Poker Articles

Hello, friend and welcome to the blog. Make yourself at home and I’ll try to give you some idea of what I’m doing here. You see I make my living playing poker. Not like brsavage or troll, or even jsup, those guys have a much larger bankroll than I do (and I suspect they make a lot more money). Might be nice to be like those guys some day, making all that cash, fan clubs following you around in tournaments, but for now I grind it out, usually just enough to pay the bills.

There have been times when even paying the bills was tough, but I’m getting by, and the bankroll slowly grows. Someday I hope to be right up there with those guys playing every big tournament that pops up, but for now I can take some satisfaction knowing that I live by my wits, and I can smile when people ask what I do for a living. I’ve never felt anything like it when I tell people “I’m a professional poker player”.

At this point in my career my income comes from all angles. I play a lot of single table tournaments and I beat them consistently, finishing in the money well over 40% of the time. Single table tournaments in fact account for a large percentage of my income. I play ring games as well, usually when I’m chasing bonus money, and the winnings at the ring games along with the bonus dollars make up the rest of my online income. In fact there aren’t many people who can bonus whore any better than I can, and I’ll be teaching you about that too over the course of this blog thing. Home games come and go, at times providing a great source of income, other times drying up but they haven’t been a big source of income for me in almost a year.

I started playing poker seriously a little over 2 years ago. Sure I played nickel dime games with my friends for years, but my first game of Texas Hold Em was on February 1st 2003. I’ve never really had hobbies, anything I do turns into a serious pursuit, so when I got started with poker it immediately became my goal to make a living doing it. I’ll give you some ideas about how to do that too, but I have to issue a warning here. Playing for a living takes a great deal of work, a lot of studying, and it doesn’t pay all that well for most of us.

In fact I wouldn’t tell anyone to start playing poker as a full time job. There aren’t any benefits, no health insurance, no retirement plan, and you can go to work every day for a week and actually lose money. Imagine that, you get your paycheck at the end of the week, and it’s a negative number. Your job has sent you a bill instead of a check! The working conditions aren’t great, and right now the bush administration is trying to make my job (internet poker) illegal. I’ve put in enough hours of study for at least a 2-year degree and my job may disappear at any moment. Don’t make it your job. If you want to know what it’s like to play for a living just bookmark the page and keep coming back, I’ll tell you all about it.

Don’t think I regret it though, I met a guy at the bar last night and he asked what I did for a living. I said it like it was nothing, but it sure felt good. “I’m a professional poker player.”

Thanks for reading,
Chris “Fox” Wallace