Daniel Negreanu: "A Professional Poker Player is a Small Business Owner"
In a blog published on Friday on FullContactPoker, Daniel Negreanu (pictured) gave his take on becoming a professional poker player. He explained, “A professional poker player is a small business owner, in the business of entertaining their customers (players who aren’t as skilled as they are).”
Negreanu added that part of being an owner of a business is to create a two-sentence vision statement about what you want to get out of your career as well as determine a concrete income you can achieve. “Drawing from our vision statement, we need to make sure that our plan is financially responsible and that we are continuing to develop our skills away from the table,” Negreanu cautioned.
He gave an example of a player wanting to make $100,000 from poker in a year, not a far-fetched goal by any means. However, by his calculations, a person would need to work upwards of 120 hours per week in order to amass that amount. That’s 17 hours a day, which barely allows any time to eat and run errands. Kiss your social life goodbye.
He questioned, “If you aren’t playing with a bankroll big enough to play the games you want and live the lifestyle that you want, then what is your plan if you run out of funds? How will you stay in action? Borrowing from friends is one option, but how will you ever build a bankroll big enough to pay them back?”
Negreanu asserted that between 2% and 5% of the poker population can “make the lifestyle work.” The PokerStarspro noted, “There are many careers where the odds are heavily stacked against you. There are heroes, those special people who have ‘it’ and find a way to make it, but most will fail. This holds true in poker as well.”
It wasn’t Negreanu’s intent to be full of doom and gloom, by the way. Instead, he summarized, “My intention wasn’t to discourage you from chasing your dreams, whatever they may be. My intention was to illustrate to you that it will require hard work. It will not be as easy as it looks on TV. Are you willing to put in all that hard work, all the while knowing that even if you do, it still may not be enough?”
Read Negreanu’s full thoughts by clicking here.
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