Thursday, November 3, 2011

Time is Money

I just realized something yesterday and am sort of embarrassed by it. In general there are two basic ways to make money; you can use your time, or you can use your money. This sort of glosses over some forms of passive income, but not really because any asset you have that generates passive income (a rental home, a business, etc) could be sold for some price and therefore by not selling it you're just using money to make money once again.

The rub about playing poker for a living is that you have to use both your time and your money in order to make money. You have to grind out big hours if you want to get any where, and you need to have a pretty big bankroll behind you if you want to do so reliably with a small chance of going broke. Put another way, back in 2007 I could make close to $100K a year writing software, and I didn't need a dime in my pocket to do it; all I needed was 2000 hours. In 2011, in order to make close to $100K playing poker, I needed 2000 hours AND by all reasonable measures at least around $50K to start with (trying it with less would be pretty dangerous, although I guess you could).

Like I said, it's kind of embarrassing to me that I'm 3 years into this thing and had never realized this before.

1 comment:

Shaman said...

I understand what you are saying, but I think you are understating the requirements to write software. Before you were "skilled" enough to write software you had to invest time and money. Although the money may have come from a different source, parents, scholarship, etc, but there was still an investment of money to enable you to be able to learn a skill, that would enable you to learn money.

So another way to look at it, would be if you could take the 4 years it took you to get a degree, could you have just started playing poker with a starting bankroll of the 4 years tuition, what state as a poker player would you be in now?