January 22, 2004
Poker and Friends
One of the best things about playing poker all around the world is the vast number of people I have met. It is interesting to get so many perspectives on life. I have met businessman, bookies, drug dealers, housewives, and just about everything in between. I have made numerous friends at the poker table, and continue to do so to this day.
One of the many friends I have met is named George. He is a young guy, a little older than me, and lives in Atlantic City now. He started playing around the Vegas Nights a couple years after I did and now plays for a living. He was a fast learner and I like to think that I helped him learn to beat the games, as I had a little more experience than he did. He and I used to hit all the house games around Akron and Cleveland together before he moved to Atlantic City back in the days when playing $10/20 was a thrill. I was working at Sam's Club back then (and going to school) and usually playing $3/6 or $5/10 and had been beating the games at that level for a year or two. I never really had saved up enough money that I felt comfortable taking a shot at the bigger games (I like to buy toys quite a bit) so when I wanted to play higher limits I would sell some of my action to people who knew I was a winner. The 3 people who always wanted to buy half of my action were Pat, Charlie, and George. I will talk about Charlie extensively in a later post.
Selling action is rather simple, someone agrees to pay you any agreed upon percentage (usually half) of whatever you lose if you lose and you agree to give them the same percentage of whatever you win if you win. Thus if the person who's action you buy is a winning player you are effectively making money. It is a VERY high risk form of investing but one that can pay off well. Just ask George.
I would sell half of my action to George (and sometimes another 1/4 to my friend John) and we would go to some of the wildest games around, usually $10/20 games. In the few weeks before he moved out of town the first time (he came back then moved back to Atlantic City) I probably won somewhere around 5,000. That is a very large sum for $10/20 in 2 or 3 weeks. So George had a little moving cash and I finally had a bankroll that would allow me to play a little higher limits. At least until I lost it, but more on that later. More important than the bank roll though was what I had learned. I learned that players at the $10/20 games, while willing to play for much more money than the $3/6 players I was used to, were not necessarily any better. I also learned much about the game talking to George on the car rides home. Talking over hands played with other competent players and getting as many viewpoints on how it should have been played is a great way to improve your game, and something I wish I had more opportunity to do these days.
So in a way poker is good for friendships and friends are good for your poker. Those days of running around North East Ohio with George were sort of my formative years of poker. They gave me the confidence I needed to play the bigger limits (or at least what I though were bigger limits back then) and a new friend to travel with. And a small financial boost, which never hurts.
Posted by themaroon at 6:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 20, 2004
Poker FAQ
Playing poker for a living is different from any other occupation in that when you tell someone what you do you are more or less forced into a half hour conversation explaining it. It is almost always the same few questions over and over again so here are the answers to them. Call it the Pro Poker FAQ if you like.
1. Is that legal? Yes. It is legal to be a professional gambler. In almost all states it is legal to place a wager though you generally cannot be in the business of accepting wagers with the mathematical expectation of showing a profit (such as a bookie or a casino) and no state can tell you what to do outside of that state. So even in a hypothetical state where all gambling is illegal you may still be a professional poker player (or sports bettor, or any sort of gambler) and you are breaking no law.
2. Is it legal to play poker on the internet? That is a very tricky question because no federal laws really apply to wagering on the internet. While it is a violation of the Wire Act to run an online casino (though some say it may not even be that) no person has ever, to my knowledge, been indicted for gambling on the internet.
3. Do you count cards? No. Counting cards is a way to win at blackjack, not at poker. And 99 out of 100 people who say they count cards at blackjack have no idea what it really means or how to do it. They think that paying attention to how many aces have been dealt qualifies. In poker the deck is shuffled after every hand so knowing what cards were dealt out the hand before is useless, unlike blackjack.
4. Do you always know what your opponent has? No. Such a thing would be impossible. I probably know about what strength my opponents hand is much more frequently than 99.99% of poker players, but even still it is not nearly all the time.
5. Do you always win? No. I probably win about 2/3 of days when playing regular games, and substantially less than that at tournaments.]
6. Are your games like the ones on TV? No. The people you see are tournament professionals, as ordinary ring games are not exciting enough to make it on the television. Most professional poker players make their living playing ordinary ring games where you may buy in as many times as you like for as much as you want. In tournaments there is a limit to the amount of chips you can buy (usually just one buy-in but sometimes more) and all players play until one of them has all the chips. Tournaments are much different than ring games, though I would say that the best players in the world are probably not the ones on television, but the ones who play ultra high stakes ring games. A few players (Doyle Brunson, Jennifer Harman, Phil Ivey, and a few more of last years WPT contestants) excel at both forms but most players seem to excel at one or the other. One is not necessarily better than the other but I suspect the top ring game players probably make more in the average year than the top tournament players. That is only on average though, as the largest poker tournament payout is now over $2.5 million.
Posted by themaroon at 9:21 AM | Comments (0)
Welcome
This is a new blog I am starting to expose to the world what it is like to be a professional poker player. It seems that most people I meet are stunned to here that I play poker for a living. A week ago my broker asked me "can you really do that for a living". So I decided to make this blog to educate the public as to what professional poker is really about.
This website will, over the course of the next few years, chronicle one of 3 things:
1. My meteoric rise to recognition as one of the top players in the world.
2. My merely average success as a professional poker player.
3. My complete failure and going broke.
Where I will end up is anyone's guess. I have been playing poker professionally for about 8 months now, which is a fairly decent amount of time. In my 8 months I have made an amount which I would say that maybe one or two out of every 10 people who attempt to play poker for a living manage to make. I would also guess that somewhere between 60%-90% of people end up broke and searching for a job in their first 6 months. Usually they end up working as dealers in local house games or card rooms in California or Vegas, and maybe propping on the side at another cardroom in the area. I greatly suspect somewhere around half of the dealers in Vegas are busted out ex-professional players, who are happy just to make a decent living and be around poker full time.
More important than how much I have made is how much I have learned, and how much I am currently making. When I first took the leap from semiprofessional to professional I had a bankroll of about $3000 and was playing 3/6 online about 40 hrs a week, at which I made about $25/hr. Now I play $10/20 short handed (6 players or less) when online and 15/30 or 20/40 when playing live, and make over $100 per hour online. Were I to play a standard 40 hr work week that would add up to roughly $200k a year, not too shabby for a job with no set hours and no boss. I only play roughly 30 hrs a week though, as I just have too many other interests to devote a full 40 hrs to poker.
Throughout the week I will be posting frequently in order to get my readers up to speed before I leave for Tunica on Friday. I am heading there for the tail end of the World Poker Open, the second largest poker event of the year, where I plan to play in a few satellites to the main event, maybe the $2000 buy in limit Hold’em event, and plenty of side action.
Well, that is enough for this particular post. In the future I will continue to chronicle my results, what I learn about being a professional poker player, and how being one affects everyday life. I hope my posts will be informative for those considering going pro themselves and entertaining and enlightening for those who are recreational players or don’t even know what Texas Hold’em is. In the mean time wish me luck in Tunica, because enough of it could bring me back a millionaire.
Posted by themaroon at 6:39 AM | Comments (0)