Playing Poker as a Business

av Tom McEvoy. Playing poker as a business is not a nine-to-five routine. Erratic schedules are the rule rather than the exception. When I was in the world of business where people begin working at 8 AM, I had a very difficult time. Most professional poker players are night owls, and I always have been one myself, so I didn't adapt well to the 9AM-5PM drill. Part of the beauty of the poker business is that we can tailor our hours to suit our body schedules, but unfortunately the "bad" always accompanies the "beautiful," it seems. Like any independent businessman, you have to put in far more time and effort when you play poker professionally than if you were working for someone else. And there are no company benefits or guaranteed weekly paychecks.

Playing poker is like being a salesman who works on a commission basis. When you make sales, you get commissions and your lifestyle rolls on at a nice clip. If you don't make sales, you don't receive compensation and your lifestyle suffers because the bills goon whether or not you're making any money to pay them. But there is one other dramatic element added to this mix when you are in the poker business. When a salesman fails to make any sales, he is not penalized; he simply is not rewarded. In other words, he doesn't lose any money out of his pocket. In the poker business, that is not the case. Every time you sit down at the table, you put your bankroll on the line. Not only can you not make money, but you actually can lose your money in the course of a day's work. So it is possible to have a negative income through losing (which is very stressful, believe me!)

Many professional poker players go broke because they cannot sustain their losses while maintaining their lifestyle. Most pro-level players that wind up on the rail or have to go back to work for someone else don't end up there because they've lost all their money playing poker: It's just that they didn't make enough money to sustain a decent lifestyle; they couldn't handle the losses. If having a comfortable lifestyle that is stable from day to day is very important to you, the business of poker may not be the business for you.

When things are going well for you as a pro player, you can maintain a very nice lifestyle, buy things and go out for elegant dinners and enjoy yourself. When things go badly, however, some of that money that you already have spent enjoying yourself might come in handy. That's why it is important to prepare for the slow times by protecting your investment. Your investment is your bankroll. Like any businessman, you want to improve your business, move up the ladder. As soon as you are doing reasonably well at one level, you may want to go up to the next level. If you've consistently been beating the $10-$20 game and have built up a modest bankroll, you can try moving up to the $15-$30 game, and so on.

It also is very important to keep up with the competition. There are a lot of books and software on the market that can help you to improve your game. Just as business owners keep up with the latest technology, you must keep up with the latest knowledge in poker. It's part of developing a business plan.

A winning player who has developed a solid game has the best of it. But that doesn't mean that he's going to win every session. Most professional players who win 60-to-70 percent of the times that they sit down in a game, still have a 30-to-40 percent failure rate, making it very important for them to properly manage money so that their losses don't exceed their wins. You've gained nothing if you win four sessions in a row and then, in your fifth session, you lose everything back that you have gained. I make it a rule of thumb to never lose more in one playing session that I am capable of winning back in the next one.

One of the keys to success in playing poker as a business is flexibility. If the game is good and if you're playing well, the game justifies continued play, whether you're winning or losing. You can't always quit when you're ahead a little bit because you may not find as good a game the next time around. Even if you're losing, as long as you're playing well and the game remains good, you should continue playing to try to get unstuck and possibly even move a little ahead. But the criteria have to be that you're playing well and the game justifies continued play.

You don't want to impose any artificial restrictions on your win, but you definitely should impose some restrictions on your loss. No matter how good the game is, if you're getting beaten to a pulp, and if you exceed the loss limitation of what you can expect to win back in your next session, you should quit. This is what I loosely term "money management," which is a controversial topic in itself.

The business of making money at poker probably is one of the toughest ventures you can enter. I think that a better term than "playing" poker is "working" poker. You are working at winning a business game in competition against some of the toughest "vendors" in the world.