Pro, to me, just means that it's your sole source of income...and that you NEED an income. So, you're working at poker instead of a 'job'.

Wow you're an asshole...wow, fuck you.

There's a reason I'm where I'm at...it's called a student wife. If you had to pull in 3k/month at 100NL, moving up would be a lot harder than you think.

Fuck you.

I was playing 2/4 June last year and doing just fine until an epic downtick...so, we'll see who gets to 10/20 first, shall we?

There's many ways to define a poker professional. One is your mindset while playing the game - to continually improve in decision making and bankroll management and so on. It may not be your sole source of income, but you are treating poker "professionally" as some source of income. Another is playing poker as your sole source or at least main source of income.

I personally didn't enjoy relying on poker as my main source of income. It's a very lonely game clicking buttons online and stressing over decisions. Every decision you make is with your wallet. Combine that with no longer having a passion for poker and (at the time) being emotionally unstable, and it's easy to understand why I'm taking the route for landing a job with stable income doing something I love as my main source of income.

I'm in the "stick with a stable job while playing poker part-time" boat. Congrats on your gaming achievements BTW!

I recall a 28 buy-in downswing at $25 @ Party about a month into playing cash games.

Basically I won $700 in about two weeks, then lost it back over the next 8 weeks...obv. I simply wasn't good enough at cash games or equipped to deal with tilt at that time.

It did have the side effect if making sure I didn't move up until I had 40x BI for the next level from then on, so I've basically had zero risk of ruin throughout my playing career.

I would say that I've had three 15BI dowswings in the 4 years since. Last one being this January and the one before that being February 2007.
Tilt was a major factor each time.

In maybe 100k hands of shortstacking I've yet to see a downswing worse than 4 (full) buy-ins for obvious reasons.