Popular glamorized movies have given a pretty unrealistic
version of what does a professional poker room looks from within. They have an
image of dark room with smoke and a table full of sharks ready to rob every
single penny off your favorite hero. The truth is however that none of these
glamorized scenes are close to reality. Professional player experience a
friendly environment and an environment which is defined by multi ethnicity and
learning new skills.
In the real world, poker is no different than any other
profession. Every profession, every business has risks and so does poker. Some elements
of risk come wrapped under the cover of financial investments while some are
when someone is presenting you with a pot. Usually direct risks are more honest
as in the world of poker.
When you enter the world of professional poke, you’ll meet a
lot of individuals who haven’t gone to work (in conventional sense) for as long
as 7-8 years and approached to
poker as a business professionally. In every
business one party suffers a loss and other gain something, this is the same
way poker works, in fact more directly than anyone else.
An accountant or a club owner sees delayed results, their
profits or losses comes in a long term calculations, while the pain of defeat
or the joy of victory can be seen on the faces of a player right away. At the
end of the day every one of them is bound by similar laws of business, loss or
gain of one affects the other quite the opposite. Most business start ups fail
within the first 5 years of their starting because their quality of service or
goods or marketing was inferior to that of their competitors. So comparing all
these facts with poker, we can safely say that poker is nothing but another
form of a business. The fundamental rule stays the same, be better than your
opponent.
When a experienced worker is preferred over the
inexperienced one then it is clear that one is preferring results over anything
else. It is possible that till the time the rookie doesn’t gain experience
properly, he’ll be handled the less important clients, where it is ok to make
the initial mistakes. Sometimes the rookie becomes better than the experienced
one after a certain time but in the long run it is only the performance that
matters. So at last poker is nothing more than a business in its different
form, with all the elements of risks and so we can see a lot of professionals
doing nothing else for money other than playing poker day and night, what a
sweet, fun way to make a living.
