"Going Pro"

couple things that I don't think are being taken into account Re: using CC's to pay bills.

First, you realize that cash advances on CC's start to accrue interest immediately. And usually at a higher rate than purchases. So, you are starting off taking a hit there.

Second, by adding monthly CC bills to the occasion you are increasing your monthly expenses, or X, right off the bat. With the small starting bankroll this spells disaster.

Also, thinking long term. You will be stunting the growth of your bankroll by having to constantly withdraw from it. This stunts your progression up stakes, and stunts your potential earn. This could set you back a year or more from where you could be if you waited until properly rolled to take a shot at going pro.

If, instead of going pro immediately, you worked your soul-sucking job for 6 months while building a roll and moving up in stakes, you could conceivably be playing 100NL properly rolled, and earning much more than $20/hr. At that time, going pro can be done more easily. You should be able to have enough in reserve to cover a few months, while still having the bankroll to play properly.

By taking the shot too early and bringing in credit cards, you would severely reduce your chances of making a long-term living off of poker, and would increase your chances of going busto, and having CC debt to work off at your new $8/hr job.

Consider the following.

If a decent 25nl player started playing 25nl with about a $500 bankroll and ran 4.5 ptbb/100 over 30k hands, he will have around $1175. Getting 900 hands/hour (16-tabling) yields $20.25/hour. This fits the profile of the Hero we have mentioned in the original post. Over those 30k hands of 25nl, he or she will have stats similar to this:

35 hours played
4.5 ptbb/100 winrate
32 ptbb/100 standard deviation

What level of confidence can we have that Hero is a winning player?

Answer: No more than 59%.

So we have a 40% chance of going back to our $9/hour job with credit card debt.

by bills do you mean cost of living?

I guess I misunderstood the problem. I thought we knew could beat the game at $20/hr. Your point about uncertainty in win rates is something that I think anyone considering going pro would want to think long and hard about, but I thought we assumed this out of the problem. How do you do this calculation, btw?

Also, I did not think we had the option of building our bankroll for 6 months, since we only were interested in finding the current value of X. Of course, if you have the option of waiting until you have a bigger roll with a buffer to pay bills, you definitely should.

I was imagining a player with closer to 300k hands of history that, for whatever reason, had spent most of the money he made. I also had in mind a player that was playing fewer tables with a win rate around 8ptbb/100. This player is in a vastly different situation than the player you had in mind.

going pro is overrated.

So the value of X is irrelevant.

Miffed is back, Miffed is back, Miffed is back!!!!!!

yo, what's crackin' Miffed?

Fun one spoon. Here's my take.

Hero needs to plan only making about $5 an hour to cover expenses, so assuming 70 hours of poker per week, $350 can be life expense. The other $15 an hour goes to downswings, building bankroll, paying taxes, etc.

The other consideration is whether, if times get rough, hero can play 90 or 100 hours in a week at his best level - all while running bad. If he's running bad, he will have to keep playing well and play more hands to make ends meet.

Of course, there are safer ways, like earning $600 bucks a week for a month playing poker 30 hours while keeping the job and launching the pro career 4 weeks late. But that wasn't the question.

So X = $350 / week. Which is less than he's making now with the day job, although it appears we're assuming $9 an hour is take home pay.

In all honesty, the point of this thread was as follows.

In the past week I've heard at least 4 different people talk about how they should quit their job and "go pro" at 25nl just because over a relatively small sample they've made approximately twice at 25nl that they do at their job.

Unfortunately none of those people posted in this thread, but I'll refer them to it the next time I see them.

Is it safe to say that you would want at the absolute minimum 200k hands of history at 8ptbb/100 or 400k hands at 4ptbb/100 before you could ever quit your job, regardless of bankroll?

Go pro when you feel confident enough to be able to pay for everything on a constant basis with your winnings.

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