I’m going amateur!

I remember a couple years ago every other day you’d see a post of people asking “should I make the leap and become a professional poker player?” or “I finally did it! I’m a professional poker player!” Well, you don’t see many people talking about going the other direction back to becoming an amateur. Most likely this is because when most people do they inevitably went busto and couldn’t cut it anymore. Well, in my case I still have a decent amount of savings built up and I think I still have an edge against most PLAYERS in the games I play, however, the fact is that’s just not enough these days. In light of the recent legal developments, it’s tough for me to get enough tables going sometimes, and even when I do the rake is just so high it’s not even worth it. There’s also all sorts of deposit, withdrawal issues, the poker economy is dying and I don’t really see it booming any time in the near future and for me at this point it’s just best that I move on from poker and go get a job. Sure, I could move, I could go play live, I could mass table grind and squeak out $40k this year, but the fact is it’s just not worth it. There are more important things to me in my life right now than maintaining my profession as a poker player and I’ve started sending out my resume.

One of the things that I think appealed to my blog from the beginning is I’ve always been very open about posting results where as most people only post their winning streaks or complain about their bad runs. Well November, I lost $1,700 and December I made $1,000. In December I actually put in a decent amount of volume and tried to stick it out at .5/1, but after I got up $4k or so the mixed games proved too tempting and I ended up losing this hand during my “shot taking.” This was about 3x as big as any other pot I played for the whole month. I don’t post it to show how bad I run, but post it to show my lack of discipline in being able to grind out the low stakes for a steady profit. I think this has been a major flaw of mine throughout my poker career, but also perhaps major driver in some of my success. If you’d like to learn from my mistakes I would summarize as follows:

a) If you are concerned with making the most money possible as a professional poker player, I would recommend being relatively conservative with your bankroll and never playing at stakes with under 100 buyins. Be extremely selective with your game selection and try to only play people really bad at poker.
b) If you are less concerned with maximizing your hourly and making the most money possible from poker, but more interested in making decent money, pushing yourself to your limits and becoming the best poker player you can be then be aggressive with your shot taking. Play in some tough games, improve as much as possible, spend a lot of time studying the game and see how far it will take you.

I clearly selected b) and don’t regret it one bit. I know what I am and where I fall in the poker food chain. I’ve played David Benyamine in headsup 7 game and beat him. I’ve bought significant action against Gus Hansen in a nosebleed stud8 game. I played the main event on my own stake. I view these as accomplishments of mine, but clearly if you select a) you do not care about such things. You would simply look at the EV and variance of any one of these things and conclude it’s not worth the risk.

Anyways, enough poker. I’d like to talk about what’s next for me. You may be wondering what kind of job I’m looking for. Well, one thing’s for sure, I’m super glad I got my degree and didn’t drop out or “take a semester off” for poker like I considered back in the college days. At first I thought I wanted to get a job in the finance world and ultimately with a hedge fund trading and speculating on stocks all day. Well I ended up meeting with a hedge fund manager who just moved out to Seattle for lunch and he had some pretty decent career advice for me which you may also find helpful which I’ll talk about next time.

PS I have a couple 2010 wrap up blogs in mind and what I have planned for 2011, but beyond that please leave a comment if you are still interested in me blogging after I get a job. I mean how interesting is I grinded 40 hours a week all four weeks this month and made exactly what I thought I would! I’m actually looking forward to this now haha. I’m more than happy to keep it up, but blogging is somewhat time consuming and obv I will try to keep it interesting, but it’s pretty understandable if poker players are no longer interested in hearing from a guy with typical day job.