The Wisconsin State Journal has an interesting piece about playing poker online for a living. This is a growing phenomenon. But is wearing your own personalized loungewear a job requirement?
From the Wisconsin State Journal:
Brett Hartfiel, 22, is his own boss for the summer. He wakes up at about 10 a.m. and works sporadically throughout the day.If his friends go to the beach, he can go with them. If he wants to work in his pajamas, he can. That’s because Hartfiel has turned online gambling, a pastime that has recently exploded among college students, into his summer job. In the past six or seven weeks, he has made more than $6,000.
“I told my friends, ‘I’m going to be a poker pro for three months and see how it goes,’ ” he says.
Professional poker has its perks for the recent UW-Madison graduate. Hartfiel job-hunts and fills out applications online while he plays. Plus he can enjoy the college lifestyle for one last summer.
“There’s something to say for getting to work in a pair of shorts and a ‘Got Brett?’ T-shirt,” says his roommate, Luke Louison, nodding to Hartfiel’s personalized loungewear.
Hartfiel plays no-limit Texas Hold’em, the most popular online poker game “because it’s the fastest and the riskiest,” according to Hartfiel. He mostly plays on Pacific Poker, but he also plays on PartyPoker and PokerStars.
The rest of the article chronicles the high and low points of online poker as a vocation…to me, it seems that there are more valleys than peaks.