One of the things that troubles me about poker is that it seems like a major time sink and a deeply unhealthy lifestyle if you just want to calibrate yourself; but if you are interested in making some money as well or even making it your livelihood, it's still troubling because online poker is a negative expected sum game which is receiving a lot of media exposure.

I'm frankly confused about the whole issue of poker (both online and real-life). I know a lot of smart people who claim to have made ridiculous amounts of money playing poker casually in their free time. Judging from what they're saying, it would seem like there are so many suckers around playing for real money that a highly intelligent person willing to study the game can exercise a ridiculous amount of arbitrage.

But if I accept all their stories at face value, then why on Earth do all these smart people toil at difficult jobs for mediocre salaries when they could be earning much more money gambling? In particular, why do even all these people I know who boast about their earnings at poker still maintain difficult and demanding day jobs? (Of course, they can reply that gambling is only a short-term opportunity while the career is more important in the long run, but they could still invest more time in gambling while scaling down their careers temporarily with a clear net profit. And even if that's not possible, with such vast profit opportunities, one would expect they'd be playing far more even in their presently available free time.)

I don't know what to think of all this. Whatever the truth might be, either I know a bunch of otherwise honest and down to Earth people who are lying or delusional about this issue, or there is actually a screaming opportunity for making money on easy arbitrage that few people bother to exploit, and even they only partly and incompletely. Both possibilities seem to me highly implausible (but the latter more so).