Life and Times of a Poker Addict

Big or small, it's been a month of winning sessions, so I've got that goin' for me... which is nice. Job questions are coming in from all fronts. Did you hear about that last job interview? Would you take a job with so-and-so? Are you gonna go on anymore interviews?

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I'm making $24 an hour playing poker live here in the good ol' metropolitan area of Richmond. Extrapolated out, that means that I make $2400 a month in the 100 hours or so of live poker I get in playing around here. If I took a position with any of the companies I've been interviewing with I'd probably make in the neighborhood of $32,000 per year starting out. After you factor in taxes I'd probably bring home about $1875 a month working 160 hours or more a month.

To make it as a successful player and still live in Richmond, I have to go back online and start winning consistently at limit. It seems like 2BB/100 is the statistical standard of success. So assuming I could be a winning player at 5/10 limit for the sake of the mathematics, that's $20 per hour and multiplied by four tables it's $80 per hour. Adding in 25 hours of online play each week for another 100 hours of poker a month, that's $8000 at the assumed hourly rate. Putting together both take home numbers, that is $10,400 per month in income or $124,800 annualized. After tax consideration, that take home should be around $7200 per month.

So the heart of my dilemma revolves around the following: I am already making as much or more playing poker live at part-time job hours as I would getting any of the full-time jobs I had been interviewing for.

For the record, my heart still leans toward playing poker for a living.