One of my housemates in college was able to maintain a fairly decent middle-class income playing poker, starting from a few books on professional play and a few months of experience (as well as a preexisting Magic: The Gathering habit, which may have provided some crossover skills). He was a fairly bright guy, but not a genius and not unusually rational outside the game, so it can be done; I've got a few theories as to why more people don't.
First, and probably most importantly, playing poker professionally is a job. It's often tedious, it's emotionally demanding, and since it relies on subverting the instincts that make gambling fun, it usually isn't. My friend spent ten or twelve hours a day playing, often on four tables at once, and while he was making about the same money that I now do in software, I never got the impression that he was working any less hard for it.
Second, it's not a reliable source of income over the short term. The variance in day-to-day take is astounding: some days my friend would stagger out of his room thousands of dollars the poorer, either because he'd gotten in a bad emotional state and lost rationality (the jargon is "on tilt") or just because of a run of bad luck. Indeed, professional poker players are expected to blow through their entire playing fund on a semi-regular basis. I imagine that a lot of people wouldn't want to live that way; financial stability is itself a net positive for most, as evidenced by the existence of insurance companies.
Finally, it's low-status. "Professional gambler" has a certain rough-edged glamour to it, but it occupies sort of the same mental space as "private investigator" or even "soldier of fortune": exciting but not respectable. Status considerations being as important as they are with regard to career choices, it wouldn't surprise me if this played an important role in limiting the number of people playing professionally.
Actually, the story of your housemate is precisely what the efficient markets hypothesis predicts: if you try hard to squeeze out some arbitrage profits from an efficient market, the profit you can expect will be roughly the same as what you could earn with other pursuits, including wage labor, given your talents and the amount of effort expended. So I'm not at all surprised to hear it; in fact, it would be surprising if the amount of arbitrage profits available were much less than that.
What does confuse me are the stories of people who claim that the arb...
Related to: Problem of verifying rationality
We're excited to announce the (soft) launch of RationalPoker.com! It's a new guide developed by me, Zvi, Kevin, and patrissimo detailing how to use online poker as rationality training to conquer your cognitive biases. We want our community to go from knowing a lot about cognitive biases to actually having a training method that allows us to integrate that knowledge into our habits -- truly reducing biases instead of just leaving us perpetually lamenting our flawed brain-ware. In the coming weeks, we'll be making the case that online poker is a useful rationalist pursuit along with developing introductory "How To" material that allows those who join us to play profitably.
We want to make sure we aren’t wasting our time practicing an ungrounded art with methods that don’t work. Poker gives us an objective way to test x-rationality. The difference between winning and losing in poker once you know a small amount of domain-specific knowledge is due to differing levels of rationality. Our site will be presenting the case that a strong rationalist who can act on their knowledge of cognitive biases (a defining feature of x-rationality but not traditional rationality) should have a distinct advantage. We'll be offering the connecting material between the sequences and online poker to teach you how to apply knowledge of cognitive biases to poker in a way that verifies your current level of rationality and naturally teaches you to improve your rationality over time.
Incidentally, this also presents a solution for those of us looking to earn money from anywhere with a flexible schedule that leaves time for outside interests.
We’re just getting started so please be kind! Our site is definitely not a final product yet. If you're curious about where we're going with this though, add us to your RSS feeds or check the site every few days. We hope some of you who aren't convinced yet consider playing once you feel like we’ve finally given you enough information to understand why poker is a profitable rationalist pursuit.
Also, if you sign up for one of the online poker rooms like Full Tilt using our affiliate links, the residuals get donated to Less Wrong/Singularity Institute. That way, the more poker you play after you sign up, the more money you direct towards raising the sanity waterline and creating provably friendly artificial intelligence.
We’re not counting on it, but even a very small group of us could theoretically fund SIAI in a very real and meaningful way just as a side-effect of playing a lot of online poker. I know I'm partisan, but this seems like an unreasonably exciting opportunity! So if you support SIAI and you (or your friends) want to sign up to play online poker anyway, please sign-up using our links.
Anyway, we hope some of you want to get stronger by joining us in the Rationality Dojo of online poker. You can be part of our crew of aspiring rationalists who want to increase our rationality, earn money, and help save the world -- all by playing a fun computer game with no boss, no schedule, and the potential for lots of self-development and personal growth.
So check out our site and let us know if you're interested in joining.