With tough times on Wall Street and shrinking bonuses traders and former financial high flyers are tuning to gambling as a supplemental income.
According to a piece in Details, the turmoil in financial markets has given rise to a new breed of online poker player...retrenched ex-bankers, or still employed bankers looking to supplement their now non-existent bonuses.
And the strong skill base correlation between the two pursuits means that most of them are taking to poker like ducks to water. In fact, wall street firms have been known in the past to look favorably on potential employees with a poker playing pedigree. One firm, Susquehanna International Group give new recruits a copy of gambling technique guide 'Getting the Best of It', as assigned reading.
Reading plays, understanding probability and a healthy swagger are essential in both poker and playing the markets. Of course the key difference is that with one you are playing with someone else's money and the other usually involves your own stake on the line. But no matter...ex-bankers are flooding Vegas and Full Tilt in growing numbers.
From one ex- banker: "There is not as much immediate upside on Wall Street as there used to be," he says. "After things got bad I upped my poker hours significantly." While another, who has taken up online poker as full time job notes that it is a lot easier than investment banking - as well as being more lucrative in the current climate.
So next time you're playing ta Full Tilt, consider that there's a good possibility at least one of the players at your table is ex Lehman, Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley.
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