How to Play Poker for a Living

Video Transcript

"You've heard the term take this job and shove it? Well if you want to quit your job and you want to learn how to play poker, my name is Dean Hale and today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about how to play poker for a living. The main thing in playing poker for a living, it's bankroll. If you don't have a proper bankroll, you're really not going to be able to play poker. And what I mean by bankroll is it's the money that you have set aside that is specifically earmarked just for your gambling. You need a large enough bankroll to withstand the ups and the downs that come with playing poker. As I've talked to many of my colleagues in the poker world, poker is considered a continuum. It is a long line that never ends. You will have times where you're going to have a run of great cards and you're going to win a lot of money. Unfortunately, because of mathematical probabilities, you're also going to have runs where you're going to have bad cards, bad luck and you're just going to lose a lot of money. That's why bankroll without a doubt is the most important thing to playing poker for a living. The other things are, you need to study the game. It's not just a game, you need to go out there and you throw money around, there are actually a lot of very intricate things about poker such as learning your outs, learning what implied odds are, trying to manage the size of the pot. Just a lot of things, so I would stay study. Go out and look at some books, go online, check out various ways to learn and play a lot of hands. The other thing is you want to have patience to be a professional poker player. There is no professional poker player out there, regardless of what you see on TV, that does not have supreme patience. Even those players that seem very aggressive are playing every hand sometimes go hours folding every single hand they have. You just see the crazy action that has been edited for TV. The other thing to do is just simply study your opponents, learn to look for tells, learn to look for betting patterns, learn to look for things they tend to do in certain situations all the time. The biggest thing is learn the game, have it down pat, but have a bankroll. If you have a proper bankroll, you could withstand the ups and downs and you can turn it into becoming a real good and a longstanding professional poker player. My name is Dean Hale and I've just given some of the basics of how to play poker for a living."