Poker--How I got started (2 of 2)

We left things with my recuperation from an auto accident. After that happened, I went back to my second residence. I had a lease obligation there, and my job was in that city. That didn't last long. I worked with a cast for one day, and I was told to come back when the cast came off. The next thing I heard from my employer was that they were going out of business.



Soon I was back home full-time--no job, a spotty resume, and living in a city where the unemployment rate was 20%. My wife had a good job, but I had absolutely nothing going. We decided that I would become a full-time poker player as of 1/1/2009. We really didn't have anything to lose .


I knew that I could play, with a 14% ROI (return on investment) playing $10 online STTs (single table tournaments) on PokerStars in 2008. My wife's income could keep us going long enough for me to build my poker bankroll.



It didn't exactly work out that way. My wife's employer wound up in a merger, which cut her monthly income by close to 50%. It wasn't long before we were having conversations like this:



Her: "We need your poker money to play bills."



Me: "If I don't keep 50 buy-ins in my bankroll, I'll probably go broke at some point due to statistical variance". ("Statistical variance" is mathspeak for short-term bad luck, such as getting a bad run of cards--something that hits every player from time to time).



Of course, the stupid thing about this conversation is that it couldn't go anywhere--we were both right. I wound up regularly raiding my bankroll, which had me either playing $1 tournaments, or playing way underrolled at my current level, hoping that I could build it up before the inevitable happened. The inevitable happened.



What made this situation even more ridiculous is that the IRS had me pretty much locked in. Tax rules for "gamblers" are different than for any other kind of self-employment. To be treated as a professional for tax purposes, the guidelines say that gambling has to be your main source of income, and it has to take up the majority of your work hours.



I won't go into the tax minutia, but the bottom line is that if I found some other work and lost my "pro" status as a poker player, whatever money I did win would receive very unfavorable tax treatment. In poker parlance, I decided that I was pot-committed so I went all in, sticking with poker.


But believe it or not, there is good news. Another reason I decided to stick with poker is that my wife's income situation was temporary, and would, we hope, eventually get straightened out. It took almost a year, but now things are getting back to normal.



Now it's 2010 and this time I really do have some breathing room, a few months to rebuild a bankroll. My PokerStars bankroll at the end of 2009 was $46. We deposited another $100 get things going, making it $146. I've won enough playing $1 and $2 tournaments to run it up to $200. I will keep building my bankroll, and somewhere between $5 and $10 tournaments, depending on how many tables I play, I should be able to generate a small income and still have a little left to keep building my bankroll to play higher.

There is a new poker book out, entitled "Poker is an Easy Game". No comment.