicine. Whether poker will be able to make up the difference 10 or 20 years down the line is pretty much impossible to say. Who knows how the games will be then and how my game will be. But for now we can chalk this up as a victory for life after poker.
The next post in the series will look more into how my career has been affected by poker.
posted by Pinky @ 2:00 PM
2 Comments:
At 5:02 PM,
CC said…
Very important that you're looking at this financially both in the short term as well as in the long term. You and Mrs. Pink may want to ask yourself is the financial aspect an enabler for anything else in your life, or is it purely additional income.
At 7:57 AM,
Razboynik said…
An interesting article Pink.
I am very interested to know how the level of intelligence of a poker player affects his success in the game?
I know that there are professional players that are 'thick as pig shit' and make a decent living, but maybe they just have certain 'god given' talents?
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