Poker
I played online poker professionally from 2012 to 2016, funding four years of travel across Latin America.
The short version
I started in high school during the Moneymaker-era boom, around 2006, and moved online at 17. Through Michigan State it covered most of my living costs. A roughly $25,000 tournament cash in my junior year lined up with losing interest in my finance major. So I took a year off, played while my friends went to class, then came back and finished the degree in 2011. From 2012 to 2016 I played professionally while traveling, living across Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and a few other places on about $20,000 to $35,000 a year: modest in the US, comfortable there at the time. When a teaching salary in Beijing started to beat thinning poker margins, I took the teaching job.
What it built
Poker was about the money — that’s why I played. But earning it forced study: I taught myself the game from books, forums, and equity calculators, with real stakes making the feedback honest. It taught bankroll and risk management, because you can’t survive variance without them. It taught emotional control. You go through months where you’re down and still have to show up and play well, and blaming bad luck doesn’t win any of it back. And it taught me how betting markets and expected value work from the inside, not from a textbook.
That last part is the through-line to Fantasy Joes, where I built the real-money tournament mechanics. Years of watching how odds, EV, and people hold up when money is on the line is the right background for building that.
I don’t romanticize the years. It was a grind, and I’d tell most people not to do it. But the self-reliance and the habit of thinking clearly about risk have stuck.
