Am I Better Because of Poker? - Career

I've been putting off writing about the effect of poker on my career somewhat. I have a sneaking suspicion about the conclusions I'll reach and don't really want to have to reach them, but let's see.

This is the second post in a series to address the impact of poker on my life. I'm assessing the following aspects:

Financial
Career
Hobbies
Physical Health
Intellectual
Psycological
Marital Relationship
Friendships

As I outlined in the previous post I discovered poker while I was still a student. At the time I was fairly dedicated to the idea of pursuing a career in medicine. It didn't take long for that to go out of the window as I became less interested in studying. That was reinforced when I did badly in finals and ended up with a 2:2 which, even if I'd have been inclined to carry on studying, would almost certainly have been insufficient to get into medicine.

The job I'm doing at the moment is the beginnings of a career that I'd been considering even when I first started thinking about medicine. I've never written about it and I'm going to keep it that way for now, but I don't think this post will suffer much from the omission.

There are two main questions that need answering: am I going to enjoy my current career path more than a career in medicine; and do I think that the continued presence of poker in my life will affect this career path?

Both are hard to asses and it may be hard to be honest, but it needs to be tried.

My current role is not the one I'm aiming for in the future (as is probably the case at the bottom of many ladders) so I can easily say that I'd rather be doing medicine right now. As far as my future enjoyment of this job goes compared with how much I would enjoy doing medicine, it is hard to say. Over the last few weeks I have been thinking more about the missed opportunities regarding medicine. I work very close to a hospital and only yesterday I saw an old friend of mine from secondary school, who I knew had studied medicine, walking down the road towards the hospital carrying a coffee and with a stethoscope around his neck and I looked on somewhat enviously. So if I'm honest I've been having some regrets about not pursuing medicine. There's no reason that I shouldn't be able to get as much satisfaction from my chosen career path, but I have been having doubts recently, be they well founded or not.

As for the effects of poker on my current career path, that's really going to depend on my ambition and determination. I don't think poker has held me back yet, but it certainly could and I've already seen evidence of that potential: I'm supposed to be learning Turkish and I went through a phase of a few months at the end of last year when I was working reasonably hard to that end, but I've let it slip this year and I quite possibly wouldn't have done so if I didn't play poker so much.

Overall it's a pretty hard one to call, but I'm certainly worried that my career and career prospects are worse off because of poker. It's probably too early to tell. I must just ensure that I keep things in balance and dont let poker totally take over.

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.

Am I Better Because of Poker?

CC has been writing a very though provocing series of articles to help him discover if he's better because of poker. It's something I've been meaning to address for some time now so I'm going to copy his idea by looking at all parts of my life and seeing how poker has impacted on them. After that maybe I can decide what part poker should contiue to play in my life and see if any other aspects need addressing. I'll look at poker's impact on the following parts of my life:

Finantial
Career
Hobbies
Physical Health
Intellectual
Psycological
Marital Relationship
Friendships

I'll start by looking at all things finantial in the next post.

All Too Soon

With only one day left before heading back to work, I'm already beginning to forget that we've had any time off. I've also managed to get ill. Good work Pink.

The time away was great, however. We spent five nights in the Lake District, having stopped off in Oxford to drink with friends and in the depths of Herefordshire to drink with familiy.

In the Lakes we stayed in Hawskhead, a beautiful little village one valley over from Lake Windermere. We stayed in a cosy pub which did great home food and locally brewed beer - just what we needed after a long day of walking. Given the time of year the weather was pretty good. We only had a little rain and the cloud lifted at just the right times for some great views from the tops of the mountains.

I believe I promised some photos: