On Saturday, Sam SamDMND Holden (pictured) announced that he is taking a “semi-retirement” from poker to pursue further academic and professional goals.

In his blog on the website of 888 Poker, where he has served as a poker ambassador for three years, Holden said that he took a gander at a professional poker career when he completed his last degree. Like many who end up going into poker, he didn’t know what he wanted to do for a living, so, being a young man with the opportunity to take a risk, he decided to give it a go. If he failed, he “would’ve treated it as a gap year and headed back to education or perhaps another career.”

But, he didn’t fail. He has amassed $821,965 in lifetime tournament earnings online as well as $1,195,067 on the live tournament circuit. Holden’s career highlight was clearly in 2011, when he made the final table of the World Series of Poker Main Event, finishing ninth for $782,115. The next year, he made a rare follow-up deep run, coming in 55th.

His desire to play, though, has been waning. Financial security sounds like it was Holden’s primary goal when he set out on his poker career and, having gotten that, he “lost the financial motivation to play poker.”

“Although I enjoyed playing from time to time,” he added, “I was not finding it fulfilling and began to realize that I should look into some new challenges to motivate me.”

Holden said that he was inspired in recent years by Phil Gruissem, who introduced him to “effective altruism.” Holden explains the concept as “a structured process of earning as much as you can in a money-making career to then donating a significant proportion to charity.”

He said that while he was proud of some donations he was able to make, he ultimately felt he could “make a bigger impact in another career.”

To that end, Holden plans to attend the University of Kent to study philosophy. He explained some of how he arrived at his next path: “I find myself listening to debates, podcasts, lectures, and speeches while playing online. I’ve also started to develop some pretty strong opinions on politics and ethics, a position opposed to my previous relentless fence-sitting stance. This passion for what I think is right in the world has spurred me further in to the arts and I find myself reading more than ever.”

He added, “Above all else, I really want to question every opinion, to listen to others and be consistently skeptical of my own views. I am drawn to philosophy for those reasons and I am really enjoying the challenge of looking at every argument from several angles. After this degree, I could see myself continuing on through academia, perhaps going on to lecture and research.”

Holden won’t disappear from the poker world entirely, though. He thinks he will still play a little online, perhaps enough to pay the bills, and will at the very least play at UKIPT Nottingham in May, as he has already qualified for it.

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