Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner: Side Jobs and the Internet Economy
Such a muddy line between
The things you want
And the things you have to do
–Sheryl Crow, “Leaving Las Vegas”
Over eighty thousand pounds! I knew, didn’t I know I knew? Malabar came in all right. If I ride my horse till I’m sure, then I tell you, Bassett, you can go as high as you like. Did you go for all you were worth, Bassett?
–D. H. Lawrence, “The Rocking Horse Winner”
Some of you might have wondered why my participation in the blogosphere fell off so quickly and dramatically. The answer is that I was teaching myself to play poker.
You cannot survive, at least in Orange County, California, just on the salary a teaching assistant in the humanities receives for half-time work. This is a shame, because when you’re not doing your teaching, you’re supposed to be researching and writing your seminar papers, and then reading for your exams, and then writing your dissertation.
When I made the decision to enter graduate school in 2003, the situation was a little less bleak. For one thing, the average price of gasoline in the OC was $1.80 per gallon. It is now at $4.60 and climbing. The public transportation system in Orange County and Los Angeles is exceptionally poor. There is a metro, but it takes extraordinary luck to find that both starting point and destination are anywhere near to it. This is partly because it was run mostly through the poorest parts of Los Angeles, I imagine to save on building costs and hassles from neighborhood groups. There is a bus system, but it requires a very time-consuming series of changes and runs infrequently. This part of the country is dominated by highways: over-crowded, slow-moving highways. My fianceé’s job currently has her staying in a hotel in Riverside, some 45 minutes away, and living in Long Beach, 35 minutes away. When we move in together next fall, the likelihood is that I’ll have a commute of my own, along with a host of new fees for parking.
In 2003, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had not yet had the opportunity to demonstrate his deep commitment to higher education — each passing year has seen a new budget impasse and new cuts affecting the University of California. The university has responded as it had to: raising rents and fees, cutting disbursements. When I completed my exams, I was awarded a standard fellowship covering all fees (additional to tuition, which is paid by the teaching assistantship). That summer, the fellowship was canceled, and the quarterly fee almost doubled. The fees are slated to increase again this year.
Finally, the university is no longer in a position to guarantee teaching assistantships for all of normative time to degree. There are certainly ways around this — the faculty has been incredibly good at getting funding for teaching programs that can support graduate students in their seventh year and after — but the bottom line is that for most of the people I know who are writing their dissertations, there is no way to avoid significant financial risk if you are entirely dependent on the university. This has not become a union issue because it’s not malfeasance on the part of the administration; it’s the result of politicians reducing funding for higher education, without the private contributions that help compensate other disciplines.
All of this might still be survivable if your car didn’t break down, requiring expensive repairs, but it does. Or if you never traveled, but you do when your friends are getting married. So what fills the gaps?
The Optimizer Economy
Yes, the optimizer economy. This is the entire economy that has grown up during the Information Age (with its boons for self-promotion: cheap desktop publishing, the Internet, etc), targeted at parents who want to give their children an edge. The test prep companies that have been around forever, such as Kaplan or The Princeton Review, now compete with all kinds of small brick-and-mortar startups, some managed out of a home, usually offering comprehensive tutoring in all subjects in addition to test prep. Beyond this there are any number of private tutoring relationships begun through referrals and emails forwarded to graduate student listservs.
The parents have sympathetic motives, the kids often appreciate the attention, and the tutors get to teach. It can work out wonderfully. During the summers I teach test prep and ESL at a boarding school, and that’s a terrific opportunity, because the kids have a rigorous schedule and learn a great deal over five weeks. Teachers have the support and structure they need to get through a real curriculum, and they have creative control over their curricula.
Unfortunately, the day-to-day reality of these part-time tutoring jobs is very different. If you teach for one of the big test prep companies, you are teaching from a book, which is a minor bummer. The major problem is that most of the companies are incredibly exploitative of their workforce, charging twice (or more) per hour what the tutor or teacher receives. In addition, many of them are oriented towards parents, because the parents pay, rather than considering what would be optimal for students. As an example, quantifiable lessons like vocabulary words are emphasized over the much slower and wayward progress of a standard liberal arts education. Yesterday Johnny learned fifty vocabulary words, today he passed a test on them, boom! Learning! This type of lesson also gets around the problem that students aren’t in these enrichment programs very long on any given week, since they supplement regular school, sports, and the rest of the child’s responsibilities. This can also be a problem with individual tutoring: if a student doesn’t see the tutor very often, then progress is slow (e.g. one novel for a whole summer), the curriculum becomes erratic (affected too much by the academic concerns of that week), and the lessons don’t stick.
To sum up: the intensive institutional programs are good, and some individual tutoring relationships work out very well (at least, they’re no worse than harmless), but still the majority of side jobs mean working as basically a knowledge temp, with all the frustrations and disadvantages of any temping job. I chose something else.
No Limit
On a broad scale, what is interesting about poker is not the $5 million dollar televised games between the same 25 celebrities. Nor is it the World Series of Poker Main Event, where people invest a huge amount of money to play against thousands of other people, getting relatively bad odds unless they manage to sneak in via Internet poker promotions. The only real significance of the televised poker craze, as dozens of writers have pointed out, is that it helped to make the game well-respected and popular.
Playing regular cash poker in a casino is feasible, particularly in Las Vegas, but you need a lot of cash if you want to play for more than entertainment. That is, you need many thousands of dollars, because even though good players generally win money, on a given night it is quite possible to lose big instead. In California, you need even more, because the house’s percentage of every hand is vastly higher. That’s necessary because California casinos can’t use poker as a loss leader to attract gamblers who then try their hand at craps, baccarat, roulette, blackjack, sports betting, or the slots.
Economically, the interesting thing about poker is that it has become Internet wage labor, played for small stakes by vast numbers of people sitting at their computers, a lot of whom are now poker professionals in a meager sense.
The most profitable game is “no limit” Texas Hold ‘Em, for the intuitive reason that since there are no limits on betting, you can bet more when the odds are in your favor, and less when they are not. The game has a canon of about twelve books written by Dan Harrington (5), David Sklansky (3), Phil Gordon (2), Doyle Brunson (the infamous Super/System), and Barry Greenstein (Ace on the River). The canon takes a month of study, maybe two. I should note that as of last September I had never played Texas Hold ‘Em once in my entire life.
If you* sit down at a no-limit game and play only the very best possible hands, folding (refusing to bet) the rest, you will be dealt about five playable hands per hour in a live game. Online at one table, you will get about ten playable hands. However, once you get comfortable, you can usually play at least four tables simultaneously online, because you’re folding 83% of what you get and then waiting for the other players to finish the hand. That means you will get a hand favored to win more than once every two minutes. You will get aces or kings, the two best hands, about once every half hour. If you can just manage to win 60% of these hands, or if you win only half but bet more when you win then when you lose, your principal increases by 9% an hour, compounded every time you double your principal and can rise to higher stakes (so about once every twelve hours). Furthermore, by playing four tables, you do what you can’t do live, which is quarter your liability if an unlucky, unlikely card beats you. You get reduced to only 75% of your principal, rather than zero, and can if necessary immediately drop down to lower stakes.
If you had to cash out all of your winnings minus your principal investment, you’d be making better than minimum wage at $100, better than almost all tutoring wages at $800. If you can manage to invest or reach $1600, you stand to make better money than practically any professional-in-training who isn’t at the top of the capitalist food chain. (At a brick-and-mortar casino, this would almost certainly not be enough to make a living. Plus, rather than winning ten dollars at a time off loan adjusters playing before bed in Hamburg, you’d be playing broke retirees from the neighborhood who are spending more than they have in order to be out somewhere.) The Internet sites run every single day, 24 hours a day. It is a skill game, and of course it’s a skill learning to detect bluffs, learning when to stop betting a hand, and learning how to make your good hands seem weak to your opponents. But you only need to be about as good at poker as your local Little League coach is at baseball.
That is the new story: for some people it will be easier, more comfortable, and more sustainable than the other treading-water jobs, like restaurant jobs. This is perhaps what Hardt and Negri meant by the rise of “immaterial labor.” You’ll know one such person, then two, then five, who are sitting at home in the early afternoons, playing poker for money while listening to their record collection. They’ll take the time they have left for their passions — waiting, still waiting, for the miracle to come.
****
* Note: This “you” is a hypothetical you. Your mileage may vary. It usually does.
Lovely piece – good to read your writing again :-)
“…it was run mostly through the poorest parts of Los Angeles, I imagine to save on building costs and hassles from neighborhood groups.”
Also because that’s where the need is, I think. In Southern California, mass transit is generally seen as being for those who can’t afford a car.
Great post, one that hit home at quite a few points. An added problem I’ve found with one-on-one tutoring is that well-meaning and sometimes very nice parents and tutoring centers still have problems remembering that the tutors are not professionals with an indefinite reserve of hours to commit. This usually just means a few awkward phone calls with employers , but that can still be taxing.
“This has not become a union issue because it’s not malfeasance on the part of the administration; it’s the result of politicians reducing funding for higher education, without the private contributions that help compensate other disciplines.”
I agree that budget cuts are a huge factor in the university (and community college) system’s dire straights. But don’t administrators routinely make over $300,000 a year? Are they really doing 16 times more work than TAs (assuming a TA salary of 18K a year)? Are administrators receiving pay cuts as well?
Glad to hear you’ve been doing well at the tables. I have to admit, though, that, as a (fairly successful) poker player myself, as you know, I read things like
and
with some hesitation. In the first case especially because your hourly rate goes down (and thus your bankroll requirement goes up) for every additional table, and while you might increase your hourly rate every time you move up stakes, it won’t be proportionate to the increase in stakes since the game will be tougher.
I don’t mean to be patronizing, but I’m just thinking of my own experience and how long it took me to understand bankroll management and statistically significant hour rates, etc, how many times my good friend who got me into poker had to put my short term successes into perspective, how many times I got ahead of myself in terms of expectations after running good for a while, and probably how many times I was set back by tilting because I wasn’t winning at the rate I had convinced myself I could expect. The better you manage your expectations, the more you’ll profit both in the short and long term, and the more enjoyable you’ll find the game.
More importantly, I’m strongly convinced that treating poker as a job, especially as a solution to the gap between your income and your expenses, rather than as a sort of windfall or a hobby, is a bad idea, even if you’re consistently beating the game at a decent hourly rate. This is first of all because of the random nature of the game – even the best players will have sizable downstreaks, and the higher the stakes you play, the larger these streaks will be (and, again disproportionately so – i.e. higher in terms of both bb and dollars). You don’t ever want to put yourself in a position where you need a good session to pay your bills…especially because the more you need or expect a win, the harder it is to play with discipline.
In my own experience, a few summers ago I decided based on my hourly rate (over some 10,000’s of hands) that the best economic opportunity for me over that summer was to play full time. I hit a 300 bb downswing in the first week. Ended up recovering the 300 bb plus about 100 bb over the course of the summer, but I wasted a lot of hours and a lot of aggravation getting it back. Fortunately, I had a big enough bankroll to cover the loss, and I had previous profits and other savings to live off of during the downswing (otherwise I wouldn’t have risked playing full time in the first place), but I would definitely never plan to play full time over a summer again.
Anyway, I don’t know what kind of hourly rate you’re clearing – maybe you’re already making “better money than practically any professional-in-training who isn’t at the top of the capitalist food chain.” For all I know you’re already making more than I was. Just be careful managing your bankroll and your expectations as you move up levels. Play for the love of the game and let the money be a nice side-effect.
A great post, but the whole idea scares the shit out of me. As does poverty wages mopping the floor at Chili’s, or whatever.
I would simply turn tricks instead, but as I’m sure you know, you can’t get anywhere peeling or hooking in SoCal without investing money in a boob job up front.
That’s why I’m planning on just marrying rich instead.
NP, cheers!
tomemos, what you say is true, and I’d add that things like transportation time are usually not compensated at these side jobs. Obviously, they aren’t for 9-5 jobs either, but since the block of compensated time you’re spending is potentially much less, your effective wage can end up being something like half what you get per hour.
Girl Detective,
Where can I go to read more about that? In general, I’m very much in favor of flatter salary hierarchies, and support any kind of reform in that direction. Simultaneously, I do not believe that reducing administrative salaries would produce anything close to enough money to cover the deficits, nor do I think university executives should be compensated less than their counterparts in the business world. Otherwise you get a brain drain (precisely what you are getting in the humanities).
Sisyphus,
A good solution. For starters, you have excellent elocution; we English majors have hardly any trace of Cockney at all.
(Note to readers: I will try to explain the technical stuff in my response to surlacarte, but it will remain a bit technical. The abbreviation “BB” refers to the large forced bet that one player must contribute at the beginning of each hand, known as the “big blind.” The small blind is half the big blind. Bet amounts and “stack sizes” are determined by the size of the blinds.)
surlacarte,
There are a number of good points in your response, which I’ll tackle one by one.
First of all, my numbers are based on my own winnings. That said, I’ve cashed out frequently because the whole thing makes me very nervous, too. So I haven’t accumulated a huge stake to mess around with. That means an average win of 9BB per hour; for me, usually $4.50 per $50 table. That’s how much I’ve been cashing out.
Second, the discussion here is about side jobs. Nobody can become really dependent on any of these jobs, since tutoring can go through dry spells just as much as poker. I think it is very possible to play full time (there’s a whole discussion of people doing it in the poker book Take Me To The River), but not, as you say, without some kind of cushion.
Third, the swings in no limit poker are huge compared to the swings in limit poker. While a 300BB loss would mean shifting to a completely different set of low stakes tables, it’s not unusual to spend a while down 100BB in the course of a single session. The average expectation in limit poker is, by all accounts, 1BB per table per hour. There is no average expectation listed anywhere for big bet poker because it is so completely dependent on the skill of the player. You wouldn’t be surprised to be down 100BB, as I say, in the course of one playing session, but by the same token if you ended a whole summer only ahead 100BB, that would be the result of mediocre play. In limit, conversely, that’s a perfectly reasonable finish given some bad luck.
At least in my case, the biggest setbacks are the result of psychological responses to pressure. I am prone to playing too aggressively, as well as to making awful calls and to playing unprofitable games (such as tournaments and other variations of poker). The effect of inevitable so-called “bad beats” on my bankroll has been negligible compared to the effect of easily recognizable errors, many the result of fatigue or wishful thinking.
Oh, one more thing (which I’m getting straight out of Harrington on Cash Games) — playing multiple tables does not decrease your expectation or increase your bankroll requirements. It actually increases your expectation without increasing your bankroll requirements, because in theory you should have a positive expectation for any money you put in play. If some of your money is just lying fallow as a reserve, of course you can’t lose it right away, but as far as luck is concerned you can go through two buy-ins at one table just as easily as you can go through one buy-in at two tables. Of course, playing multiple tables does make it harder to keep all four gas tanks full up, but in my experience, being able to do that isn’t compensation enough.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any consistent lists of administrative salaries – I’m mainly going off of various press releases and my super best friend Marc Bousquet. And I absolutely agree that the overall budget needs to be addressed in addition to the salary hierarchy – but do we know how much reducing administrative salaries *would* help?
To really address equity between administrators and their business counterparts, I think we’d have to start discussing larger issues like outsourcing and the minimum wage, so I’ll leave it at this: out of curiosity, what would be the effects of a brain drain in administration? The current higher education system is bad for educators and bad for students; what exactly are administrators achieving? What if faculty took a larger role in university governance?
“Bad luck. That’s all it is. I pray in your life you will never find it runs in streaks. That’s what it does, that’s all it’s doing. Streaks. I pray it misses you. That’s all I want to say.”
—Shelley Levene in Glengarry Glen Ross
That’s what I meant. When you move up levels and the players get trickier, by the book play won’t be as profitable, and you’ll need to pay more attention to each table to maximize your win rate. Each table you add reduces your focus and the amount of information you can take in from a given table, thus your win rate/table. Obviously if you played exactly as well with 4 tables as with one, it shouldn’t effect your bankroll requirement and should short the length (in terms of time, rather than hands) of downswings.
$4.50/hour at 25 cent/50 cent sounds reasonable to me, but just don’t expect to t beat $1/$2 for the same rate. I would think you could find a discussion of reasonable BB/hr. rates on the 2+2 forums, though.
Anyway, you’re right in terms of side jobs. I think of the tutoring in a similar way to the poker, as extra cash rather than as a solution to a financial crisis. If I were actually falling short of my expenses (say, when my teaching eventually runs out), I’d be forced to find something more stable. I certainly wouldn’t want it to be poker. Though I think tutoring could be pretty stable with some active searching for clients (contacting schools, posting ads wherever you can post them for free, etc.). There’s definitely enough demand out there. As in any industry, with self-employment you trade job security for better wages and more control over the work environment.
Not that that excuses the problems with university funding and the academic labor market….
Bummer about the teaching assistant stuff. If only the world could see that teachers are invaluable resource and need to be treated better. I also enjoy poker and your info on online poker play is very informative. I going to look into doing some multi-table poker play. As far as side jobs go, gambling is rather rough. You might want to look into some other side jobs that could potentially make you some more money. Good luck with your professional career.