Jarrow man living the dream

If you have spent any time playing online poker, you have likely spent some time daydreaming of quitting your job and becoming a full-time professional poker player. It is a pipe-dream for most people but sometimes you need these little fantasies to help you get through the day and to relieve the tension a little. However, there are obviously people who are able to cut it as fulltime professional poker players so it is not as if it is a mission impossible, it is just unlikely. Further hope has been handed out to all the poker dreamers with the news that Gareth Walker, a 28 year old web designer from Tyneside in the North of England has given it all up to follow his dream.

This decision is not something that Walker has rushed into as he has been playing poker on a semi-professional basis for the past 5 years. In that time he managed to pick up around £200,000 in winnings, which isn’t a bad haul. That equates to a salary of around £40,000 and this is a figure that would please many people in the United Kingdom so it is not as if he is basing his new career plan on a complete flight of fancy.

One big win made the decision

A big win at the PokerStars UK and Ireland event in Nottingham, where he claimed £109,000, was the final factor in deciding to go for broke and go all in for his poker dreams. This one win more than doubled his earnings in the past 5 years so without it the move would be far riskier but it does show that if you can get a major win every so often, it can make up for a number of dry spells. Poker players have to be prepared to take the rough with the smooth and there is certainly the need to look at the long-term picture when it comes to earnings and income.

Web design is a good fall-back position

A role as a web designer does give Walker a bit more freedom than other posts and he has his winnings up until now to fall back on. As long as he hasn’t squandered these winnings, he should be able to give himself a reasonable amount of freedom to see if he can live up to his dream of playing poker for a living. If it doesn’t quite work out, web sites will still need to be designed so he may be able to return to his former job but obviously he and his friends will be hoping that this isn’t the case.

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