Playing Online Poker to Pay For School
Onlinecasino.org has an interesting article about students paying tuition by playing online poker. The articles gives the example of two students who have made a significant amount of money playing online. One has made $8,000 by playing six days a week for the last ten months, and another has made $6,000 playing six hours a day for the last seven months.
The problem with the article is the bias in favor of online poker. The article relates online poker to a part-time job waiting tables or doing office work. Making a living playing poker is much riskier than a waiting tables.
For most players, online poker is a real grind, often requiring that the player play more than two tables. Otherwise the income is meager and not enough to live off.
The article fails to mention that not everyone wins at poker. It’s not as simple as deciding that you want to make a living playing poker. A part-time job waiting tables at least ensures a base income plus tips. There’s no way to lose money. In poker there’s always the possibility that the player will end up losing money in the long-run.
In my sophomore year of college I had a roommate who played online poker. That was also my first year playing for real money online. I won’t get into how I did, but I will say that I played nearly the same amount of hours, if not more, only to win about a thousand dollars in three to four months. After that I flamed out and lost five hundred dollars in two weeks.
My roommate played pretty high stakes poker for a college student. He was playing 2/4NL and 3/6NL. To make things worse he was playing out of his bankroll, using money from his parent-backed credit card, continually reloading every time he lost.
A few weeks before Winter Semester was over, he won $400 dollars. He hit a real hot streak and decided to try his hand at 5/10NL. During this session he was playing well until he took a bad beat and lost his bankroll. He had a flush and lost to a full house on the river. After that he decided to take a leave of absence for the Spring Semester. He wasn’t getting his school work done and he was losing hundreds of dollars playing poker.
I have no problem with students playing poker. I do so myself, but school work comes first. Making some cash playing poker is time consuming and requires a lot of effort, about as much as working a normal job. Of course there are always going to be the success stories, but it’s good to keep in mind that that’s not the case for everyone.
poker, student, online poker, pay tuition
April 20th, 2007 at 8:59 am
Nice post, Richard.
It would be interesting to see what percentage of college students are successful relative to the non-college students. I would guess it would be less for college students since many probably don’t have the maturity to handle the bad swings.
April 21st, 2007 at 4:24 am
I think another thing to take account is what it means to be a successful poker player. Does it mean just not being a losing player or does the player have to win a certain amount of money or play at a certain limit to be considered successful?
Success is very relative and hard to judge. I consider myself somewhat successful, but I’m a recreational player, so just being a “winning” player is successful for me. But for others my meager winnings would be considered a failure.