A PRO POKER CAREER: Is It in the Cards?

Many kids dream of one day being rock stars, spending their days in recording studios and, occasionally, tearing the roof off Madison Square Garden. Others imagine building business empires or ascending to lofty positions of political power. Not me. No, I was going to build my fortune playing games somehow. Clearly, my parents had screwed up in a big way.

But how would I do it? As far as I knew, there was no National Pro Monopoly Circuit. Solitaire busking in New York subway stations was hardly lucrative. And yet, I was determined to find a way to avoid real work at all costs. I slapped together poorly constructed prototypes of board games I invented (mercilessly repurposing Risk boards and Parcheesi pawns to fit my requirements), then attempted to shop them around, to no avail. I got very good at Scrabble, writing a strategy guide that was published in 2012 and sold somewhere between 10 and 10,000 copies. (All right, it was closer to 10.) When the escape room craze came along, I designed a number of rooms, two of which saw the light of day, although one of them ran for a single weekend and the other was located in my detached garage. Not at all creepy or pathetic.

I was keeping the game half of my brain stimulated and busy, but I wasn’t reaping much financial gain as a result of it. I was still forced to show up daily at poorly