It has been about a year since I quit my full time job at Uber to become a professional degenerate gambler market maker for wagering on cards. Now that I’ve returned for an extended stint home after a ton of poker tournament travel, I have some time to reflect and do a little processing of everything I’ve experienced over the past 12 months.
The biggest question that loomed over me when leaving my job to play poker full time was whether it was sustainable both from a financial standpoint and from a lifestyle standpoint. The longest I’ve taken off of work to play poker before was for a month during my sabbatical and, while I enjoyed it, doing it for an indefinite amount of time is a completely different proposition. How would I function having completely self structured days? Would I continue to enjoy poker treating it as a profession rather than hobby? Can I mentally and financially handle the swings that come with playing poker?
How would I function having completely self structured days?
I have discovered that self employment is right for me. I spent around half of last year traveling for poker and the other half at home. The travel days were a bit more structured since most of the time you want to be putting your time in at the tables and there would usually be a tournament schedule to play that requires you to be at certain places during certain times.
My time spent at home has been more challenging to manage. When home there are always many options on what to do at any given time, very little feedback on what is worth spending time on, and no external pressure to do any particular thing. For those reasons it has been important for me to settle into a weekly routine that contains a little bit of everything I think is important. This includes some amount of exercise, seeing friends, studying and playing poker, and streaming on Twitch.
I actually haven’t thought about this until I started writing this out - this is the only time in my life that I have had this degree of flexibility and control over how I spend my time. While there have been the occasional self-doubt on whether or not I’m spending my time on the right thing, it has overall been one of the best experiences of my life. I can’t imagine myself doing anything that resembles traditional employment right now and, thankfully, I have the opportunity to keep doing what I’m doing now for at least another year. It is certainly not for everyone, but I have found myself very happy with organizing my life this way.
Will I continue to enjoy poker treating it as a profession rather than hobby?
This was also a big question on my mind at the start of last year. A very common observation on hobbies is that they tend to become less fun when you have to treat it as a job. It has been almost the complete opposite for me. I’ve gotten far more into the game as a professional and find a lot of joy in studying, practicing, and refining my game with other players. A huge part of this has been meeting other strong players who have a curiosity for how poker works and are willing to help me become a better player. While poker is not a team sport, it is so incredibly valuable to have the support and guidance of other people in the game.
Can I mentally and financially handle the swings that come with playing poker?
2025 was a test for me in many ways. I was testing out a new way of making a living. Poker in turn has tested my bankroll and sanity over the past year. As a testament to the swings I have endured I will be splitting my year into two periods and answering this question in two parts: “The Agony” and “The Ecstasy”.1
Each of these two periods have taught me something important both about poker and more generally about times in our lives where everything seems to be going wrong and when everything seems to be going right.
I’ve gone through a couple of extended downswings in my poker career. Part of the reason why I decided to try going full time was because I’ve gone through what I thought was the worst of it without quitting and going crazy. However, the poker Gods are cruel and put me in a blender last summer.
The World Series of Poker summer series hosted in Vegas is the biggest live poker event of the year. Hundreds of tournaments are scheduled for a six week period from May to July across a dozen poker rooms and it is the place to be if you want to get in serious volume as a live poker tournament professional. In previous years I had taken a week or two off work to play part of the schedule, but 2025 would be the first summer that I could play a full schedule.
It… did not go well. I had one of those runs where it was day after day, week after week of just losing every all-in and having to wake up the next day and do it all over again. Psychologically it was sort of an interesting experience because you start inhabiting a state of mind where you just expect to lose. Get it all in as a 90% favorite? Sorry, the deck has other plans for you, it’s time to lose again.
I went on a run of 45 tournament entries without a single cash. Statistically this isn’t even a crazy downswing.2 Tournament grinders have to put up with an insane amount of variance and the median experience at a series like the summer WSOP involves losing money. The distribution of outcomes is very lottery-like with most participants losing, a few folks with small wins, and an even small percentage of players hitting the jackpot.
What I am most proud of during the series is that I weathered the storm without losing my mind and ended up playing some of the best poker I have ever played during the WSOP Main Event. The $10,000 buy in Main Event takes place every year about a month into the series during the first week of July. At this point I had hit rock bottom of my summer, down about $80,000 with thoughts of “wow I’m going to need to find a job again next year” creeping in. Things were looking pretty bleak. However, the bankroll was prepared for this scenario and there was no way we were going to miss the marquee event of the summer.
The Main Event is not only a test of a poker player’s skill, but also one of endurance. In order to win, you must out last 9,000+ other entries over ten twelve hour days. This event is a unique experience because of how large the field is and the sheer variety of player types that enter the tournament. You can feasibly play with a super pro that has cashed for tens of millions of dollars and someone who is playing the WSOP for the first time all at the same table. Maximizing your profitability in such an event requires not only a good understanding of strategy, but also paying close attention to figure out as quickly as possible the type of player you are up against each hand.
Day after day during my Main Event run my philosophy was to just focus on each decision the best I could. My $80,000 downswing over the past four weeks was completely irrelevant to how I should be approaching each spot. I am pleased to say that I think I found the best line in the majority of hands that I played. Getting max value from sticky players by using absurdly large overbet sizings, relentlessly attacking flop continuation bets with check raises after defending the big blind, and over-folding to aggression from people who were clearly not bluffing enough formed the bread and butter of printing chips.
My run came to its conclusion close to the end of Day 4 after making the money and a few pay jumps resulting in a cash of $25,000. It was a nice respite from the relentless beatdown I had taken over the series and definitely gave me a bit of a morale boost. I am not looking forward to the next time the downswing gets as bad as this, but I am now confident that I can weather the storm and keep on executing. Sometimes the right thing to do in these situations where nothing feels like it’s going right is to focus on playing the hand in front of you.3
“We have to remember these days. Because there’s no guarantee that they’ll last forever. Enjoy them as long as they last.” - Sebastian Vettel, Four Time Formula 1 World Drivers’ Champion
Any poker player who wants to have longevity in the game has to develop some form of psychological defense to weather the inherent swings in the game. My personal defense mechanism is to try as deeply as possible to not care about the results. There will always be some frustration when I lose a big pot, but it’s important to dissociate the outcome from the decision making. This is, of course, very difficult to put into practice. Whether it was school grades or your job out of college, many of us including me have been programmed from a very young age to fixate on results. As we’ve seen with my own summer WSOP, poker doesn’t work this way at all. You can do the right things for a long time and have less than nothing to show for it.4
The months immediately following my summer WSOP run were less brutal, but still unprofitable and by the time we get to the end of October there was a bit more doubt creeping into my mind as to whether being a professional poker player was going to be financially sustainable for me. Not only were we still taking beats at the poker tables, but the federal government decided to pile on as well and limit the amount that professional gamblers could write off losses on their taxes from 2026 onwards. Things were continuing to look pretty bleak.
November, however, had other plans for us.
That month we basically had the opposite experience that we did over the summer. We made the money of nearly every event we played, made a final table every week, and came runner up twice for a total of over $100k in cashes.5 It was also more fun than the usual tournament schedule because I was doing well across many different formats outside of the usual No Limit Hold’em grind. Must have felt good right?
“You did not look very happy after final tabling” was something a poker friend said to me over dinner after my run in November and it shook me into doing some introspection on how I emotionally process this game. Even before I decided to jump into poker full time, I’ve been quoted as saying “I’m a little dead inside” after winning my first live tournament in 2024. There is a cost to not tying my emotional state to my results at the tables because dulling myself to the losses had also dulled myself to the wins. The goal is to even out my emotional state so I can continue playing at a high level and continue focusing on the next hand no matter what happens poker-wise. This psychological shielding involves not dwelling on things outside your own control and moving on to the next hand, the next tournament, the next series. Win or lose it is what it is.
In January 2026 I returned to the scene of my summer downswing in Vegas to play the WSOP Circuit series at Planet Hollywood. I made a deep run in the $1.7k Main Event, but busted out in a painful spot with 24 remaining for a chip lead pot. I moved on from that, grabbed dinner, and registered for one of the last events of the series: the $3.5k “High Roller”. This particular tournament is somewhat unique due to its higher buy in, its place in the schedule as a two day tournament that finishes on Monday, and that the tournament is hosted in Vegas. As a result the majority of the players who end up playing the event are professional players.
The first bullet did not go well. At the end of day 1 I punted off a large part of my stack versus one of the few recreational players in the field check raising all in on the turn with a combo draw in a spot where in retrospect I had very little fold equity.6 We busted out shortly afterwards. After taking a look at the day 1 survivors, I decided it was well worth firing a second bullet on day 2.7
The second bullet went far better. We battled our way into the money and soon found ourselves three handed versus two Vegas pros. Chips were being shuffled around between the three of us with each of us at some point attaining the chip lead and then relinquishing it to one of the other players. Every time one of us would get short stacked, the short stack would either double up or win a big pot.
After we had battled for about an hour and a half we agreed to take a five minute bathroom break. During this break I had a realization: I am loving this. This was some of the most fun I have ever had playing poker because I was playing against people who were far stronger than the average tournament player and I had to actually think in almost every hand I played. I was probably the most focused I had ever been at the table and being in that flow state simply felt good. From a profitability standpoint I would, of course, prefer not to play against stronger players, but the dance that is poker is a lot more intellectually stimulating when you have competent dance partners.
At the end of the break I was determined to, win or lose, savor this experience. Be present. Be focused. Enjoy the ride. About 30 minutes after play resumed we bluff three bet jammed JTs big blind vs button and won a 40/60 vs AQo as the covering stack to eliminate a player bringing us to heads up play holding a 2:1 chip advantage. A few hands into heads up play our opponent open jams 18 big blinds and we called off with A6o. Our opponent shows T9o and the board runs out K… 6… 5… 2…
9!
Our opponent spikes a 9 on the river to double up. I distinctly remember that there was a very brief moment where I broke focus, glanced up at the ceiling, and thought “not 2nd place again” as the chips were being pushed to my opponent. That feeling very quickly subsided as we still had the chip lead and a job to finish.
A few hands later our opponent is on 20 big blinds and min raise opens off of the button. We look down at 87o in the big blind and defend. The flop is a beautiful J87 rainbow giving us bottom two pair. We check, our opponent quickly checks back. The turn is the 3 of spades bringing in a backdoor flush draw. We bet 80% pot to set up a slightly larger than pot sized shove on the river if there is a clean runout. Our opponent tanks for a few seconds before calling. The river is an off suit K. Our hand is still good here most of the time in this line and we go for the 110% overbet all in.
We fade the snap call and after a few seconds pass I know we have the best hand and am screaming in my head “PLEASE CAAAAAAALLLLLLLLL”. After just over a minute of thinking our opponent eventually flicks in a chip to call and we win versus pocket tens. It’s all over baby.
Got’em. It has been a while since we’ve outright won one and this was a sweet one to come out on top battling against the Vegas pros. $53,079 up top and my first ever WSOP Circuit ring. Played my heart out and obviously got very lucky in a bunch of big spots - a standard recipe for success in tournament poker.
The day after I hopped on a plane straight to Florida for the next hand, the next tournament, the next series. Compared to the last time I won, this time was a bit different though. These are the tournaments worth remembering, worth dwelling on a little bit as a reminder of why I love the game. It’s an important reminder to celebrate when you have the chance to because you never know how long it will be before the next one.
A fitting way to cap off my extremely swingy first full time year in poker.
Poker is a brutal game. I’d like to be playing for as long as I am able to and the past year has given me perspective on what it takes mentally to continue performing both when things are going wrong and when they’re going right.
For the rest of 2026 I’ll be continuing to travel for tournament poker - albeit cutting out some of the more marginal stops due to the gambling tax law changes. This will mean more time at home where I’ll mostly be grinding it out online. I’ve also started putting time learning some other poker variants such as 5 card Pot Limit Omaha. Just like in a normal job it’s important to be learning new skills to prepare for the future!
To close I would like to thank everyone who has played a role in getting me here. So grateful for the opportunity to be doing this as a “job”. Special shoutout to all the folks who are in the trenches with me and who have accompanied me on these poker trips - I have learned so much from each and every one of you.
Appreciate everyone who is reading and following along this journey. It has been cathartic to reflect by writing all of this out. See you all in the next one and see some of you at the tables!