Last summer, Ben Foster quit his $110,000-a-year job as a senior product manager at eBay to play online poker full-time. In the months leading up to his decision, the 28-year-old with a degree in statistics had been tracking his winnings on a detailed spreadsheet. After checking and rechecking the numbers, he came to the conclusion that he could earn more money playing poker than working at eBay. Plus, his wife was pregnant with their second child, and he was needed around the house. Foster decided to become a stay-at-home poker dad.
His in-laws thought he’d lost his mind – this is no way to support a family. Foster had what to him seemed a perfectly reasonable rationale: “There are a lot of suckers out there.” And his spreadsheet proved it. Over the course of hundreds of games, simultaneously playing eight of them per hour on PartyPoker.com, he averaged $15 a game. (Despite all the talk of poker bots, his earnings held steady.) If he played 20 hours a week, that $15 per game would translate to about $125,000 a year for a part-time job. The in-laws were still skeptical.
Nine months later, Foster dutifully sits in front of two flat-panel displays in his sparsely furnished home office in San Jose, California. On his bookshelf, Caro’s List of Poker Tells is crammed next to Baby Names Now. It’s 9:30 on a Tuesday night, and his wife is upstairs trying to get the little ones to sleep. Foster logs on to the PartyPoker Web site. “Open for business,” he says. At this hour, there should be a good number of drunk and/or inexperienced players online. There’s always the chance that more sophisticated opponents will join in – rumors that a poker-savvy Google executive recently quit to play full-time online make him blanch. But so far, his average take still hovers in the acceptable range, $10 per game.
Not that it’s been an easy nine months. “It’s nearly impossible to play eight poker games at once when your 4-week-old son is screaming in the background,” Foster admits. As a result, he hasn’t logged as many hours as he had planned. To make up for it, he spent a recent weekend in Reno. A group of his former eBay colleagues wanted to chill out in the hotel room and play some “friendly” poker. For Foster, it was the perfect opportunity to win some money from people who questioned his decision to leave the corporate world. But before long he was in the mood for higher stakes – and easier marks – so he decided to head to the casino by himself. He couldn’t stop thinking about his wife and kids back home. He wasn’t there to have fun – this was his job. After playing for 24 hours straight, Foster came out $2,700 ahead.
Now, back in the condo on a Tuesday night, he’s settling into his chair and feeling the rush of the game. His biggest fear – that he’d stop liking poker – hasn’t come to pass. And unlike working in an office, he says, the game is always exciting. Even tonight, when he has a bad run and makes only $10 in his first hour, it’s still better than holding a tech job. When his wife peeks in and asks how he’s doing, he shakes his head. It hasn’t been good, he says. But the kids are asleep, and, statistically speaking, there’s a sucker born every minute.
– Joshua Davis
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Daddy’s Feeling Lucky
