When does an amateur player become a professional?
Is a player a professional when they earn more from poker than they do at work?
Last week banker Talal Shakerchi won the $100,000 Triton Poker Main Event for $3,250,000. Talal has numerous live high roller titles and five SCOOP titles also on his resume, to name just a few.
He has a record that most professional players would be proud of, in fact, he is probably better than a few of the high-stakes pro players he rubs shoulders with on the nosebleed circuit.
However, despite this, like a lot of people in his position, he is keen to distance himself from being called a professional. My question is, when does an amateur become a professional, even if they don't want to be?
The advantage of not being a Pro
It's funny how things change. In the early days of the poker boom we were inundated with people who claimed to be professional players, who actually were not.
These days high profile successful players try to claim the opposite. Whether it is those who claim to be retired, like Doug Polk and Fedor Holz, or businessmen who are just as well known for poker, like Tony G and Dan Shak.
There is an obvious reason why this is in the high stakes scene, the rise of Pro/Am events like the CoinRivet Invitational, where pros play pros, and amateur players play other amateurs, on Day 1. It is very advantageous to be drawn with the recreational players in this event, by claiming to be one.
That is just one event, but it had a panel that decided if somebody was a pro or not. What would their criteria be?
How is the player spending their time?
It cannot be simply that the player has made more money at the tables than in their job. That would make Jerry Yang a professional poker player. Anyone can go on a heater and make more in a tournament than they do at work.
It can't be the other way around either. For example, I can't say for sure but there is a good chance that Daniel Negreanu has made more money from his partnership with GGPoker and his other ventures than he has at the tables. He is still a pro, and it is because of his status as a pro player that he was able to parlay it into other business ventures.
I don't think there is a perfect answer, I think the best we can hope for is an honest self-evaluation about how much time the player spends on the game compared to other ventures. If poker is the way Talal Shakerchi blows off steam after a day of work, even if his expectation is higher in poker, then we have to respect that.
But we can probably be a little dubious when the next Pro/Am event is around the corner and Stephen Chidwick suddenly makes a claim to being a stonemason.
At what point does an amateur player become a professional? Let us know in the comments:
