Recently, a few people have told me they were about to be laid off and were looking to play poker for a living.  I generally think that unless you *know* you have a talent and aptitude for it, you are better off looking for another "9 to 5 job."  I realize that the fact that a lazy clown such as myself can make almost 20K a month (in a mostly "retooling" year) reasonably consistently can look really appealing.  But there's a lot more to making it a CAREER:

* It takes a certain type of person to be able to take risk for a living...  You really need to be able to separate your poker performance with your life outside of work.  This is especially important when you have a family.  If you are the type of person to punch walls, kick your dog, and generally be in a bad mood away from the tables whenever you have a bad session, then poker is a poor career choice.  And this must apply not only to you, but your spouse - s/he must also be able to be "happy" on days when you go thru a brutal stretch of run-bad.  "Work" is less than half of your "life" (in both time and importance).  You can't let the less relevant facet of your life taint everything else you do.  When I was hired into the Sales and Trading program of the bank I worked for, they gave us various diagnostics to see if we would be better suited for a sales or trading position.  A few of the guys told me they could never take all the stress and worries of a bad day(s) in trading - that it would carry over into their home lives. The same applies to poker.

* You may play poker part-time now, but any stresses are going to be magnified when you have to win for a living.  You are going to have expenses EVERY month.  Your poker income is not going to be so steady.  In fact, you may have several months where you don't make any money.  No matter how good you are, you are going to have some brutally bad stretches.  If you don't have a good mindset, this will make your career even more difficult than it already is.

* Think about the number of years you need to play poker.  If you only plan on working a few years before retiring, then playing poker as a career is going to be much easier than if you are very young.  As pointed out previously in my "finish school" post, the odds of you continuing to be a solid winning player for decades are very slim.  Dozens of new up-and-comers and dozens of formerly solid regs from higher stakes will constantly be coming to your stakes every year.

The two main arguments for giving professional poker a try is that (i) you're never going to know if you can make it unless you try, and (ii) the job markets may be such that you have no other appealing alternative.  For those of you, I'll list my tips for getting started in your new career.  To be continued...