Professional online poker players reveal how they turned a card game into a lucrative full-time job

$100K in the first month. $1.5 million in a brief career. These are the Aussies shunning full-time jobs to make a handsome living from online poker — and here is how they do it.

Welcome to the elite $100K-a-month club

WHEN online poker exploded in popularity about a decade ago, many Australians reached for their credit cards and dabbled in low stakes tables for a bit of fun.

For others, it became an alternative to a full-time job.

Ray is one of those people.

For the past seven years he has supported himself handsomely by playing online poker, shunning a conventional career to make a living off easy opponents.

Ray (who didn’t want his real name used for reasons we’ll get to later) began playing while studying at University. At first he played $10 dollar games with his friends but mostly lost, so went online for practice and quickly developed a taste for the game — and it’s rewards.

By the time he reached his final year of uni, he had made $80,000, so before looking for a proper job, he decided to give full time poker a try. It proved to be a lucrative decision, albeit one that his mum struggled to accept.

He began playing full time in August 2007 and says he won $100,000 in the first month. In fact, that first year was his most profitable. It was a golden time in online poker. “Everyone was playing it but no one was any good … a lot of the smart math kids hadn’t gotten on to it yet,” he says.

Now 30, Ray averages about four to five hours playing a day, usually multiple tables at a time. It’s a small club of guys that do this for a living and Ray says a many enjoy the level of celebrity that comes with being a top player.

However, he has a different strategy. “I don’t want to be known. I go on other sites and look for the easiest opponents,” he says.

PokerStars is one of the most popular sites. Professionals will play anywhere between 2 to 6 tables at a time.

According to Ray, a lot of the guys who enjoy the attention play on PokerStars.com but he typically frequents sites such as iPoker.com, Pokerparty.com, and Bodog.

For him, it’s all about the mark — players that clearly aren’t professionals. Gaining access to such tables is so valuable that as Bodog withdrew from the Australian market citing “liquidity issues”, Ray now pays $300 a month to a Canadian guy who rents out servers (explicitly for such a purpose) so that he can still gain access to the site.

When Ray logs on, he is clinical in his pursuits. He uses programs such as Poker Tracker and Hold’em Manager that record every hand and collates the information into a database. This allows him to compile statistics and patterns in his own game, as well as his opponents.

Most sites allow a player to pin an opponent with notes by right clicking on their avatar. Given that Ray is exclusively playing high stakes tables, he comes across the same players on a semi regular basis. So it pays to watch the game tape.

Some sites even allow you to add certain players as a “buddy” without them knowing. So naturally, Ray adds all the terrible players to his buddy list and seeks them out when logging on. “It’s more like a hit list than a friend list,” he jokes.

While Ray’s experience in the world of online poker has been a rather solitary one, that is not the case for fellow professional player Jamie, who has had a more gregarious path over the last eight years of his career.

Jamie (who has never given an interview about his poker playing and also wished to remain anonymous) has won about $1.5 million in his career. Aged 27, he began playing when he was 19 and quickly became addicted to the lifestyle.

The office.

While Jamie would spend most of his time playing games online, he also attended “live games” and got caught up in the heavy partying that accompanies the professional poker scene. “It’s everything you’d expect it to be … it’s quite a degenerate world,” he says.

While Ray is pragmatic in his approach to the game, for Jamie it’s a world that survives on “fast money.”

“When I was at my peak I was playing $1,000 to $2,000 limits,” he says. He recalls one game when he was up $250,000 and then swiftly lost it all. “I had a $500,000 swing in the space of an hour.”

During 2013, Jamie says he was averaging $100,000 a month in earnings. Playing mostly on PokerStars.com, at the height of his playing days he was putting in 12 hours a day. “I’ve probably played about 3 million hands of poker in my life,” he guesses.

During this time he rented houses in Melbourne and Thailand with four other players where the group would spend all day perfecting their craft.

“We spent lots of time deconstructing our game, doing the math, everything we could do to get that edge. It was actually pretty nerdy,” he says. Apart from the occasional evening trip to the strippers, of course.

The one thing professional players have in common is a respect for the mathematics. “It’s all about the math but there’s a human element,” Jamie says.

Jamie prides himself on his ability to manipulate his opponent’s mood (something referred to as needling in the business) and then use the numbers to exploit their emotional reaction. But it’s a fine line. “If you’re too good, you won’t get any action.”

Image from the PokerStars app that has been pulled from the Australian Apple App Store.

Like any form of gambling, the trick with poker is to quit while you’re ahead. Jamie has taken a huge step back from playing and has begun learning computer coding. As far as his poker playing goes, he considers himself one of the lucky ones. “A small percentage actually retain their money and go on to do anything with it,” he says.

The number of successful poker players in Australia would be much smaller than anyone would like to admit. “There’s not that much money in it anymore.”

But for players like Ray who continue to put the hours in daily, there is a significant perk. Apart from being their own boss, they are not required to pay any tax on their earnings. Yep, that’s right. They can keep it all.

In fact, it is the primary reason he is concerned about the disclosure of his identity. He fears that if new legislation was passed in Australia, he would be targeted and retroactively taxed on the basis of this article. Ray has gone out of his way to ensure he remains on the right side of the law. When he began to make serious amounts of money he sought professional tax advice and was assured his winnings could not be taxed.

Given that the average full-time wage in Australia is $74,000, and given that Ray could make that in a day, it’s not hard to see the appeal of professional online poker. That is, when you’re winning.

When you’re not winning, life is stressful. Ray has witnessed a friend lose an entire year’s earnings of $500,000 in just a few days when emotion got the best of him after some big losses. The state is called being “on tilt” — an old reference to pinball machines.

For most players, there is an overlap between competing in live games and the online world.

There’s no denying that the world of online poker has lost a bit of its glamour lately. The industry was marred on what players refer to as “Black Friday”, which marks the FBI’s seizure of three of the world’s most popular poker sites for fraud and money laundering in 2012.

While the indicted sites, including PokerStars and FullTilt have since been purchased from the US Department of Justice and have reinstated their legitimacy, for Jaime it’s a reminder of the growing threat of “collusion and cheating” that can occasionally rear its head in the world of online poker.

But demand for online poker is still high and there remains no shortage of sites. Sites that will forever be populated by that small, esoteric group of players who are trying to make their living. So if you ever find yourself sitting at the proverbial seat of an online table, just beware of who you might be up against.