Poker and my future career (part 2)

I never had a real passion for any field of work. In school I didn’t really excel in a particular area, beside math. I tried a couple of different bachelor studies, but nothing could interest me longer than 1 or 2 years. Then I found poker. It started out for fun with friends but once I realized I could make a living doing it, I spend almost all of my spare time on this. I would wake up with it, and go to bed with it, and even dream about it. I wasn’t just dreaming about winning the World Series, I was processing the information I didn’t have time to process in the day. When I gave up my job and study to do this, I was very happy and confident. I thought I had found my dream job which I could make a lot of money with and do this for the next 20 years to come. Boy was I wrong! Poker has some big upsides, but also a lot of downsides. I think people underestimate how stressful it really is. I might die of a heart attack before 50 if I keep doing this. I plan to live at least a couple of years longer than that. So lately I have been thinking what I could and want to do if I leave the games for ever.




Poker has spoiled me in a lot of ways. I’m like a small child that didn’t have to go to school and could eat all the candy he wanted. Now I have to go to school, sit still in a chair and listen to somebody who orders me around. I can only eat my candy in breaks or playtime. How do we expect this child to adapt? I think this child would get in fights with his peers and teachers, and will be suspended from school very fast, where he can go back to eating all the Mars ice creams he wants. I’ve enjoyed absolute freedom the last couple of years. I have nobody to answer to. Only thing I have to do is make enough money to cover my big spending habits and save some for the future. Working for somebody and with other people seems to be something I will never be able to adapt to anymore. Of course when I’m flat broke and have no other choice, I will be forced to do something I don’t like or want to. But when I still have a dollar in my pocket, I can still play Heads or tails to build back my roll.




I live in a digital world. This might sound a bit crazy for people who don’t do this for a living, but 75% of my day is spent behind a computer. I eat breakfast and lunch behind my desk and sometimes even diner. I have an online social life. I have online friends, who I never met in real life, but who I talk with for hours every day. We discuss poker related things but also intimate private things. I would trust those friends with large sums of money without hesitation. Some of them might know me better than real life friends who know me for years. You bond easily when you have the same line of work and they also live in this digital world. I live in a country where I don’t speak the language (yet), and English is hard to get by here. This makes me even more committed to the World Wide Web. How will I ever break free of this and join society again? Is there a red pill I can take to unplug from the matrix?




The value of money is also a very big issue. I’ve lost the value of money, and don’t know how to get it back. As a poker player you can’t be emotionally attached to money. It is just a number on your screen. This way you will not tilt easily, so it’s very important. If you play mid stakes poker, you will get used to losing and winning big amounts a day. I can lose or win a decent month salary in a couple of minutes. How can I ever get used to earning a year/month salary with a job? I can write countless stories where I wasted big amounts of money on seemingly ridiculous things, but that won’t help me finding back the value of money. You get used to spending big amounts of money very fast, and the people you hang out with have the exact same problem. But we don’t see it as a problem, we think we are cool.

My girlfriend can stand in a supermarket and think about if she wants to buy a $ 3 or $ 2,20 product. This in my eyes seems ridiculous. In my mind that $ 0,80 difference is not worth the time. But this is a normal sense of the value of money and I want to get that back. I want to start caring again about 80 cents! That is the only way back to normal society.




I’m pretty sure I can rule out working for a boss in the future. And I’m pretty sure I need to earn around $ 80k a year to cover the lifestyle I’ve grown a custom to (even if I cut back on a lot of things). So what options are left for me? Trading stocks? That seems to have similar downsides to it as poker. I hear a lot of poker players say they want to start something for themselves when they are done with poker. And I think I have to think in those lines too. I still have no passion for anything else than poker, and I will have the next couple of years to find something I am passionate about. All I know now is that I will not play this game for the rest of my life. I will try to play it for 3-5 years more to figure out what I can do with the rest of my life. I know chasing money won’t make me happy, even though I thought it would.




“Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one.”

Benjamin Franklin