However, it’s January, and this is potentially my only income for the year.” To continue playing, I also have to pay for hotels and airfare. I’m actually making zero dollars right now from writing, which has never happened before. But financially, it did not change my life because I’m on leave from The New Yorker. Winning $84,000 in a single poker tournament - does that change your life? Your day? What was that to you? I know players who don’t even have an apartment and travel year round. Last year, when I made the transition to professional play, I traveled maybe eight months of the year in total.

If you really want to, you can be playing all the time. People underestimate just how expensive it is, and how time consuming. But I actually made more like $10,000, because of all the tournaments where I bought in and did not cash. People can see online, “Wow, she won a quarter of a million dollars!” Which I did last year. But then you might play 20 tournaments in a row, each of which has a buy-in of $2,000 to $5,000, and you don’t cash in any of them. In one tournament, you can win $200,000 - an insane amount of money. If you’re a tournament player, you have to be ready to not win any money for a long time. It’s actually very expensive and very difficult. Now that you’re a professional poker player, are you just rolling in it all the time? Here’s how her winnings have changed her life - and how they haven’t. That win gave her the confidence to put her book on hold and start touring on the pro circuit, which she has done for the past year. At 2018’s PCA national championship, Konnikova beat out 290 competitors for $84,600 in prize money, plus a $30,000 package to enter a future tournament. Within months, though, she was winning - big. in psychology - learned the game as research for her latest book, The Biggest Bluff, which comes out later this year. Instead, the author and New Yorker writer - who also has a Ph.D. When Maria Konnikova took up poker for the first time in 2017, she wasn’t in it for the money.

Online poker winner