Quote:
|
Originally Posted by CincyHorseplayer
Tom,
I wasn't trying to slam you at all.But at 12.5 hours avg a week and being indifferent to the results of full time gambling it's hard to take serious on a thread regarding playing for a living!!!But please invite me out for cocktails when I'm in the vicinity  |
Perhaps I was ambiguous. 500-600 hours a year is spent on what I do for a living. I could easily spend 4,000 hours a year (80 hours a week) on this, if I saw fit to. I don't want to be chained to my "job". 200 hours a month, three separated months a year, is enough.
Pardon me while I pontificate for a while.
If I put in a "regular" 2,000 hours a year doing my "day job", my income wouldn't be much more or less than it is now; likewise, if all I did was play horses/etc. (and this didn't change my results-per-hour), I would have about the same amount of money. The three months that I work earn me enough to pay about 80% of my real life bills (and would pay all of them if I wanted to live more cheaply than I do). The money I make from horses/greyhounds/poker is literally money in the bank.
All of this isn't meant for me to blow my trumpet; it's pertinent to this thread. To gamble successfully for a living, one needs a large enough bankroll and a separate fund for living expenses----enough to not feel pressure to produce. Along with that, the "professional" also needs the ability to win, a willingness to work as hard as needed to achieve athe goal of winning, self-confidence, discipline, patience, preparedness, the willingness to pounce when the "golden opportunity" arises, total self-honesty with oneself, the ability to adapt when the game changes, the ability to self-criticize and take criticism (and improve based on the critique), and countless other things. If I could no longer make money betting, I would probably work more hours at the "day job". As it is, those years are past, and I'm semi-retired from betting, as greyhounds (and some live poker) don't take as much of my time as horses did. In other words, I have something to fall back on if the income from horses/greyhounds/poker dries up.
For me, having a regular, steady, reliable income takes the pressure off of me to produce by gambling. It eliminates the need to take living expenses out of my bankroll. Instead, I put the extra money in the bank/investments/etc. This is what works for me. Somebody else might be willing to live more on the edge, and they might do well that way, and it might even be needed to keep them focused.
Everybody has different wants and needs. What works for one person won't work for another. There's no one "right" way to do things, no one-size-fits-all.
