10 Years A Poker Player - A Retrospective
For most of my life, I’ve suffered from Impostor Syndrome. The greatest credit I can give to Poker is that it helped me finally shed this malady.
In December 2025, I completed 10 years of playing poker for a living. I played Texas Hold’em cash games online in India. That meant clicking buttons at a desk for hours, playing 6-8 (sometimes more) tables simultaneously, making thousands of decisions per session.
This is a look back on my journey in this crazy, beautiful game as a professional.
The Fully DIY Path
In these ten years, I took exactly one coaching session. One hour. That’s it.
This isn’t a brag by any means. I’m not claiming it’s the optimal path. It almost certainly isn’t. But it’s how I tend to do things - the do-it-yourself mentality. For example, it’s only recently that I realised that I can get a cup of coffee by requesting my wife to make me one.
I had an offer to join a stable. For those who don’t know, a stable is essentially a backing arrangement: someone funds your play, you get coaching and support, and you split the profits. It made sense on paper. But it didn’t align with what I wanted from life. I wanted autonomy, but it felt more like a job.
So I started grinding from the lowest stakes - blinds of INR 1/3 or a buyin of INR 300. Now I play blinds of 500/1k on a 100k buyin table.
The Roller Coaster Inside
The mindset piece of poker was a wild ride.
This wasn’t my first time taking a risky career choice. Before poker, I’d been an entrepreneur, so I understood risk. I knew the path isn’t linear. But poker is a different beast.
In entrepreneurship, you can at least tell yourself a story about building something. In poker, the feedback loop is brutal, immediate, and often misleading. You can play perfectly and lose. You can play terribly and win. Every session feels like a verdict. Every downswing feels existential. And your brain has to somehow make peace with that.
Many nights I would lie awake wondering whether I’m good enough for the game. Did I make the right choice? Eventually, you have to find stability within, not from results.
So as my career progressed, I found myself spending more time on mindset than on strategy. I hired a mindset coach. Fun fact: Out of all the sessions that I had with my mindset coach, there was only one that I had during an upswing. Every other time was when I was downswinging bad.
The Loneliness
From the outside, life looked incredible: freedom, income, flexible hours, no corporate constraints. But at 2 a.m., when you’ve lost the equivalent of someone’s annual salary in a single session, it can get very lonely.
Who do you call? Who understands?
Poker isolates you inside your own mind. The swings are too abstract and too intense for most people to relate to. It’s only a small group of your poker friends who really get it.
You can’t go to your wife and say, “Hey, I just lost a few lakhs, but it’s fine, it’s just variance.” She didn’t sign up for that kind of anxiety. After a certain point, I stopped sharing my results with her altogether. Compartmentalising became my most important skill. I turned it into a personal KPI: my wife should never be able to tell whether I’ve had a great day or a terrible one. I didn’t want the variance of my profession to become the variance of our home.
The Conflict
I was always conflicted about poker as a way to make money. It's a zero-sum game. Every rupee I won was a rupee someone else lost. It was there when I started. It is still there today.
Eventually, I made peace with it by reframing what poker actually gave me. It forced me to become disciplined, analytical, and emotionally resilient. It allowed me to provide for my family. It created freedom.
It also made me feel ready to become a father. If I could handle this level of uncertainty and responsibility, maybe I could handle raising a human being too.
It allowed me to spend so much time with my baby after he was born. The flexibility that this unconventional career gave me, i.e. being present for those early months without restrictions, was immense. I’m forever grateful to Poker for that.
The PROUDEST MOMENT
My parents didn’t really understand much about Poker when I jumped into it. They were apprehensive, as most Indian parents would be. But they trusted me. Or at least they made peace with it.
They fully embraced it when they saw me on TV during the Poker Sports League (PSL). Appearing on TV was a validation that very few other things could have given. Personally, I didn’t care about it. But my parents were ecstatic. That I did care about. (It helped that MS Dhoni and other celebs had started appearing in poker TV ads.)
Becoming a better version of myself
I remember using a catch-phrase, “Main to chal lunga.” i.e. Whatever it is, I’m up for it. I would be ready for every plan, every outing. That’s not the best strategy if you’re trying to make it in a volatile career. When you have absolute control of your schedule, ironically, less gets done.
Over time, I learnt the concept of Discipline Is Freedom. Also, life threw some curveballs, which forced me to focus on actually making money.
So I started a three-month grind challenge. If I could finish it, there would be an outsized reward at the end of it. I told everyone that I am going underground.
At that time, I was a smoker. After the first month, I looked at my results and realised I wasn’t playing my best. I could feel smoking had a lot to do with it. So I quit smoking. This book helped.
Around the same time, I joined a gym for the first time in my life. And that’s a habit that has stayed with me till today.
The Year Everything Stopped Making Sense
At the end of what had been my best year financially, I felt empty. I wondered, “Now what?”
At the start of the year, I had set a monetary goal. Upon reaching it, I realised that I didn’t really feel anything special. Sure, there was more money in the bank. But was I happier? Or maybe I was just overthinking it. Honestly, I didn’t really know what was going on with my brain.
So I spent the next year stepping back. I read a lot of books. Ancient wisdom. Proven philosophies. Memoirs. Science. I was trying to answer what this life is about, and where I fit in it.
That didn’t give me all the answers. But it gave me a couple of frameworks to lean on in uncertain situations. One is Process over Goal that became the theme of this blog. Second, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. That also inspired my son’s name - Eckarth.
The Coaching Chapter
Somewhere along the way, I started coaching other players for two reasons. First, I wanted to diversify beyond just playing. Second, I wanted to meet more people.
Through coaching, I met CEOs, college deans, government officials, techies, businessmen, and parents who wanted to introduce their teenagers to structured thinking through poker. I saw my knowledge through someone else's eyes. The things I took for granted: reading situations, managing risk, staying rational under pressure, were exactly what these people were hungry to learn. And I realised, I was great at it.
The Impostor Syndrome that I talked about earlier? Coaching had a lot to do with fixing that.
The Catapults
Looking back, growth in poker was never gradual. It came in sudden jumps where everything suddenly shifted up a level.
The first was PSL. Getting selected, learning tournament play, and binking a few big scores following that.
The second was the three-month grind challenge. Going underground, quitting smoking, joining the gym. That period compressed years of discipline into a few months. That helped me both mentally and financially.
The third was coaching. It made me a better player. I was forced to look at every spot much more deeply so that I could explain it to my students in the simplest way possible. I had a visible marker of how far I had come since starting out.
The Road Ahead
Through all of this, a new path has begun to take shape: The Little Rationals. A new chapter I’m building now, that is a culmination of all of my life paths, including Poker, so far.
Poker gave me freedom, resilience, time with my family, and a deeper understanding of myself. It also gave me loneliness, doubt, and existential questions. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Through this process, I became someone I respect. And someone who isn’t shy to admit it.
I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. But for me, it was exactly the journey I needed.
That’s the real lesson for me: the pursuit of a worthy goal and being willing to live with the trade-offs that come with it.
