Playing well and living off it are two different things. Plenty of steadily profitable amateurs do not last a year after turning professional, and the reason is usually not their game — it is bankroll size, income swings and everyday reality. This page lists the thresholds one by one.
It assumes you can already answer the question “am I actually winning”. The method for that is in are you a winning poker player. If you cannot answer it, you are not yet at the stage where going professional is the question.
- ✓Prove you are a winner over a real sample first, then talk about turning professional. The order cannot be reversed.
- ✓A professional bankroll has to be larger than an amateur one, because you cannot move down as freely during a downswing.
- ✓Unstable income is normal, so keep living expenses in a separate pot from the bankroll.
- ✓A downswing can last months, and surviving it is a psychological problem rather than a technical one.
- ✓No salary, no employer health cover, no bonus — those costs come out of your own hourly rate.
Test one: are you genuinely a winner
This is the one thing that cannot be skipped. Not “I have been running well lately”, but recorded, over a large enough sample, and still positive after rake.
Online that usually means a hundred thousand hands or more; live it means several hundred hours. Anything less and luck has not been filtered out. Turning professional on a thin sample is spending your living expenses to test an unproven hypothesis.
And it has to be the stakes you intend to play. Winning steadily at 1/2 does not mean you beat 2/5 — the jump in opposition quality is often larger than people expect.
Test two: bankroll size
An amateur who busts can stop for a while and save up again. A professional cannot: the bankroll is the tool the job is done with.
The usual guidance is thirty to fifty buy-ins for cash games at your stake, and a hundred or more for tournaments. Going professional means adding to that, because an amateur can simply move down or take a break during a downswing, and an income requirement makes that much harder.
More important still: living expenses have to be completely separate from the bankroll. Once the two are mixed, you keep playing when you should stop, because you need to win today to make rent. That is the fastest way to destroy a professional.
Test three: the real hours and income arithmetic
Treat it as a job and do the sums.
Suppose your hourly rate at a given stake is $50. A hundred hours a month is $5,000 before tax — but those hundred hours are time actually in the seat, excluding travel, waiting for a seat, reviewing hands and breaks. Real time invested is normally about one and a half times table hours.
Also consider:
- Hourly rate falls with fatigue. Decision quality in hour eight is not what it was in hour three.
- Good games are not always available. You cannot commit to eight hours every day without forcing yourself into tables you should not be sitting at.
- Income swings. Making $10,000 one month and losing $3,000 the next are both inside the normal range.
Test four: surviving a downswing
This is where the highest proportion of people drop out.
Given the scale of variance in online cash games, a genuine winner running badly for two or three consecutive months is entirely normal. An amateur can take a few weeks off; a professional still has to sit down every day.
And the damage from a downswing is not the loss itself. It is that you start doubting your own judgement and change your game to win it back — moving up, playing more hands, bluffing people who never fold. Most players are not beaten by the downswing; they are beaten by their reaction to it.
Test five: everything nobody covers for you
Everything a job provides, professional poker does not:
- No salary. Income depends entirely on how you played this month and how good the games were.
- No employer health cover or pension. Both are on you.
- No bonus, no paid leave, no sick pay. The days you are ill are days at zero.
- Tax is your problem. The rules vary by jurisdiction, so find out before rather than after.
- Credit is hard to get. With no proof of salary, renting and borrowing both become awkward.
None of this is meant to put you off. The point is that these costs should be subtracted from your hourly rate before you evaluate anything.
A more realistic sequence
You do not have to jump in one step. Most players who settle into it took this route:
- Keep the day job, build a real sample in your own time, and confirm you beat a specific stake.
- Save the full bankroll plus at least six months of living expenses, kept completely separate.
- Use a long holiday or unpaid leave to run a full-time schedule for a month or two, and see what happens to both the income and your state of mind.
- Only then go full time, and keep the option of going back to work.
Skipping these steps is not boldness. It just postpones a risk you could have tested cheaply until the point where finding out is most expensive.
