Professional Poker Players and Their Lifestyles

21:17
12 Sep

Anyone can become a professional poker player simply by doing it. It is a free market and anyone can join. Main difficulty about being a professional player is that you should not be complaining about the negative aspects that come along with it.

Most of the poker pros said that playing poker for living can be incredibly stressful lifestyle, but when you decide to play poker for a living, you need to be prepared for a sick downswing or to have a long stretch of bad luck. You should be prepared to play months without profit. As a professional player you must forget about luck - it’s all about math.

Next important thing if you want to become a good poker player is that you learn all the time because poker requires years of tedious study. Learning poker can be done on and off the table. If you don’t enjoy this aspect of the game you will not spend enough time studying poker and consequently never be educated enough to win at a high level.

Poker income has that “turning water to wine” feel to it. Michael Shinzaki;
When you start playing as a poker pro it is not uncommon to lose touch with lot of your non-poker friends most of whom don’t really understand or agree with your choice. Free time of every serious poker player is almost exclusively invested in grinding, thinking about grinding, analyzing every hand s/he has played, dwelling on strategy, working on different styles, spending every day reviewing replays of important final tables, checking probable mistakes and finding way to fix them. Poker pros’ life is actually very tedious, but when money comes from your daily and nightly effort – it can be very rewarding.
Every professional will advise you to do the vast majority of your poker learning off the table by reading books, watching training videos and analyzing your past hands. They advise you to think about every played hand. Then, when you get good and have the fundamentals down, more of your advances will come from playing. Poker is both art form and a science, you need to study the science and practice the art. A lot of poker pros never expected to make a livelihood out of poker when they first started, but today they are multimillionaires living their lives in the best possible way.
Read the books! Read articles! Ask your questions about hard spots on forums! Try to get inside the mind of your poker hero! How does he think? ARE THEY REALLY HAPPY?
Well, they use flexibility to travel, they can play online poker from anywhere in the world with Internet and are able to follow live poker tournament stops throughout the world. As a professional poker player you can travel and take vacations basically whenever. You are independent. You can shape your schedule and always make time for your friends and your family.
Here are some examples of poker pros, so you can judge are they really happy or this job is so stressful for them…
Phillip Jerome Hellmuth, Jr. (born July 16th, 1964) is an American professional poker player who has captured 13 World Series of Poker bracelets. He is the winner of the Main Event of the 1989 World Series of Poker and the Main event of the 2012 World Series of Poker Europe. Hellmuth is also known for his temperamental “poker brat” personality. His total live tournament winnings are $16,067,876.
Phil Ivey (born February 1st, 1976) Is an American professional poker player who has won ten World Series of Poker bracelets, one World Poker Tour title and appeared at nine World Poker Tour final tables. Ivey is regarded by numerous poker fans and contemporaries as the best all-round player in the world today. His total tournament winnings are $19,224,828.
Sam Trickett (born July 2. 1986.) in East Retford, United Kingdom is a professional poker player also. His total live tournament winnings are $19, 391,961. His favorite hobby is football.
Erik Seidel (born November 6, 1959.) is and American professional poker player from Las Vegas, Nevada, who has won eight World Series of Poker bracelets and a World Poker Tour title. He is married and has two daughters. His total live tournament winnings are $21,059,587.
Daniel Colman (born 1990) is an American poker player, originally from Holden, Massachusetts but now residing in Brazil. He is best known for winning The Big One for One Drop at the 2014 World Series of Poker. He beat Daniel Negreanu heads-up for a first place prize of $15.3 million, the second largest first place prize in poker history. His total tournament winnings are $21,458,813.
Antonio “The Magician” Esfandiari (born December 8, 1978) is a professional poker player and former professional magician known for his elaborate chip tricks. Esfandiari is the face of the United States first legal and regulated online poker site, Ultimate Poker. In addition to appearing on several poker television shows, he has won two World Poker Tour championships and three World Series of Poker bracelets in his career, including Big One for One Drop in 2012. His total live tournament winnings are $25,524,731.
Daniel Negreanu (born July 26, 1974.) is a Canadian professional poker player who has won six Series of Poker bracelets and two World Poker Tour championships titles. Since his second place in the Big One For One Drop 2014 tournament, he is the biggest live tournament poker winner of all time, having accumulated $30,369,663 in prize money. He was named the WSOP Player of the Year in 2004 and again in 2013, making him the first player in WSOP history to win the accolade more than once and he was also the 2004-05 WPT Player of the Year.
Playing poker as a hobby
Playing poker as a hobby is really awesome. It’s a fun game; it allows you to live better life and allows you to play poker a lot more comfortably. You may travel around, meet other cultures, learn some new things about poker and some of you would enjoy it a lot more if you playing it as a hobby. It also takes away the stress of “having to perform well” or “having to make a good score”. You have complete freedom to play it just for thrill or maybe earn some extra money.