In thinking of a good topic for my first column for PokerNewsDaily.com, I wanted to do something different than your usual strategy piece. As a quick background for those of you that don’t already know who I am, my name is Eric Lynch and I’m a professional poker player. I’ll be turning 30 in a few days and I’ve been playing poker professionally for over two years now, seriously for about four, and recreationally in one way or another for my entire life.
I think I offer a very unique perspective as a poker player in a couple of different ways. First off, while there are many poker players out there who have families, I’m the only one I know of who actually quit their day job in order to play poker full-time because of their family. In what feels like a past life, I was a software engineer at an ad agency primarily designing and developing back-end web applications. I guess that’s a fancy way of saying computer nerd, but it was a well-paying and mostly fulfilling job. The problem was it was becoming extremely time-consuming at the exact same time my eldest child was born.
At that point, I had already been making more money playing poker online than in my day job and the time demands of working a full-time job, trying to make time for my family, and still playing poker at a high level in the evenings after everyone was in bed was taking its toll. I eventually decided to take some time off on a trial basis and resigned from my job. The plan was to take a few months off, go play some events at the World Series of Poker, see how things went, and then decide what to do after that. I was fortunate enough to have a skill set to fall back on and still to this day receive occasional job offers from people I’ve built relationships with over the years.
That same year, I had a lot of success at the World Series of Poker, cashing for over $600,000. The rest, as they say, is history. I was one of the first (although definitely not THE first) players who started their poker careers online, had a lot of success there, and then was able to take that success and transition it to the live arena. Over the last few years, we’ve seen a lot of other players do the same thing and I’m very proud to think that I was at the beginning of that.
Anyways, I think the fact that I went to college, started a professional career, and started a family all before starting my career as a poker player gives me a unique perspective both on poker and life, and that’s what I’ll be trying to focus on in my columns.
One of the things I quickly realized that I missed from my corporate days after “going pro” is that there is a certain sense of accomplishment and satisfaction you get from being part of a team, working on a project, and then seeing that project through to completion. Admittedly, the work usually profits someone else and there are many negatives (such as long hours, corporate politics, etc.), but at the end of the project, I could always point to something out there and tell people, “I did that.”
Poker is a very solitary game, though. You don’t really interact with people in a cooperative/productive way (that would be cheating!), although there is a certain sense of camaraderie in discussing hands and situations with your peers. It’s still a lot different. In a corporate environment, the goals are usually very attainable and relatively simple (even if they don’t always feel that way). In poker, especially tournament poker, you will fail much more often than you will succeed. It’s an interesting way to live life and I think it’s part of the reason that there are a lot of poker players out there with emotional/happiness issues (although you could say the same for society in general).
Part of the reason I really try to keep other projects going on in my life besides just playing poker (PokerXFactor, my book, and even this column for example) is because they help replace that feeling of satisfaction. Quite honestly, from a pure dollars and cents standpoint, I would probably be better off playing poker than working on any of these extra activities, but it’s very cool to be a published author and it’s something that I can point back to twenty years from now as a result from my poker career and be proud of.
I honestly don’t know how long my poker career will be. I still love the game and everything about it. I still get excited to sit down and play every night and travel to any of the various cities I am fortunate enough to get to see for poker tournaments. My kids are getting older, though, and I don’t want to miss out on things because of travel. I feel very fortunate as a father that this wonderful game has allowed me to be there for most of the “firsts” with my kids. I saw both of my kids’ first steps, the first times they crawled, and heard their first words. Things that most fathers miss out on I am around for.
I am a supremely competitive person. I want to be at every WPT/WSOP/EPT event there is, which makes it really tough to balance out my poker desires with the fact that I also want to be at home with my family. As they get older and more entrenched in various activities, it will be harder and harder to just take them with me as I often as I do now. I am looking forward to both what life and poker have in store for me and I’m looking forward to sharing those experiences with PokerNewsDaily readers. I hope you enjoyed the first column and feel free to e-mail me at rizenpoker@gmail.com if you have feedback.
Eric Lynch is better known as Rizen online. He creates instructional videos for training site PokerXFactor.com and his book, “Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time,” is available at Amazon.com as well as on his personal website at www.rizenpoker.com.