'Well, 'decent living' means something beyond those parameters,' Dalla says. I also asked Dalla how many people he thinks make a 'decent living' from poker, which I define as $50,000-to-$100,000 per year, after deducting poker-playing expenses like the cost of traveling to and from casinos, food and lodging, dealers' tips, etc. However, as Dalla points out, 'these figures are grossly outdated' because this came before the expansion of gambling, the explosion of interest in poker, and, perhaps most importantly, the advent of online poker. poker base, estimated roughly at 200,000, which we defined as the number of players who play in a public cardroom two-plus times in a calendar year.'

'This amounted to about 10-to-12 percent of the U.S. 'We calculated that about 15,000-to-20,000 players were winners in any given year, U.S. Dalla, a long-time writer/thinker about poker issues - he's something of a specialist on questions of poker ethics - teamed up with Jeff Goldberg, a math professor from Arizona State. The only somewhat scholarly attempt to answer the second question that I've heard about is a piece by Nolan Dalla that appeared in Card Player magazine back in 1995, long before poker's big breakout. sometimes, people are irrational.īut, as it turns out, it wouldn't have mattered if I had asked myself those questions, because there is no reliable research on either subject - at least, nothing since the poker explosion of a few years ago, the one started by the Card Cam (the TV camera which allows audiences to see the players' hold cards during the hand), fueled by ESPN's coverage of the World Series of Poker and the Travel Channel's broadcasts of the World Poker Tour, and topped off by the $2.5 million lamb-defeats-wolf victory of online amateur Chris Moneymaker over cunning pro Sam Farha in the 2003 WSOP.

You'd think a guy (that would be moi) would ask himself those two questions before he embarked on a year-long odyssey as a 'high-stakes poker pro.' Well, what can I say. What percentage of 'serious' players show a profit - even a minuscule one - for their careers? How many people actually make a living - even a modest one - playing poker?

Can you make money playing online poker