Someone sent me a link to “Bill’s Blog,” as Bill had commented on one of my earlier posts here on the CC blog. The link to Bill’s post is here and the link to the post he’s referring to is here. I believe the reason I was sent the link was one of the opening statements: “while I agree with some overall premises raised by the author, I have to point out some mistakes in his logic.” Aha! So we have ourselves a blog discussion!

I’m going to go ahead and make my point again, for those readers who don’t want to skim through both posts linked above: “Poker is easy money, but it isn’t a lot of money” and “being able to live off of poker seems like quite a chore.” To illustrate these points, I made some basic stipulations, and in doing so I was being very liberal with some numbers and very conservative with some others. I believe this is what caused Bill to claim faulty logic, but I disagree with him. Using over- or underestimates to prove a point is very okay as long as you’re on the side of error that is contrary to the point you’re trying to make. For instance, if I want to show that nuclear weapons kill a lot of people and I say that one bomb is able to kill “thousands of people,” then pointing out that it actually kills “hundreds of thousands of people” is hardly refuting my point. If anything, it’s strengthening my point.

I contend that it’s the same here. I showed how much poker I need to play to reach my current level of income, but Bill pointed out that I need to be ready to play many more hours. I made the conservative estimate that I “only” needed to make $5,000, Bill says that in reality I actually need to make more like $7,000. All in all, Bill’s actually making my point for me.

And to be honest, I think he’s to a great extent is making it better than I was. He made a good post, and casual players who are dreaming of turning professional would do themselves a favor by reading it - it’s an excellent read. The only thing I disagree with is that it somehow would refute anything I said.

Now, to answer a very specific thing that Bill brought up:

First off, I’m not sure of what world the author lives in

The author lives in Sweden. Here, I have an employment that is very common in Sweden, but extremely rare in America: I’m a salaried worker with paid overtime. I also have five weeks of paid vacation a year, and a very generous pension fund. Bill’s remark was supposed to be slightly sarcastic, I gather, but brings up another point: My job is so good already that giving it up to play poker is not enticing to me. Someone reading my post in America may get the wrong idea and think that the numbers would apply equally to him, which may not be the case since a job would pay differently (and work out differently) there than here. I should have been more clear on this in my original post, and I thank Bill for (implicitly) pointing that out to me.

Cheers,
Fredrik