'Semi-professionals' enjoy poker as a side income and hobby without relying on it as a stable source of income. They also avoid the anti-social, monotonous nature of professional poker playing. Some semi-pros make a very significant income from playing cards, even more than many professionals!

'Spumoni! Spumoni!'

• A semi-professional athlete is one who is paid money to play and thus is not an amateur, but for whom sport is not a full-time occupation, generally because the level of pay is too low to make a reasonable living based solely upon that source, thus making the athlete not a full professional athlete. Likewise the term semi-professional can be applied to an artist such a photographer or musician who derives some income from their artistic endeavors but who must nevertheless take a day job in.
• Semi-professional poker player - Someone who derives income from poker as a side job. Professional poker player - someone whose main source of income is poker. (outside of investments, this is generally their sole source of income).

This is the safe word Jackie Moon, played by Will Ferrell, yells in the 2008 comedy Semi-Pro when he is bitten by a bear as his attempt to wrestle with it goes horribly wrong. It's also the name of a type of ice cream, which happens to be a comfort food I used quite often to soothe the pain of being bitten by negative variance during my recent attempt to become a professional poker player.

Like Jackie, I finally cried uncle and admitted that the pain is more than I can take. I decided that being a full-time professional poker player is not for me. Instead, I decided to try my hand at being a semi-professional poker player. Here are five lessons I learned from Jackie Moon and his pursuit of glory in Semi-Pro.

Lesson #1: Follow Your Dream

In the trailer for Semi-Pro, an interviewer asks Jackie how he learned to play basketball. His response is 'I saw it on TV a couple times and I thought, I can do that.'

This is exactly how I, and many like me, got into poker. In hindsight, poker has not been as easy as the guys on TV make it look. TV doesn't show the downswings. Sure, we see the suck outs, but the heroes always seem to bounce back and pony up another $10K buy-in for the next episode. Unlike your favorite TV player, when I went busto, I got a job.

Just because I decided to go back to a regular job does not mean I can't continue to follow my dream. 'Dreams sometimes become nightmares' is a line from the movie that ironically describes the first six months of poker for me in 2016. This was because I was depending on poker money as my primary source of income during my downswing. I put a band aid on this problem by getting backers, but when I lost their money, I felt even worse. When I made money for them, I felt great but was still broke after distributing the vast majority of the winnings. It was a lose-lose situation.

By going back to work, I can use my disposable income to play on my own dime. If I win, I get to keep all of the profit. If I lose, I can't play poker anymore... well, at least not until the next paycheck. Going semi-pro seems like a way to follow my dream without it becoming a nightmare.

Lesson #2: Don't Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

In the film, Jackie Moon is a former singer who decides to become a professional basketball player, but he never puts all of his eggs in one basket. Even though he wants to play ball, he continues to sing before and after games. He's also the owner, coach, and promoter for the team. In other words, if he couldn't make it as a player, he still had multiple sources of income.

I was a former teacher who decided to become a professional poker player. When poker took a turn for the worse, I started doing a little tutoring and substituting here and there. Unlike Jackie, I was still depending on poker for most of my income. Now I believe it is best to depend on the non-poker sources primarily and consider any poker income to be icing on the cake. This is what it means to be a semi-pro. It seems like a much easier way to live.

For me, the beauty of this approach is that this hybrid is much better than either extreme. I was not happy as a full-time teacher, but I was not happy as a full-time poker player either. By playing poker for a smaller portion of my income, I can enjoy the game without the stress. Because I don't depend 100% on my income from work, I have more flexibility in choosing which assignments I take as opposed to staying in a dead end position that pays well. The key is to find a comfortable mix of poker and work and maybe even sell some nachos on the side like Jackie.

Lesson 3: Promote Yourself

Jackie Moon is a good singer and an okay basketball player, but he's a master promoter. When he needs to sell tickets to a game, he gives the fans a show they couldn't miss by agreeing to wrestle a bear after the game. I already explained how this doesn't go as planned, but you have to give the guy an 'A' for effort. Even though he gets mauled, he did sell the tickets.

As a poker player, I can do more to promote myself. I'm not about to fight a bear any time soon, but my appearances on podcasts, my Twitch stream, and my presence on social media helps me to get more writing gigs. It also helps to be somewhat known when I am looking to sell action.

If I spend less time actually playing poker, I can do more of these things to increase my public profile. Shameless self-promotion leads to more variance-free income, which in turn leads to happier semi-pro poker players.

Lesson 4: Try New Strategies

When basketball doesn't go well for Jackie, he's not afraid to try out some hare-brained ideas to improve his team's play. Once he decides to have his players wear eye-liner to frighten the opposing team. When his team is losing badly in one game, he's knocked unconscious and has a dream about a brand new play called the alley-oop, which he then 'invents' in this fictional tale. Who knows? Maybe the idea to try a cold four-bet bluff came to somebody in a dream.

As a professional poker player, I depended on tried and true strategies that I used to make my meager income. As a semi-pro, I can take more risks and even some hare-brained ideas of my own to see what works. The downside of this has much less of a negative impact if I am not depending on the money for expenses. As a semi-pro, I can be much more aggressive with ambitious bluffs and thin value bets in spots where I have previously been scared money. By getting comfortable with some of the more 'outside of the box' strategies, I will eventually increase my profitability.

Lesson 5: Go with the Flow

Jackie Moon dreams of playing basketball for a living, but because of his promotion skills, he gets offered a job as the Marketing Director of the NBA. I really like playing poker, but if my involvement with the game leads me in a different direction such as a full-time writer or something else besides actually playing, then I am willing to go with it.

Having a full time off-the-felt job in the poker industry while playing on the side may actually be the Holy Grail of semi-professional poker, now that I think about it.

Conclusion

We constantly hear about serious poker players taking the leap to turn pro. The idea of this scares even some successful players who have made many millions of dollars from encouraging others to do the same because they know how hard dealing with variance can be.

Maybe if we heard more stories of people turning semi-pro, the transition would be a lot easier. Fewer players would be in debt, and the poker community as a whole would be a lot happier. Or at least fewer of us would find ourselves calling out for spumoni.

^{Image (Semi-Pro): imdb.com}

Want to stay atop all the latest in the poker world? If so, make sure to get PokerNews updates on your social media outlets. Follow us on Twitter and find us on both Facebook and Google+!

• Tags

  cash game strategytournament strategybankroll managementmental gamepsychology

Former poker player and now quiz showchampion Alex Jacob has shown his abilities on the quiz show Jeopardy! Ona couple of occasions. He is the 2015 Tournament of Champions victor – in whichhe took down a cool $250,000 (along with his $151,802 for originally winning onthe show) – and was one of the leaders of the Team Tournament this year on theshow. It seems that Jacob likes to keep his skills honed as, most recently, hetargeted another online trivia show and came out a big winner.

Taking Down the HQ Jackpot

For a little over a year, the onlinetrivia game HQ has been growing its audience by leaps and bounds. With thisgrowth has come an increase in the prizes that the site gives away, loads ofcash and sometimes even other prizes for their competitors. Literally hundredsof thousands of people come together online daily and battle it out for theseprizes.

Of late, HQ has been awarding some of thebiggest prizes in its existence. Called “Jackpot” games, the players have theoption to resign from the game at a certain point – and are awarded a smallcash prize for their efforts – or they can continue onward to reach a bigger prize.The prize on Monday night was $125,000 and the players had to answer 25straight questions to be able to grab a piece of the pie.

Poker Semi Pro Poker

At the end of the questions on Monday night, six players remained in the game and were awarded prizes of just over $20,000. While this wasn’t the largest prize ever given to a single player on the site (earlier this year a singular player earned a $100,000 payday), the $20K was a pretty nice chunk of change. But, since everyone in HQ uses on-screen nicknames, the winners weren’t known…unless you happened on a Twitter conversation later that evening.

Fellow Jeopardy Champion Outs Jacob

Jacob was asked over his Twitter feed by afellow Jeopardy! Champion, Jackie Fuchs (also known to many as JackieFox, the former bassist for the groundbreaking 70s all-female band TheRunaways), whether he was the one who had earned the prize on HQ. As you cansee, Jacob was coy about the answer but then almost all but confirmed it:

Joueur De Poker Semi Professionnel

Jacob has been very open about how his formerlife as a poker professional prepared him for the travails of Jeopardy! and,perhaps, dealing with the rapid-fire questions on HQ. “Themost challenging aspect was probably just dealing mentally with the high stakesand the knowledge that I could win the tournament if I played well,” he statedto Variety after winning the Tournament of Champions in 2015. “The onething I had going for me is that I’ve played for a lot of money on national TVbefore. The thing that makes ‘Jeopardy’ different than poker, though, is thatthere’s always another poker tournament, but you only get one Tournament ofChampions.”

Poker Semi Pro Wrestling

While Jacob has been notable for his performances in the trivia arena, his achievements arguably paled in comparison to another Jeopardy! alum and a Las Vegas denizen, sports bettor James Holzhauer. Holzhauer went on a 33-game run this summer on the popular syndicated show, earning $2,464,216. It was Holzhauer’s aggressive approach to the game that has had many people reexamining the strategies and philosophies of Jeopardy! and whether players with a little less concern for risk have an advantage on the program.

Semi Professional Poker Player

While many might not think $20,000 is all that much, in the world of HQ it is a sizeable chunk of money. Jacob has also shown that he’s still got the skills that carried him to the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions victory. How long might it be until Jacob takes on Holzhauer – and, of course, other champions – in a solo match?