[Aurornis]

> 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.

[quickthrower2]

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.

[ska]

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.

[saiya-jin]

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.

[quickthrower2]

Unless you apply to working for a trading company or sports betting company who will appreciate the experience.

[ska]

True enough, there may be exceptions.

[zone411]

Many former poker players move into finance/trading. Could be a viable route.

The owner of Brighton is a former poker player: https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2023/sep/20/bright....

[wordpad25]

Poker is a great analogy for the market.

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

[quickthrower2]

Not only that, if you load a dice by 1% and roll it 10,000 times, you might still lose. You need to detect that the dice is loaded somehow even though the results are poor, and that eventually you will get a winning streak.

Also understanding of odds, management of your bet sizes (Kelly criterion).

[antisthenes]

What's the poker equivalent of buying and holding an index fund?

[financltravsty]

Being a nit.

[whoami_nr]

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.

Wrote more about it on my blog here: https://rnikhil.com/2022/06/15/gtoinspector-startup.html

[bsder]

> Most interviewers looked at the 5 year gap in his resume to play poker and passed.

Found a corporation--it's not that hard. Viola! No gaps in your resume anymore.

[ska]

That works for an automatic screen, but not any real interview process.

[kybernetikos]

It's probably much more a plus in an interview scenario because its interesting. The biggest danger is at the screening stage.