I quit my job today to be a professional poker player...

I'd like them to hide the cards sometimes...do any of the shows do that?

I haven't seen one. We get the WPT, PPT, and UK open poker, and they all show the cards. We don't get high stakes poker here (wish we did). I've only seen it on YouTube. Can't remember if they show the cards in that.

Lost more today than yesterday. New job sucks so far!

Hoping tomorrow is a more normal day of cards, a really bad run (like the one I had in 07) would be disastrous for me right now.

Very sorry to hear this, Robert.



Here's hoping. Fingers firmly crossed for you! Now I'm getting worried!

What happened in 2007?

Phooey. Sending positive vibes in your direction. Hey, give the kid another ace.

I play a bit online (not for money). I usually do well, but those losing streaks are the pits. I play the same way every day. Sometimes the cards are against you. Nothing you can do but wait it out.

Resumer's yuck.


It'll turn.

The kind of bad luck that really isn't supposed to happen. Basically, a decent poker bankroll is around 20 buy ins (depends on the level and the style of play), which means you can lose 20 days in a row before you can't play anymore. In poker (when you play right) you are about a 75% favorite. So the 25% of luck shouldn't crack your bankroll.

But in the summer of 07 I had a 6-week run where the 25% hit every time. The other pros I know here were taken aback, that kind of bad luck isn't supposed to happen and none of them are keeping a bankroll around for that kind of run.

Anywho, so the problem now is that when you play for a living, you can't just back off when you get your bankroll cracked. When you play for fun, you can crack your bankroll and just walk away from the game a while. When you depend on it cracking your bankroll is to lose your job.

So anyway, right now I just can't afford to crack my bankroll and my only fear in resuming poker was a streak bad enough to do so.

And so far it was really looking that way. Tonight was better though. I got off to the same start as the last two days, and was losing almost $300 for what looked to be the 3rd night in a row. There was a guy on the table playing every hand and calling every raise till the river and he was getting lucking and cleaning everyone out.

Then in the last hour my cards stopped running so dry, and I had a couple of hands hold up to come back and recoup the losses. I only won $7 after hours and hours of work, but I'm pretty damn happy with it just to break the losses. If I didn't come back I'd be out a grand in my first 3 days of work and I'd be stressing the danger to my bankroll.

The key problem that is making it stressful is that I wasn't playing poker, so I don't have a poker bankroll at all. It came out of our savings, and I can't allocate enough to have a safe bankroll that can handle real bad luck right off the bat, so bad luck right off the bat is a serious concern, and it wasn't looking good the last couple days.

So just pulling off a win even for $7 feels great. It makes the last couple days feel like less of a slippery slope.

This is mighty scary & stressful stuff you're describing, Robert. I honestly don't know how you do it.
Good luck! Here's hoping you're still winning!

Was looking for some of my old poker stats from my first month of playing professionally and came across this thread. Was fun to read back at my early poker days.

These days I just play tournaments and just for fun (though it's a nice side bit of profit). I'll play a couple of very small ones (2 table or so is typical) a week because I don't have time to play more than 2 hours. On weekends I'll occasionally play a longer tournament for a shot at bigger winnings but it's nice to play for fun versus for a living, takes a lot of the stress out of the variance.

That's awesome. Hope it goes well for you.

I played a lot of online games a few years back. Partypoker, PKR, Pokerstars... could always find me on those!