I played back during the glory days of 2000-2004 and through the net-teller shutdown for America. Back then the money was absolutely absurd, because the game was very new online and very few people understood basics. This combined with the massive amount of marketing that was going on for television, tons of people were addicted to the thrill of the game.
Every single year the game became more difficult as more people studied and I continued to move up into higher and higher stakes. At one point I looked at how much money I had made/compared to how much I hated what I was doing and decided that I was done. People around me never understood why I quit because they knew me and the amount of income I had made, but the thing is no one can understand what it is to live on a grinders schedule like that.
I would get up at 10-11AM study the hands from the previous day to make sure I was playing correctly mentally, read over new material, review a partners hands as we both did each others to confirm playstyle and decisions were correct, around 3PM I would start scouting tables across various levels looking for soft players that I had datamined information about. Around 4-5PM I would start playing and continue to add tables with soft players and immediately leave any tables that didn't contain any soft players or they had busted. This table hopping and monitoring is absolutely exhausting, but critical to being as profitable as possible.
Repeat this until about 11PM. Then go to sleep until 4AM, get up and play against the players on the other side of the world as they were starting to play loose. Play against them until about 7AM, then go to sleep and get up around 11. Repeat. Do this for 4 years and almost anyone will decide enough is enough even with the amount of income I was making back then. The only rest I took was on weekends, just to remove myself mentally from the exhaustion.
Of course poker is much tougher now then it was then. I wouldn't even dream of trying to play now. I was maybe upper 85-90% player, now I would be in the lower 50%.
Live poker is still quite soft. While you do have to be better compared to years past, it's also far easier to get better because you can study solvers. I used to be a "good but not great" online player, but the extent to which you could truly understand hands was limited due to the limitations of the software at the time (mostly equity calculators that could not truly calculate EV). That changed with the release of Piosolver in 2015 that lets you calculate the EV of various strategies and give you the "correct" answer assuming various assumptions. Those assumptions are always wrong but it's still informative in the "all models are wrong, some are useful". I used to "plateau" in my undertsanding of the game but you no longer plateau because the game can now be understood at a more complete level.
Live poker will always be soft because there will always be plenty of people there to have fun and gamble no matter how much software exists. Furthermore, only a slim minority of players even actively trying to win actually put serious effort into studying (see also, dan luu's post on how it's relatively easy to reach the top 5% of any endeavour, even if very difficult to reach the top 1%).
I can't help but use the opportunity of poker on the front page of Hacker News to note that I have a strategy blog and training app on this exact topic:
www.livepokertheory.com
There's a lot of beginner to advanced strategy articles on applying practical solver outputs to live poker games as well as a preflop training based on solver generated preflop charts. Poker is currently my only significant source of income and I "eat my own dogfood" on this site so I'm very incentivized for it to be good!
Hello fellow HN'er! I am PioSolver author and thanks for mentioning my software as a turning point in poker theory evolution. Feel free to pm me (by Pio email or Discord). While I am no longer involved much in the poker world it's always nice to keep in touch with people doing interesting things in and around the industry!
Yes, live poker is still pretty soft, and since the players are worse, your winrate and edge should be better. But then again, I'm not sure you can get enough hands/hour to be as profitable as an online player--everything is just so much slower. You could have a year long downswing live where, if that happened online you are probably just a losing player. So you need to spend all your time at the casinos. You can't make a living grinding home games even if your edge there is astronomical.
Just my viewpoint as a solidly recreational player. Although I'm a decently profitable cash player (I donk my cash winnings away by losing tournaments), I'm not good enough to go pro online and I'm not patient enough or willing to spend my life in the casino to go pro live.
Not much has changed in the current live poker meta. Yes, the average player may be better, but if you put in the consistent time to study/solvers/hand reviews, IMHO that puts you in the top 20 percentile. It's getting to the top 5-10 percentile that is killer.
Ultimately, like life, the only true edge you can control is game selection. Hence, that Rounders quote that rings eternal:
"Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker."
I don't have the greatest references available, but a naive Google search brings up quite a few sources from databases and surveys that say that while 30% of poker players do better than break even, only 18% of actually manage to make any kind of worthwhile income from poker and only 5% of poker players make what is considered good income from it.
I don't know what "good income" is, whether it's like 100k a year or 500k a year... but I can take a pretty good guess that unless you're in the top 15%, poker is probably not worth it professionally.
Surely there's a lot of HUD/automated play now. Where players are simply seeing the GTO play for the entire hand. Sites make an attempt to prevent this but today I'd play online with extreme scepticism.
Real-time assistance simply wasn't a thing back in the day.
I used to play professionally during 2003-2007 until all the poker coaching sites started popping up everywhere. The money was indeed crazy and I was making roughly $400k/year at NL1000 back then. Eventually my winrate started dropping along with all the fish leaving the game and the whole boom died out. I did a year coaching but later decided to leave poker for good.
Good times though and kind of surreal for a 20 something year old dude.
Back in the early 2000s, the wife of a guy I worked with fancied herself a decent poker player.
She lost some non-trivial amount of money in an online game and was worried about telling her husband.
So, she tried to win it back and lost even more.
I think you know where this is going (if not, see Gambler's ruin).
She lost all of their savings trying to break even.
Stopped paying the bills.
At some point in the ensuing months, my co-worker came home to an eviction notice (plus, his wife was hiding the letters threatening to shut off the heat, etc.).
She is like a unicorn because I have personally never met a losing poker player.
Everyone is crushing it no matter what the rake in these games. "The games are all so soft". Sometimes they eventually though get bored of making all this money and move on to something else.
Same with sports betting now. "I win some, I lose some but overall I am up". Everyone says the same thing, even when betting on sports they don't even personally follow or watch.
How much did you make exactly? That's an extremely disciplined approach. I'd assume you could do pretty well at other stuff if you took it as serious as you did your online poker
I played a lot in person around the same time frame, and did pretty well. It was hugely popular with a lot of dumb money floating around. When I would travel for work, I would find nearby reservation casinos which always seems to have tons of easy money.
Like you said, winning poker is a grind, and for me, extremely boring. I rarely play anymore, and if I do it's with friends. But, I have memories of some big hands in Vegas that I'm happy to have experienced. I also learned a ton about risk management, my personal risk tolerance, and controlling my emotions.
Now there are apps that tell you to play your hand or not based on your opponents playing style and previous hands. You pay for the app and the app is created by the online poker site.
My friend plays professionally full time and he uses these apps for a slight edge. They all do. The apps do not play for him. They just say 80% user Smith123 folds.
Author here. Yes, the grind is something like that. I used to watch couple hours of theory videos and maybe have a hand review session before 4pm. The grind starts around 6PM and I play on-off till 5-6am. Rinse repeat for all 7 days of the week.
Every couple months I used to travel for some juicy tournament series to try my hand at live games.
It is frustrating isn't it to watch people back when we played idolize it as some glorious career, when it reality it is probably one of the most stressful, depressing and negative jobs mentally a person can have. The variance and amount of hands required to overcome it with skill can be a living nightmare to work through. I can't imagine playing when you played. It was pretty easy back when I did it, but still taking peoples money by isolating bad players with addictions wore me out after a while. I am happy to have played and the skills and determination I learned there helped me throughout the rest of my life. I run my own business from home now and I am much happier. I am glad you found some peace as well.
I find interesting that no one (yet) in OP or in the comments has talked about my main complaint about playing Poker as a living: it's a zero sum game where you basically only take money from other people. It's not productive. For me, that in itself is as depressing as the grind. But it appears most players don't really care about this, maybe because life oftentimes is not fair and thus being productive is not seen as important as it ought to be? Idk but I find it an important question, culturally.
I have a friend who got into poker in the 90s. He did a lot of studying and practicing at home, then took a bus down to Atlantic City to try his luck, goal was to pay for a ticket back.
He ended up making a lot more money than that (more than he’d ever made in a paycheck up to that point!), but half of it was from a guy with more teeth out of his possession than in his possession. Most of his opponents were irrational addicts fighting personal demons.
In the end, he decided gambling wasn’t for him, never went back to Atlantic City.
Specifically, if you're fixing to earn serious money off playing poker, your job is to SEEK OUT irrational addicts fighting personal demons, and personify said demons. You're basically looking to find prey and eat them. The wounded will be less capable of running away from you.
You could lurk outside the door and hit them with a rock or stab them with a knife, but that would be illegal. Functionally you're playing a similar role. You're stalking prey, trying to find the weak and hurt them, possibly until they die, knowing there will be more.
I quite understand why people can get off on this, but I also understand why many healthy humans will be put off by it. It's playing up one aspect of humanity while totally stifling other aspects. Humans are also cooperative, but that's not going to make you money playing poker.
If you don't count human entertainment and skill as a positive then it's not just poker you'll find depressing, but also almost all media, sport and games. It's an absolutely massive 'unproductive' chunk of the economy.
I've played in small poker tournaments where there was a buy in which went to charity and the prizes were provided by local businesses. That's positive sum.
Poker itself can be exciting and entertaining to watch, it is televised for entertainment, and has sponsors. In smaller contexts it's a social event that brings people together.
It has produced books, and culture and life lessons (I can't think of better training in outcome bias), it's synonymous with learning to control your emotions. You gotta know when to hold em...
While I think you make an interesting point, I don't think the situation is terribly different for poker than it is for most sports unless you don't count the massive amount of unpaid time and injuries that even losing competitors often put into it as a cost.
The point is that you end up focusing your energies (often intentionally, but always by the nature of simply playing a lot) on exploiting gambling addicts.
If you make films you aren’t targeting “film addicts” that go to the theater all day 7 days a week. They have a minimal effect on your outcome.
I would differentiate between entertainment and gambling. Sports and media get revenue from a massive audience of people who pay to watch it, and that revenue pays to promote solid talent within the field itself.
If playing sports required taking money from the losers to pay the winners, and the people who lost the most amount of money are those who end up having some kind of addiction and serious problem that the winners are exploiting, then yeah, sports would be also be quite morally questionable.
You are right that there is exploitation in sports and other forms of media, but I think most people can identify those aspects of sports and call them out.
Is this not also true for many sporting or competitive pursuits that are also effectively zero sum? For sports I suppose one could argue there are benefits to exercise and for other competitive games with professionals like chess there are mental benefits from getting good at them.
However, neither seem particularly "productive" outside of all the money that is funneled into events for marketing purposes. There is, of course, perhaps some inherent aesthetic and community building around a common interest that is valuable, but I'd argue that the same is true for poker - I personally find the game of no limit hold'em interesting from a theoretical perspective and have met a lot of people that I would not have otherwise through playing it.
Poker doesn't seem that much different to other abstracted competitive pursuits to me besides that it has a larger luck factor to it.
In non-tournament settings, every dollar you win at poker comes out of the pockets of another player at the table. It's truly a zero-sum game, as adding up the gains and losses of players at the table will result in zero.
In contrast, tournament games (chess, golf, tennis, WSOP, esports, etc) may have significant entry fees, but at a professional level the total winnings are significantly more than the sum of all entry fees. Generally the excess money comes from corporate sponsors or viewership fees. The entry fees can result in some players walking away with less money than they started, but I don't think this is common outside of tournament-play poker.
The most popular professional sports (soccer, football, baseball, etc) have players on salaries. Those players often also get performance bonuses, either for entire-team results (winning the championship) or personal results (number of games played, statistical thresholds, etc). But they're all getting paid _something_ win or lose.
The gambling aspect is a pretty obvious difference! There's nothing - or well, little - stopping you from gambling high stakes at chess, or go, or scrabble or dominion. It's just that those games are fun without gambling. Even some games that used to be heavily about gambling, like backgammon, have mostly turned into straight recreational games. But no-gambling poker really hasn't caught on. My guess it's that it's casinos, and a certain casino-adjacent culture/aesthetic, that has kept poker alive as a gambling phenomenon in this day and age.
Should we let casinos shape our culture in this way?
Something like football or chess or Formula 1 is valuable in itself; there's a beauty and elegance in seeing the hard thing done well.
In poker even the thing you're celebrating is zero-sum. Could person A fool person B or could person B read them; that's not people collaborating to create something in the way that two tennis players beating out a long rally are, that's just A vs B. And so much of the game is simply random luck - does the right card fall or not - and that's what people want to see; you might say there's skill in the game and that might be true, but people don't watch poker for the chess moments where someone makes a brilliant move, they watch it for the moments when the right number comes out of the random box. The larger luck factor matters.
In most sports money come from sponsorship. It's not a zero sum game but positive sum game where you compete for the value added (from the player's perspective)
Think of it as entertainment. What does the average professional athlete really add to the world? Poker advances your understanding of probability and statistics, bet sizing, drawdown management, and many other skills that would be useful in the real world. Watching baseball on TV, not sure what you take away from that. Playing sports build health and community and that is a huge benefit in itself, but for some reason poker gets all the negative stigma and little of the benefit in perception.
For me, the reason is simple: gambling. The vast majority of people who gamble lose. That's it. Once you see that truth, the whole industry looks horrible. In the last 30 years, gambling has invaded so many communities in the United States for a very much negative effect. It is a tragedy. And, the more normalised gambling becomes, the more addicts it will product.
I think this is a rabbit hole that makes you want to pull out of it real fast. For instance consider how many tech jobs right now basically devolve into trying to make people see ads that they don't want to watch. Not only are you not adding value to the world, you're actively making it worse.
Of course people can convince themselves with all sorts of rationalizations, like claiming you're introducing people to things that can make their lives better that they might not have otherwise known about. But that's just a fallacy. Good things, with or without advertising, gradually become known. Online ads are overwhelmingly about shoveling chaff down people's throats.
And poker players have the same sort of rationalizations. You might view oneself as an athlete, or an entertainer, a competitor, or maybe even just an analyst. Many of those descriptors, in my opinion, fall closer to reality than ad delivery rationalizations, but again it's all just rationalizations anyway you look at it.
The number of people working truly valuable jobs that genuinely improve society are few and far between, and they tend to pay terribly. Farmers being a textbook example. There are some good counter-examples like doctors, but even there there's an undesirable trend. Working at a poor public emergency institution is going to drive relatively low income and high stress. Go work as a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills and you're driving an extremely high income and low stress work. All in all we have a pretty terrible system, but nonetheless it's almost certainly better than all the others.
> I think this is a rabbit hole that makes you want to pull out of it real fast. For instance consider how many tech jobs right now basically devolve into trying to make people see ads that they don't want to watch. Not only are you not adding value to the world, you're actively making it worse.
I don't see this as the same thing at all. Advertisers exist because of demand for them by companies who want to sell their stuff to consumers. Those companies employ people and actually produce things that consumers want. This is not a zero sum game.
Ultimately all we really need is food, water and to keep from freezing to death in some shelter. So sure, we can get rid of almost everything else, but that isn't really the point.
During the genocide of Jewish people in Poland, one of the officers of the German reserve police who were tasked with the executions negotiated with his comrades that he would kill the children, but that he would only do so after their mothers had already been killed by someone else. This way, he told himself, he was doing the children a favor by ending their suffering because surely they had nothing left to live for if they had seen their mothers die in front of their own eyes.
I'm not saying poker (or advertising) is like the Holocaust. I am however saying people are exceptionally good at rationalizing their participation in acts they would otherwise find morally appalling if they end up in a place where they are part of a system and their ability to maintain their social status quo hinges on continuing to be part of it.
> All in all we have a pretty terrible system, but nonetheless it's almost certainly better than all the others.
Completely unrelated fun fact: Eastern Block apparatchiks used to refer to anarchists and other communists as "utopians" and coined the term "real socialism" (or "actually existing socialism") to describe the Soviet system of authoritarian governance and justify why it never met the aspirational goals Lenin and the Bolsheviks initially claimed they had. It's terrible, da, but it's better than capitalism and only a counter-revolutionary would claim that something more radical would be possible.
If you go back to the days of feudalism I'm sure you can find a thinker arguing in not as many words that while the divine hierarchy may feel cruel at times it is clearly preferable to the chaos of mob rule.
Yeah, and I think it's also an indictment of poker as a game. It's exciting? So would most games be, if played for high stakes! It can't be a very fun game in itself, if it needs stakes to be fun.
There are so many games out there. If it's really about the satisfaction of getting better, the social aspect, and all those other things, why not pursue it in one of the other games?
It's fun even for imaginary stakes, so long as they're limited. The reason you need stakes is not for the adrenaline, but because the stakes work kind of like 'life' in a video game. If you had infinite life the game would be stupid, because you could just rambo through everything. Same thing in poker. You could just go all-in every hand, because why not?
This is why some people like things like sit-n-go's or tournaments, where you pay a fixed sum once and then get a good amount of play in but where people will still take it very seriously.
Poker is hugely fun in and of itself to most people, the amount of imperfect information, dealing with human nature, mental calculations under pressure. I love playing house games with my friends
That said poker for fun and poker to make a living are almost indistinguishable, to make serious money multi-table grinds for 8 to 10 hours a day and the reasons outlined by OP article
I used to have a lot of fun playing poker for pennies, started in high school (we literally saved up pennies to play with during breaks), later online once that became a thing. The only requirement was that some stake existed, without any, it was a different game
Author here. Yes, I did mention it in my post. It was actually a big reason I switched back to daily job inspite of making 10-15x for the 3years that I played. It was very good money but depressing af. More over, once you are financially secure ($1m is enough money to retire in India), it makes no sense to put yourself through it further.
Years and years later I still have a fond memory of wiping a guy out for 5k in a 2-5nl game at Caesar’s during wsop.
He was a fellow low level pro that had been bluffing me all night, making nice and chit chatting with me.
Like thinking back now there is just zero remorse. Never saw him again. He didn’t have bus fare.
It is a sanctioned place to have a battle of wits for money. Totally agree it is not good for the soul to grind it out at the tables long term, but for me it was all about the thrill of devastation, giving and taking. Very much not the case that I “didn’t care”.
I met a great friend for a weekend traveling through Thailand after taking him for 10k online and noticing we were in the same country.
I lost 20k in an online hand all in on the flop to a runner runner. I look back on that as a thrill, the most memorable of roller coasters.
I'm not a poker player but I worked at a small casino. We had training sessions;new dealers, surveillance staff training, security staff training, supervisor training, cage training and I as a slot tech sat in as a filler customer. It was obvious after many hands the only winner is the non-loser as silly as that sounds. The one who sucks the least wins. Even with two players who always did really well if they were the last two it was basically whichever made a mistake is who lost. A bit like chess checkmate you never really stomp on the queen it's obvious to both it's over.
Many competitive games/sports where you are trading ELO or rankings (chess, RTS, boxing) are like this, but I wouldn't judge it outright as "not productive."
I'd reckon it's more about the journey, the stories and friends we made along the way, even though there may be few.
Whenever someone asks, "Why do they do that?" I always share the man who holds the Guinness World Records for rolling an orange with their nose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66xwQZuic3E
I find it hard to understand how you could argue it's productive when it is literally about exploiting other people's inexperience, naivety or honesty (lacking a "poker face") in order to take their money from them. It doesn't produce anything. At best you could argue it's a form of entertainment but it's not even good at that except as an observer sport.
Gambling, for most people, is ultimately a form of fraud. It's built on the narrative that you can get rich quick. Gambling is for the winners. The losers are just paying for it. The narrative hinges entirely on numbing the mark's rationality and making them not think about the odds, getting them to keep throwing money at you until they go bankrupt.
Rolling an orange on the other hand is something you can do entirely by yourself without harming anyone except the people you inconvenience if you do it somewhere public. Neither activity is productive but at least rolling an orange with your nose isn't actively anti-social unless you're a dick about it.
Poker is one of America's favorite past time and many losing players enjoy the act of going to a cardroom and playing with others. We've often bemonaed the lack of "third places" like churches and the ensuing rise of loneliness, and cardrooms can serve as one of these third places.
I find it interesting that professional poker players are frequently criticized for this but I've never seen someone criticize a casino dealer or other employee for this.
This is like saying you lose on lottery because the state always wins in total. Money wise yes but when you have a lottery ticket you entertain yourself with hopes and can dream about what you'd do with the megabucks. If you feel good for a while because of it ... did you really lose?
Same with poker. Sure, you can only win if someone else loses but what if they had fun?
In other words, is going to the cinema a net loss?
I play poker because it’s fun. I’m decent, I have won a few 100+ NL tournaments in Vegas and finish in the money as often as not. But I’m gambling well within my means, which is different for everyone. I have no idea if I take $1000 from someone if that’s their rent for the month or if it’s budgeted for entertainment.
Gambling is ancient and wired deep in the human psyche. It’s neither morally right nor morally wrong. It is just something we enjoy as a species. I feel bad for people addicted, but I also feel bad for people addicted to alcohol or addicted to reading the news. Everyone needs to moderate their own consumption.
It’s not front and center, and frequently overlooked.
I do have some issues spending so much time on a zero-sum game, as you mentioned, but ultimately it’s better that I have the money than people who are going to gamble it away; I’ll do something useful with it, and they probably won’t.
"As Canada Bill Jones said, 'it's immoral to let a sucker keep his money.'"
The poker player is providing entertainment for others.
It's really not much different than working on a company backed by a rich investor where the CEO skillfully plays their cards to maneuver more money out of the rich fish while the other players also try to get what they can out of them.
> The poker player is providing entertainment for others.
Yes, and the top earners in poker aren't always the best players, but rather skilled players who have some personality instead of putting on headphones and grinding and get invited to lucrative private games.
Entertainment is much better for recreational players without pro players in the game maybe with the exception of occasional tournament celebrity. Pro poker player doesn't provide anything to anyone with the exception of a challenge to other pro players.
Same can be said of trading (unlike investing, where you hope your money will help build something). When you buy and sell stocks for a profit, it is because someone has a loss (or will have at some point).
I was involved in poker for most of my adult life - first as pro player and then as a poker software developer. I was very lucky to be able live off poker winnings as a player and then become financially independent thanks to the success of my software (I am PioSOLVER founder and one of the two original programmers along with my close friend).
I agree with about everything the author of the post said. It's a lonely and destructive game. Success if meaningless and comes at expense of others. It's bad for your health both physical and mental. Gambling is fine as an entertainment in moderate amount for people who don't get addicted to it. I don't see any value in professional gambling though. I think almost everyone is worse off in that world. There is a lot of potential lost creating winners and losers in a negative sum game while game organizers make out like bandits luring addicts to their games (both online and live).
Professional poker is a very effective trap for smart analytical people. You can find success there faster and easier than in other areas and then you face a dilemma the author talks about: money is great but you feel like your are not building anything and opportunities to become involved in productive and rewarding endeavours slowly drift away. Switching becomes more difficult (and costly) with every passing year.
I am one of the big winners of the poker world - not only I made enough money to never worry about it again but I've met a lot o interesting people and learnt a lot of interesting things during work on my poker related project. I have one advice for smart people, especially those similar to me (ADHD, maybe slightly on autistic spectrum who can't imagine working a 9-5 job) - don't get involved it will lure you and chew you out. If you feel you have trouble holding a job or completing your degree which is not caused by your intellectual potential - seek help and maybe medication. After more than 15 years in the industry my biggest professional dream is to one day have enough discipline and energy to start a project in an unrelated area and create something more useful than a tool to help winners beat losers at a gambling game.
Author here. I mentioned Pio in a different comment. You are literally the reason I won any money in Poker and I must have studied using Pio/Monker for 1000hrs+ easily.
Thank you for sharing! I was just wondering what kind of devs work on solvers as a day job.
Would you say that building a “toy solver” for hold em could be a fun way to learn or improve with a language? I’d be curious to see how much work is needed to approximate the shape of the real GTO charts and common bet sizes.
> Poker has the best hourly rate for any job in India. The money is simply un-comparable to any job a 20 year old can get and is close to VP+ level in unicorn/FAANG companies
> Imagine sitting in front of a screen for 12-16hrs a day, clicking buttons
> The 95th percentile Poker income is about $200-250k.
I knew quite a few people who went through poker phases in college and their early 20s, back before it was heavily regulated. Back then, it was common for random people to join online casinos without any real skill to go along with it, so they were basically milking the average players all day long. They all had similar ideas about how they were going to get huge incomes by applying basic principles and scaling it to as many simultaneous poker windows as they could.
Some of these were very smart and talented people. A couple wrote scripts to track and graph their progress and statistics, which they shared online for extra motivation. Honestly, it became depressing to watch the growing dissonance between the high incomes they thought they were going to generate and the actual progress of their balances.
Also, staring at poker screens for 12-16 hours per day is soul crushing. Doing that to have a 5% chance of earning $250K (if those stats are correct) is even more depressing.
And then there's drawdown periods: Some times odds would align against them or they'd be off their game for some reason. They could go through long periods where their net balance was either flat or in slow decline, which could turn into a self-reinforcing cycle that worsened their play.
I don't know anyone who continued for more than a few years.
I did recently talk to someone who left their tech job to play poker for 5 years. He was at a level where he traveled to tournaments and got lucky a few times, but realized it was no longer fun nor sustainable. He was having a huge difficulty getting back into a career job. Most interviewers looked at the 5 year gap in his resume to play poker and passed. Those who did give him interviews asked a lot of questions about his career goals, likely because they assumed he was just falling back to a real job for a while before he went back to poker again in a few years. Last we spoke, he still hadn't landed a job.
As I understand it, instead of sipping at your shaken Martini at the poker table in Monte Carlo, the reality is more like having 16 tables open on your screen in a dimly lit room, and playing all of the simultaneously. Probably the real money is in automating it, but that is probably even harder. But at lease you can sit back and do data analysis / operations on your systems, rather than the dirty work of playing poker.
Even without the flight risk, a 5 year resume gap is difficult, especially mid-career. Accurate or not, your hiring managers are pretty much going to assume nothing you learned in those 5 years applies, so you are awkward to place. Especially if your salary expectations have grown.
Even worse, as most stay-at-home and later coming back to work mums can confirm, you basically hit a big fat red Reset button with 200 pound hammer going close to speed of sound on your professional experience. In your CV absolutely nobody cares about 5+ years old experiences neither, often its suggested to really trim/remove it. If you keep it there it looks like you have very little current experience to show and just desperately trying to increase text volume with useless fluff.
Doctors coming back after 5+ years of maternity leave (not uncommon in eastern europe when some social system have 3 years of paid maternity leave per child, some stay home even 10 years) can't do basic doctoring. Devs can't do anything sophisticated. People and people leading skills have also probably rather atrophied in those 16 hours dark lit room daily sessions.
So you are basically hiring a 40+ year old junior with potential gambling habit, possibly less flexible than younger, who may be in only for shorter term and probably has quite high salary expectations compared to juniors. That leaving part is probably most obvious. Yeah a hard pass is not unexpected.
Author here. You are spot on about the career break. Luckily for me, during my time I played poker professionally, I was also consulting with poker website to build out their matchmaking and fraud detection algorithms. I also built a small analytics tool for PLO professionals to study their game better.
As a part time live tournament grinder who has a full time job it's always sobering to hear from full time grinders who end up quitting due to how tough the grind is. A couple of observations to add:
1) There is absolutely a huge edge to be had playing live tournaments, even for buy ins in the $1k - $5k range. If you are playing outside of Vegas it is very common to end up at a table where at least half the table are "recreational" (i.e. players who are bad and are likely to make large mistakes).
2) The downside to playing live tournaments is that it is difficult to get reasonable volume in and the variance can be brutal. It is not that unlikely to go on a 20+ buy in downswing even with a decent edge.
3) Having an income source not tied to poker is huge and allows you to not have to be conservative with bankroll management. If you're pulling in mid 6 figures from a day job you don't have to worry about selling action or going down in stakes when you go on a downswing because you can always supplement the bankroll with your income. This, obviously, can be taken too far, but you don't have to be as worried about the variance from shot taking a higher buy in tournament where you know you have an edge like the $10k WSOP Main Event which is by far the softest $10k that exists.
As the saying goes, being a professional gambler is the hardest way to make an easy living.
It also sounds like an overall horrible, consistently highly amoral way of life. Plus some form of an addiction. All the details in this discussion point pretty clearly to this. You need to be a proper a-hole to be fine doing this long term.
If one had only choice between being poor homeless or do this I could accept that relativity, but not like this. I can't have any possible respect for smart capable human living like that by choice, sucking desperate horribly sick people of their possessions, ever.
Sure, there are still few humans around worse than that, just look at the news, but its still pretty much the moral bottom. And all I've seen in this discussion just proves that (I don't judge this activity from my experience since I don't play cards, I get my happiness from mountains and extreme sports and that's more than enough, and salary is enough too).
There is absolutely nothing amoral about engaging directly in a fair game with consenting adults.
Nobody can lose anything they don’t choose to play. Consent matters.
We sell cigarettes on every streetcorner (to say nothing of bars), which is evidence that society has reached widespread consensus on the fact that addicts are allowed to choose to be addicted (or not) to things. (The vast, vast majority of people who play poker are not addicted to playing poker.)
Back in the mid-2000s some places had crazy incentives like PokerStars. They had a form of rakeback where you could sit and grind out hands while playing break even'ish poker but still net $100,000 a year back then. The idea there was you could play ~16 tables at a time for ~25 hours a week making robotic decisions based on odds or a quick glance at PokerTracker's HUD.
There were other places as well. There were so many stories posted on the 2+2 forums[0] of people making really good money doing this. That's one of the most popular poker forums. It's interesting because it's a different type of skill. Tile a bunch of windows, have a lot of mental fortitude and grind it out. It's a completely different strategy than trying to become a "winning" player.
I used to play microstates back before online poker was banned in the US so I didn't participate in that. What's funny though is even back then at the 5c-10c ($10 buy in) or 10c-25c ($25 buy in) NL tables you'd have folks 4-6 tabling while looking at a PokerTrack HUD which gathered stats about players and displayed them above their name plate. I can't imagine at how much the game must have progressed since then.
I played for a living during 5 years in the early 90's. So before the Internet took off.
Of course there were some differences with OP's situation, e.g. because games were scarce I didn't play only poker but also backgammon, and basically any other game that had any skill and could be played for money.
Like OP, I decided to become professional because of the freedom, but also because I just liked games.
But after a couple of years these advantages start to fade away. First of all, you are not really free, especially when games are scarce: you have to be always available because if you miss a good game, it can take days before another one comes along. Also, the fun in playing games erodes if you play them day in day out.
Also, like OP points out, variance is brutal. The downswings can wear you out, sometimes I had to take a few days to recover.
But the main reason I eventually switched to a career in IT was something that OP also mentions: the main skill in making a lot of money, especially in live games, is not how well you play, but how good you are in finding wealthy suckers that want to play against you. This part really put me off in the end, it just wasn't me.
Yesterday I read a post here on HN about gambling and online casinos and went "pffft, people can't control their actions, isn't there accountability anymore?". Then I remembered that in 2006, while employed at the world's top company in 2006 I got into the poker craze and more than once a week worked from home so that I could multi-screen work e-mails with poker.
It was great that I noticed this before degenerating into a full-time addict. I used to grind at $15 9-player STTs and the variance was downright depressing. I cannot imagine what people playing at higher stakes go through. Just out of curiosity, I looked up many of the hotshot professionals of the day, almost none are still playing today. The games became tough and eventually everyone gets surpassed by the new guy using real-time assistance.
People starting this grind today simply shouldn't do it. Odds are that the game will become zero-sum at planetary scale given everyone and their mother is using GTO solvers now.
Readit News
Every single year the game became more difficult as more people studied and I continued to move up into higher and higher stakes. At one point I looked at how much money I had made/compared to how much I hated what I was doing and decided that I was done. People around me never understood why I quit because they knew me and the amount of income I had made, but the thing is no one can understand what it is to live on a grinders schedule like that.
I would get up at 10-11AM study the hands from the previous day to make sure I was playing correctly mentally, read over new material, review a partners hands as we both did each others to confirm playstyle and decisions were correct, around 3PM I would start scouting tables across various levels looking for soft players that I had datamined information about. Around 4-5PM I would start playing and continue to add tables with soft players and immediately leave any tables that didn't contain any soft players or they had busted. This table hopping and monitoring is absolutely exhausting, but critical to being as profitable as possible.
Repeat this until about 11PM. Then go to sleep until 4AM, get up and play against the players on the other side of the world as they were starting to play loose. Play against them until about 7AM, then go to sleep and get up around 11. Repeat. Do this for 4 years and almost anyone will decide enough is enough even with the amount of income I was making back then. The only rest I took was on weekends, just to remove myself mentally from the exhaustion.
Of course poker is much tougher now then it was then. I wouldn't even dream of trying to play now. I was maybe upper 85-90% player, now I would be in the lower 50%.
Live poker will always be soft because there will always be plenty of people there to have fun and gamble no matter how much software exists. Furthermore, only a slim minority of players even actively trying to win actually put serious effort into studying (see also, dan luu's post on how it's relatively easy to reach the top 5% of any endeavour, even if very difficult to reach the top 1%).
I can't help but use the opportunity of poker on the front page of Hacker News to note that I have a strategy blog and training app on this exact topic:
www.livepokertheory.com
There's a lot of beginner to advanced strategy articles on applying practical solver outputs to live poker games as well as a preflop training based on solver generated preflop charts. Poker is currently my only significant source of income and I "eat my own dogfood" on this site so I'm very incentivized for it to be good!
Just my viewpoint as a solidly recreational player. Although I'm a decently profitable cash player (I donk my cash winnings away by losing tournaments), I'm not good enough to go pro online and I'm not patient enough or willing to spend my life in the casino to go pro live.
Ultimately, like life, the only true edge you can control is game selection. Hence, that Rounders quote that rings eternal:
"Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker."
I don't know what "good income" is, whether it's like 100k a year or 500k a year... but I can take a pretty good guess that unless you're in the top 15%, poker is probably not worth it professionally.
Real-time assistance simply wasn't a thing back in the day.
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Good times though and kind of surreal for a 20 something year old dude.
I knew someone on the other end of this.
Back in the early 2000s, the wife of a guy I worked with fancied herself a decent poker player.
She lost some non-trivial amount of money in an online game and was worried about telling her husband.
So, she tried to win it back and lost even more.
I think you know where this is going (if not, see Gambler's ruin).
She lost all of their savings trying to break even.
Stopped paying the bills.
At some point in the ensuing months, my co-worker came home to an eviction notice (plus, his wife was hiding the letters threatening to shut off the heat, etc.).
---they got divorced.
Everyone is crushing it no matter what the rake in these games. "The games are all so soft". Sometimes they eventually though get bored of making all this money and move on to something else.
Same with sports betting now. "I win some, I lose some but overall I am up". Everyone says the same thing, even when betting on sports they don't even personally follow or watch.
You know what they say, the house always loses.
I don’t know how long he played, he certainly didn’t mention a grind as described here.
But, he netted enough to buy his then new $30k Lexus.
A lucrative hobby if nothing else.
Like you said, winning poker is a grind, and for me, extremely boring. I rarely play anymore, and if I do it's with friends. But, I have memories of some big hands in Vegas that I'm happy to have experienced. I also learned a ton about risk management, my personal risk tolerance, and controlling my emotions.
My friend plays professionally full time and he uses these apps for a slight edge. They all do. The apps do not play for him. They just say 80% user Smith123 folds.
Every couple months I used to travel for some juicy tournament series to try my hand at live games.
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He ended up making a lot more money than that (more than he’d ever made in a paycheck up to that point!), but half of it was from a guy with more teeth out of his possession than in his possession. Most of his opponents were irrational addicts fighting personal demons.
In the end, he decided gambling wasn’t for him, never went back to Atlantic City.
Zero sum games are really depressing.
You could lurk outside the door and hit them with a rock or stab them with a knife, but that would be illegal. Functionally you're playing a similar role. You're stalking prey, trying to find the weak and hurt them, possibly until they die, knowing there will be more.
I quite understand why people can get off on this, but I also understand why many healthy humans will be put off by it. It's playing up one aspect of humanity while totally stifling other aspects. Humans are also cooperative, but that's not going to make you money playing poker.
I've played in small poker tournaments where there was a buy in which went to charity and the prizes were provided by local businesses. That's positive sum.
Poker itself can be exciting and entertaining to watch, it is televised for entertainment, and has sponsors. In smaller contexts it's a social event that brings people together.
It has produced books, and culture and life lessons (I can't think of better training in outcome bias), it's synonymous with learning to control your emotions. You gotta know when to hold em...
While I think you make an interesting point, I don't think the situation is terribly different for poker than it is for most sports unless you don't count the massive amount of unpaid time and injuries that even losing competitors often put into it as a cost.
If you make films you aren’t targeting “film addicts” that go to the theater all day 7 days a week. They have a minimal effect on your outcome.
If playing sports required taking money from the losers to pay the winners, and the people who lost the most amount of money are those who end up having some kind of addiction and serious problem that the winners are exploiting, then yeah, sports would be also be quite morally questionable.
You are right that there is exploitation in sports and other forms of media, but I think most people can identify those aspects of sports and call them out.
However, neither seem particularly "productive" outside of all the money that is funneled into events for marketing purposes. There is, of course, perhaps some inherent aesthetic and community building around a common interest that is valuable, but I'd argue that the same is true for poker - I personally find the game of no limit hold'em interesting from a theoretical perspective and have met a lot of people that I would not have otherwise through playing it.
Poker doesn't seem that much different to other abstracted competitive pursuits to me besides that it has a larger luck factor to it.
In contrast, tournament games (chess, golf, tennis, WSOP, esports, etc) may have significant entry fees, but at a professional level the total winnings are significantly more than the sum of all entry fees. Generally the excess money comes from corporate sponsors or viewership fees. The entry fees can result in some players walking away with less money than they started, but I don't think this is common outside of tournament-play poker.
The most popular professional sports (soccer, football, baseball, etc) have players on salaries. Those players often also get performance bonuses, either for entire-team results (winning the championship) or personal results (number of games played, statistical thresholds, etc). But they're all getting paid _something_ win or lose.
No, absolutely not.
LeBron and Stephen Curry show up to a game, and both walk away hundreds of thousands richer.
---
In the top 1% of basketball games and the top 1% of poker games, they are sponsored and no one loses money.
And in the other 99% of basketball games, no money is involved. (People normally don't play pickup games for money.)
The other 99% of poker games involve players losing money.
Should we let casinos shape our culture in this way?
In poker even the thing you're celebrating is zero-sum. Could person A fool person B or could person B read them; that's not people collaborating to create something in the way that two tennis players beating out a long rally are, that's just A vs B. And so much of the game is simply random luck - does the right card fall or not - and that's what people want to see; you might say there's skill in the game and that might be true, but people don't watch poker for the chess moments where someone makes a brilliant move, they watch it for the moments when the right number comes out of the random box. The larger luck factor matters.
Of course people can convince themselves with all sorts of rationalizations, like claiming you're introducing people to things that can make their lives better that they might not have otherwise known about. But that's just a fallacy. Good things, with or without advertising, gradually become known. Online ads are overwhelmingly about shoveling chaff down people's throats.
And poker players have the same sort of rationalizations. You might view oneself as an athlete, or an entertainer, a competitor, or maybe even just an analyst. Many of those descriptors, in my opinion, fall closer to reality than ad delivery rationalizations, but again it's all just rationalizations anyway you look at it.
The number of people working truly valuable jobs that genuinely improve society are few and far between, and they tend to pay terribly. Farmers being a textbook example. There are some good counter-examples like doctors, but even there there's an undesirable trend. Working at a poor public emergency institution is going to drive relatively low income and high stress. Go work as a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills and you're driving an extremely high income and low stress work. All in all we have a pretty terrible system, but nonetheless it's almost certainly better than all the others.
I don't see this as the same thing at all. Advertisers exist because of demand for them by companies who want to sell their stuff to consumers. Those companies employ people and actually produce things that consumers want. This is not a zero sum game.
Ultimately all we really need is food, water and to keep from freezing to death in some shelter. So sure, we can get rid of almost everything else, but that isn't really the point.
I'm not saying poker (or advertising) is like the Holocaust. I am however saying people are exceptionally good at rationalizing their participation in acts they would otherwise find morally appalling if they end up in a place where they are part of a system and their ability to maintain their social status quo hinges on continuing to be part of it.
> All in all we have a pretty terrible system, but nonetheless it's almost certainly better than all the others.
Completely unrelated fun fact: Eastern Block apparatchiks used to refer to anarchists and other communists as "utopians" and coined the term "real socialism" (or "actually existing socialism") to describe the Soviet system of authoritarian governance and justify why it never met the aspirational goals Lenin and the Bolsheviks initially claimed they had. It's terrible, da, but it's better than capitalism and only a counter-revolutionary would claim that something more radical would be possible.
If you go back to the days of feudalism I'm sure you can find a thinker arguing in not as many words that while the divine hierarchy may feel cruel at times it is clearly preferable to the chaos of mob rule.
There are so many games out there. If it's really about the satisfaction of getting better, the social aspect, and all those other things, why not pursue it in one of the other games?
This is why some people like things like sit-n-go's or tournaments, where you pay a fixed sum once and then get a good amount of play in but where people will still take it very seriously.
That said poker for fun and poker to make a living are almost indistinguishable, to make serious money multi-table grinds for 8 to 10 hours a day and the reasons outlined by OP article
He was a fellow low level pro that had been bluffing me all night, making nice and chit chatting with me.
Like thinking back now there is just zero remorse. Never saw him again. He didn’t have bus fare.
It is a sanctioned place to have a battle of wits for money. Totally agree it is not good for the soul to grind it out at the tables long term, but for me it was all about the thrill of devastation, giving and taking. Very much not the case that I “didn’t care”.
I met a great friend for a weekend traveling through Thailand after taking him for 10k online and noticing we were in the same country.
I lost 20k in an online hand all in on the flop to a runner runner. I look back on that as a thrill, the most memorable of roller coasters.
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I'd reckon it's more about the journey, the stories and friends we made along the way, even though there may be few.
Whenever someone asks, "Why do they do that?" I always share the man who holds the Guinness World Records for rolling an orange with their nose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66xwQZuic3E
Why not?
Gambling, for most people, is ultimately a form of fraud. It's built on the narrative that you can get rich quick. Gambling is for the winners. The losers are just paying for it. The narrative hinges entirely on numbing the mark's rationality and making them not think about the odds, getting them to keep throwing money at you until they go bankrupt.
Rolling an orange on the other hand is something you can do entirely by yourself without harming anyone except the people you inconvenience if you do it somewhere public. Neither activity is productive but at least rolling an orange with your nose isn't actively anti-social unless you're a dick about it.
I find it interesting that professional poker players are frequently criticized for this but I've never seen someone criticize a casino dealer or other employee for this.
The perception of role might be, but not for the product they are participating in ...
You've never seen someone critising the gambling industry for preying on the mentally ill and troubled? That's extremely common
This is like saying you lose on lottery because the state always wins in total. Money wise yes but when you have a lottery ticket you entertain yourself with hopes and can dream about what you'd do with the megabucks. If you feel good for a while because of it ... did you really lose?
Same with poker. Sure, you can only win if someone else loses but what if they had fun?
In other words, is going to the cinema a net loss?
Gambling is ancient and wired deep in the human psyche. It’s neither morally right nor morally wrong. It is just something we enjoy as a species. I feel bad for people addicted, but I also feel bad for people addicted to alcohol or addicted to reading the news. Everyone needs to moderate their own consumption.
I do have some issues spending so much time on a zero-sum game, as you mentioned, but ultimately it’s better that I have the money than people who are going to gamble it away; I’ll do something useful with it, and they probably won’t.
"As Canada Bill Jones said, 'it's immoral to let a sucker keep his money.'"
This isn’t unique to Poker.
This applies to all Gambling.
It's really not much different than working on a company backed by a rich investor where the CEO skillfully plays their cards to maneuver more money out of the rich fish while the other players also try to get what they can out of them.
That is the income of full time poker players.
Yes, and the top earners in poker aren't always the best players, but rather skilled players who have some personality instead of putting on headphones and grinding and get invited to lucrative private games.
It's a negative sum game.
I agree with about everything the author of the post said. It's a lonely and destructive game. Success if meaningless and comes at expense of others. It's bad for your health both physical and mental. Gambling is fine as an entertainment in moderate amount for people who don't get addicted to it. I don't see any value in professional gambling though. I think almost everyone is worse off in that world. There is a lot of potential lost creating winners and losers in a negative sum game while game organizers make out like bandits luring addicts to their games (both online and live).
Professional poker is a very effective trap for smart analytical people. You can find success there faster and easier than in other areas and then you face a dilemma the author talks about: money is great but you feel like your are not building anything and opportunities to become involved in productive and rewarding endeavours slowly drift away. Switching becomes more difficult (and costly) with every passing year.
I am one of the big winners of the poker world - not only I made enough money to never worry about it again but I've met a lot o interesting people and learnt a lot of interesting things during work on my poker related project. I have one advice for smart people, especially those similar to me (ADHD, maybe slightly on autistic spectrum who can't imagine working a 9-5 job) - don't get involved it will lure you and chew you out. If you feel you have trouble holding a job or completing your degree which is not caused by your intellectual potential - seek help and maybe medication. After more than 15 years in the industry my biggest professional dream is to one day have enough discipline and energy to start a project in an unrelated area and create something more useful than a tool to help winners beat losers at a gambling game.
On a relevant note, I built a preflop tool for PLO folks. Check it out here: https://rnikhil.com/2022/06/15/gtoinspector-startup.html
You are very accurate with how Poker lured me in. Its a easy place for analytical minded folks to make a ton of money.
Would you say that building a “toy solver” for hold em could be a fun way to learn or improve with a language? I’d be curious to see how much work is needed to approximate the shape of the real GTO charts and common bet sizes.
> Imagine sitting in front of a screen for 12-16hrs a day, clicking buttons
> The 95th percentile Poker income is about $200-250k.
I knew quite a few people who went through poker phases in college and their early 20s, back before it was heavily regulated. Back then, it was common for random people to join online casinos without any real skill to go along with it, so they were basically milking the average players all day long. They all had similar ideas about how they were going to get huge incomes by applying basic principles and scaling it to as many simultaneous poker windows as they could.
Some of these were very smart and talented people. A couple wrote scripts to track and graph their progress and statistics, which they shared online for extra motivation. Honestly, it became depressing to watch the growing dissonance between the high incomes they thought they were going to generate and the actual progress of their balances.
Also, staring at poker screens for 12-16 hours per day is soul crushing. Doing that to have a 5% chance of earning $250K (if those stats are correct) is even more depressing.
And then there's drawdown periods: Some times odds would align against them or they'd be off their game for some reason. They could go through long periods where their net balance was either flat or in slow decline, which could turn into a self-reinforcing cycle that worsened their play.
I don't know anyone who continued for more than a few years.
I did recently talk to someone who left their tech job to play poker for 5 years. He was at a level where he traveled to tournaments and got lucky a few times, but realized it was no longer fun nor sustainable. He was having a huge difficulty getting back into a career job. Most interviewers looked at the 5 year gap in his resume to play poker and passed. Those who did give him interviews asked a lot of questions about his career goals, likely because they assumed he was just falling back to a real job for a while before he went back to poker again in a few years. Last we spoke, he still hadn't landed a job.
Doctors coming back after 5+ years of maternity leave (not uncommon in eastern europe when some social system have 3 years of paid maternity leave per child, some stay home even 10 years) can't do basic doctoring. Devs can't do anything sophisticated. People and people leading skills have also probably rather atrophied in those 16 hours dark lit room daily sessions.
So you are basically hiring a 40+ year old junior with potential gambling habit, possibly less flexible than younger, who may be in only for shorter term and probably has quite high salary expectations compared to juniors. That leaving part is probably most obvious. Yeah a hard pass is not unexpected.
The owner of Brighton is a former poker player: https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2023/sep/20/bright....
You don't make money by having amazing unique insight, you make money by finding soft players and milking them for money.
All the retail investors and day traders are the amateur players thinking they are decent but really are just getting milked
Wrote more about it on my blog here: https://rnikhil.com/2022/06/15/gtoinspector-startup.html
Found a corporation--it's not that hard. Viola! No gaps in your resume anymore.
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1) There is absolutely a huge edge to be had playing live tournaments, even for buy ins in the $1k - $5k range. If you are playing outside of Vegas it is very common to end up at a table where at least half the table are "recreational" (i.e. players who are bad and are likely to make large mistakes).
2) The downside to playing live tournaments is that it is difficult to get reasonable volume in and the variance can be brutal. It is not that unlikely to go on a 20+ buy in downswing even with a decent edge.
3) Having an income source not tied to poker is huge and allows you to not have to be conservative with bankroll management. If you're pulling in mid 6 figures from a day job you don't have to worry about selling action or going down in stakes when you go on a downswing because you can always supplement the bankroll with your income. This, obviously, can be taken too far, but you don't have to be as worried about the variance from shot taking a higher buy in tournament where you know you have an edge like the $10k WSOP Main Event which is by far the softest $10k that exists.
As the saying goes, being a professional gambler is the hardest way to make an easy living.
If one had only choice between being poor homeless or do this I could accept that relativity, but not like this. I can't have any possible respect for smart capable human living like that by choice, sucking desperate horribly sick people of their possessions, ever.
Sure, there are still few humans around worse than that, just look at the news, but its still pretty much the moral bottom. And all I've seen in this discussion just proves that (I don't judge this activity from my experience since I don't play cards, I get my happiness from mountains and extreme sports and that's more than enough, and salary is enough too).
Nobody can lose anything they don’t choose to play. Consent matters.
We sell cigarettes on every streetcorner (to say nothing of bars), which is evidence that society has reached widespread consensus on the fact that addicts are allowed to choose to be addicted (or not) to things. (The vast, vast majority of people who play poker are not addicted to playing poker.)
There's a write up about it here: https://www.pokernews.com/news/2010/08/making-supernova-elit...
There were other places as well. There were so many stories posted on the 2+2 forums[0] of people making really good money doing this. That's one of the most popular poker forums. It's interesting because it's a different type of skill. Tile a bunch of windows, have a lot of mental fortitude and grind it out. It's a completely different strategy than trying to become a "winning" player.
I used to play microstates back before online poker was banned in the US so I didn't participate in that. What's funny though is even back then at the 5c-10c ($10 buy in) or 10c-25c ($25 buy in) NL tables you'd have folks 4-6 tabling while looking at a PokerTrack HUD which gathered stats about players and displayed them above their name plate. I can't imagine at how much the game must have progressed since then.
[0]: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/
Like OP, I decided to become professional because of the freedom, but also because I just liked games. But after a couple of years these advantages start to fade away. First of all, you are not really free, especially when games are scarce: you have to be always available because if you miss a good game, it can take days before another one comes along. Also, the fun in playing games erodes if you play them day in day out. Also, like OP points out, variance is brutal. The downswings can wear you out, sometimes I had to take a few days to recover.
But the main reason I eventually switched to a career in IT was something that OP also mentions: the main skill in making a lot of money, especially in live games, is not how well you play, but how good you are in finding wealthy suckers that want to play against you. This part really put me off in the end, it just wasn't me.
It was great that I noticed this before degenerating into a full-time addict. I used to grind at $15 9-player STTs and the variance was downright depressing. I cannot imagine what people playing at higher stakes go through. Just out of curiosity, I looked up many of the hotshot professionals of the day, almost none are still playing today. The games became tough and eventually everyone gets surpassed by the new guy using real-time assistance.
People starting this grind today simply shouldn't do it. Odds are that the game will become zero-sum at planetary scale given everyone and their mother is using GTO solvers now.