My first venture into the role of professional gambling was when I played blackjack. I actually made as much money playing local poker games prior to that but I could hardly consider myself professional seeing as I had a full-time job as well. My definition of professional is when you make your living at something entirely. Blackjack made me a living but it was a mediocre one and the main problem with it was always in trying to evade detection and get enough money over the table to make a decent wage.
Most of the time the variance was so bad that it seemed hardly worth it! When you only have a 1% edge most of the time then you are basically flipping coins but with a slight edge. We used other techniques as well which probably gave us a combined return on investment of around 3-4% which is huge in blackjack. But even that kind of return is still small and the losing runs will be long.
Online poker for me surpassed blackjack and it wasn’t even close. I could play more hours, play at home, not have to worry about detection and the career was not under threat. Even though you couldn’t multi-table at the time that I first played, it was still far faster than playing a live game and the $10-$20 action was very soft and I was making $40/hour at that level comfortably. For me there was no comparison even as long ago as 2001 comparing playing blackjack with online poker and even though the online poker scene has become far tougher recently, it is still a no brainer.
