- I was passionate about this game for 2 or 3 years. I read a lot of books, learnt probabilities, and so on. At this time, I was engaged in a promising relationship with a girl. Poker broke everything at this level: poker was a real devastating passion.
For me it was a slight different story.
Poker was devastating for me due to the "toxic" lifestyle you can get yourself into. Not because of poker itself but due to the fact that MTTs has such a high variance and, in order to "beat" that variance you need to invest a lot of time into studying and playing.
I once had a schedule where I played 20-22 days a month which was my "working" days where I played on average of 75-150 SNGs and 30-50 MTTs and, I took just a few days off each week with the exception of weekends as, you know, are the highest value online MTTs with bigger payouts and soft-tables.
When it came to studying, I had weekly sessions with my poker buddies where we hop into skype and team viewer and we will go over someone in the group deepest run in MTTs and discuss hands, situations, strategies, and share notes on regulars, etc.
And quickly that became "toxic" for me because I didn´t have much a "free time" to do much else and I started to develop some bad habits that deeply affected both my mental and physical health.
- Online, I invested so much in software (like Poker Tracker) to get stats about your opponents in real-time online
Funny that you mentioned PokerTracker because it was my go-to tracker software over Holdem Manager because I loved its customizability.
In fact, I got so obsessed with learning the ins and outs of the software I spent a hell lot of time on the PT4 forum asking questions like a maniac. It wasn´t long until I became a PT4 expert and I even got a developer´s account for PT4 where I even started to sell custom stats, reports, and HUDs (I think I still have the account

)
Some other softwares I bought which I recently sold to a poker buddy were CardrunnersEV, Flopzilla, and GTO+.
- Quickly, I did a trip to Las Vegas where I went to all the famous poker rooms for one night. I was a shy and skinny guy, intellectual and introverted. I was not even capable to understand the talks at the table. Strangely, It was a huge success. Might be luck, but obviously, I played an atypical poker. I won more than $15k during the full night.
Never had the pleasure of sitting at a poker table in a casino. One of my biggest regrets as a poker player.
- 10 years after, I still remember how upset they were against my strange moves, especially at the river. Seems to be my speciality to push others to do "all in".
- I also played a lot in poker rooms in France, at night.
My biggest regrets at poker was a two-outer from a Russian (duh, right!

) in the final table of The Bigger 11 (don´t know if you remember these Sunday majors on PS), where I got 3rd for $7.2k cashout (biggest online cash in an MTT).
The guy ends up winning the damn thing for $22k after getting 2/3 of all the chips in play from that bad beat.
- One day, I won against a street prostitute at the table. I downplayed voluntarily a four of a kind against a Full House to get the full pot. She falls into the trap, all-in, I won obviously. But that was not easy to digest mentally. This is the kind of hand you cannot forget. I still remember her face when I showed her my cards. These 3k€ were just money for me, but for her...
hahaha niiice!
My exit was due to rational analysis: this game has an extreme variance. You never know if you play well. Never.
Yeah, I was dealing with lots of memory issues (I still am) even until this day my short memory sucks big time!
Also, it was around the time we were experiencing an electrical crisis in my country and it was s suicide to load an MTT/SNG session because of the risk of going powerless in a middle of a session with 12-16 tables opened and $200-$300+ in buyins.
I don´t know if that´s the case, I think it highly varies from person to person and country to country.
For example, for most Latin American countries, for some youngsters, online poker can be extremely profitable. It´s not a coincidence most online "pros" are people in their early 20s.
Also, making a couple of hundred dollars it´s rather easy if you´re willing to put in the work and have the discipline and, in most Latin American countries, $200-$300 it´s like minimum wage.
I consider myself to be very "technical" when it comes to poker. I remembered I loved breaking down spots and handing in CardrunnersEV and playing with the variables and seeing how changing the bet size, the texture of the board, or the villain range affected the EV of a particular decision.
That was one of the things I loved the most about poker and I still find it interesting.
I remember when GTO became THE thing in poker and I felt like in paradise!
I would not recommend investing time in this game, except if you want to meet various people and be the social guy at the table.
After 8 years of playing poker professionally, I couldn´t agree with you more.
I remembered what happened in the US in the infamous "Black Friday" of online poker when the DOJ banned online poker for political reasons and many poker buddies remained unsure of what to do.
One of them even started working as a pizza delivery guy waiting for the DOJ to authorize the poker site to return the money to the account holders.
Many others had to relocate and many did to Mexico to a place called "playa del carmen".
There was a decent size community of online poker pros there and we shared a skype group (around 40+ people).
This is a pure loss of time.
This is a strong way to put it but I understand what you mean.
I think poker should be a side hustle and NOT a long-term thing.
I remember being coached/staked by a US turbo specialist that played poker on the side and the guy was one of the best turbo 180s grinders back when the $15 180s was $12 and there was a $30 and a $60 buy-in that rarely ran.
He had a full-time job as a legal consultant for a US government institution making $100k+ a year and, another $100k+ a year from poker and I remember us asking him why he didn´t dedicate himself to poker full time and he gave us the same answer as you, basically because we don´t know what will happen in the future.
And funny thing is, one year or so later, online poker was banned from the US.
The force of poker? It's a game for losers, nobody wins, except sponsored people as their bad beat is paid by a company.
I am sorry but I strongly disagree with this.
I was a profitable player in almost all the sites I played in with the exception of the iPoker network. (I don´t know why I just never felt comfortable playing there.)
I remember I crushed the turbos 180s SNGs at the $2.50 level and even when it was $2.20.
I used multitabled 20-25 tables at the time and sustained a ROIs of 27% before moving up the stakes to the $3r/$8 and, eventually, to the $15s.
On MTTs, I did alright on PS but I used to crush PartyPoker, 888Poker, and other smaller networks/sites I used to grind over the weekends like Intertops and Bodog.