[bcassedy]

Sure happy to answer questions.

Note that professional in this context just means made a living through poker. There are a ton of people like myself that earned a good living playing online or in casinos. A small minority received long-term sponsorships.

1. I started playing in high school and college. Like everything else I do I dove in to get better and eventually I was good enough that I was making good money playing online. At that point I started to pursue things full time.

2. For me it was the latter. The very top players in skill and visibility are typically the ones getting sponsorships. Win a big tournament, win at the highest level of online games, or make a tv appearance at a final table and you'll find opportunities for sponsorships. For most players, these sponsorships really just add stability to their income with the bulk still coming from winnings. Though there are the poker personalities who make the bulk of their income from sponsorships and TV deals.

3. You can definitely do it part time at some levels, but to keep up it does require quite a bit of study time to win at meaningful stakes.

4. When the US legal landscape changed in 2011, getting your money out of the sites that were still willing to serve Americans got more challenging. Moving out of the country wasn't an option for me. With the game getting harder all the time due to the proliferation of good strategy material and botting, it seemed like it was time to move on.

[IgorPartola]

Thanks! One more question for you and @jat850:

So with the online games, etc. is the point just that you are better than the next guy to join the game so you just end up winning against players that are not as good? How reliable is something like that? It's true that a sucker is born every minute, but is it really feasible to make a living off it vs just staying income-neutral (e.g. win some, lose some, not really make any profit)?

[bcassedy]

It's fairly reliable. Due to the random nature of poker, it's very easy to delude yourself into thinking that you're a better player than you are. This is true for hobbyists, gamblers, and professionals alike. Professional players may move up in stakes or even stay at the same stakes and think that they're stronger than the competition and write off their bad performance as a run of bad luck. Runs of bad luck (and good) can significantly skew your results even over a hundred thousand hands.

Because of this, players of all skill levels will play a long time in games where they are not favored. This is part of why it's so important to keep studying both your play and that of your opponents. If you rest on your laurels, those that do study will surpass you and you'll find yourself playing at a disadvantage without realizing it.

Online you're really able to make a good amount off even a small edge, as measured in big blinds per 100 hands, because hands are dealt so quickly and you can play more than one table at a time. For most of my career I was playing ~1000 hands/hour. In reality due to the rake, the cut the site takes from each pot, you need to have a substantial edge to make money, but this isn't as hard to achieve as you might think.

[smnplk]

A hobby poker player here.

The main goal of any poker game is to win money. You win money from your opponents, you don't play agains the house. Although , the house (poker site) does take a small percentage of every pot you win, this is called rake. Do note, that in some games, rake can be so high that it is not profitable to play the game even if you are much better than your opponents. The only way to win money on the long run in poker is to be better than your opponents, so you need to look for bad opponents, it is a well know strategy called table selection or "bum hunting" :)

Nowdays it is still very feasible to make a living off poker, but you will have better chance finding bad player in live games.