Young Online Poker Careers
16th November, 2007
Few Northwestern students will be lucky to ever make the kind of money they're making. And they're unemployed.
Joey Michael and Chip Ferguson have no issue with money, they are minted and they made it all from playing high stakes online poker. They both live in Austin, Texas in a million dollar home that they own jointly it has a large pool, hot tub, six bedrooms, seven televisions with 5,300 square feet. They are playing 40 hours plus a week.
"It's like my full-time job, but it doesn't really feel like work," Ferguson said. "I watch TV most of the time while I'm playing and I can stop and start whenever I want. So it doesn't really feel like work, which is the main reason why I chose not to get a 'real job.'"
Ferguson and Michael began playing online poker freshman year, when they each put $50 into a Party Poker account. They first viewed it as a way to earn some spending money, but by junior year, they had realized it could be extremely profitable and started playing seriously. They read books on strategy and began playing more often, to the point where it distracted them from their schooling.
"I had a hard time motivating myself," Ferguson said. "It's like, every hour I study for a test is a couple hundred dollars I could make playing poker."
"School just wasn't important to me," Michael said. "And I didn't really have the motivation to keep my GPA really high; I mean I was making more money than most kids my age."
Ferguson was planning on going to law school but when he realized he could make as much money as his dad who is a partner in a law firm from just playing poker.
Both Ferguson and Michael said they invested a large portion of their earnings, and as seniors started a business of their own. They run sngicons.com, an online poker training site.
"There's a lot of money right now in (poker) training sites because people lose a lot of money," Ferguson said. "We basically take videos of us playing, and people pay to see them."
