The Reason I Quit Poker
I want to start off with saying thank you for all the best wishes! I think there are many people who read this blog for the first time, so I will start at the start to try to explain the situation in the best way I can. I started playing poker and streaming because I really liked the idea of building a community, creating a place of support for people, connecting with like-minded people and together do cool stuff. I always believed having 5 viewers that care about each other and support each other, is greater than 500 who don’t. I still believe that was the right idea, but it didn’t work as intended.
Missing the fulfillment
Many will say that I should be proud of what I have achieved, that I did great. Reading all the messages I received, that should indeed be the case, but it never felt that way. I am happy that I have been able to help people with what I did and I will try to continue to do so, but to be able to continue to do so.. I have to get to a better place myself (This is the essence of why I made the decision to quit). If you look at just the titles of all blogs I have written, you see that constant up and down trend. Which is normal as life is full of ups and downs, but you also see a consistent question arising of: “What am I doing it for?”. It just shows that throughout those years, it has never been bringing me too much fulfillment. Getting huge scores is fun, but only for a day or maybe a week and then you realize nothing actually changed. I am super big on respect though, so for me all the fulfillment had to come from building the community, growing relationships and respect with that, but that fulfillment never came.
I was streaming fulltime for 2 years, 7 days a week and when not streaming I was creating content or engaging in the community. That led to me partnering up with partypoker. Various people have been asking me how that was, to be really fair with you.. I had higher expectations. I was hoping I was finally gonna have that team vibe and together do cool stuff (which was one of my goals as I mentioned). Unfortunately, that never really happened. Whenever you are part of a team, you always have some kind of expectation and I personally feel like I tried my best to make it work. So I am disappointed with how it turned out and it made me ask myself: "if this is ‘the top’, then what am I doing all this for? Because this is it and it ain’t it.”
The flaw in approach of my stream
The idea of building a core and building on top of that was nice. I saw the core as a group of people that supported each other and something people would love to be part of, but there was one flaw in it. The flaw is that the quit rate in poker is super high. People get heavily invested in it for 6-12 months and then they mostly move on. If you look at the crushers of the game, well you need to love the game to become a crusher as it costs way too much energy to become one. Most of them also move on, but then after a few years. It takes time to build good relationships and create that core, so the issue is that the time is not there. By saying what I thought at all times (mostly with good intent of wanting to help), by sharing the good AND the bad sides of the journey… I sacrificed a lot of potential viewers. Because the majority of people come to Twitch to have a good time, not to be reminded of their own flaws and trying to improve at them.
When people move on from poker, they mostly stop watching poker streams, they stop watching poker Youtube video’s, they stop opening the discord servers and basically they get out of the poker loop. This caused the core that I was trying to build, was constantly crumbling and I was constantly into the beginning phase of building a fundament. If you don’t believe me, just open a highlight on my Youtube channel and look at the chat. The massive majority of the people aren’t around anymore and I don’t blame them, I am actually happy if they do what makes them happy. My goal with the community was just bigger than just poker, I wanted it to be a place of support for whatever journey you are on and hoped that vision would connect the community. I don’t know if this is a poker community thing (it being very individual) or whether this is the case with everything, but either way it caused me to also not find that fulfillment in the community aspect because (whether it be the case or not) it felt like I was doing something wrong that was causing people to turn their back to me. I am aware this is my own issue and I am super thankful for everyone who has supported me along the way and I can’t expect more than that. If I was feeding off other things, this would not have been an issue. But what you may notice now is that I am investing a lot of resources into all of this and the return on most fronts is currently nowhere near equal and I don’t see much potential in it changing.
Money to compensate for it all?
When you miss the fulfillment, the joy.. it becomes really tough to continue doing it. Many people take money as compensation for it, I believe doing what you love doing is more important than the money, but let’s assume money would compensate it. I talked about this before, but many still assume poker streamers make bank. Truth is that that is just not the case. I am not going to name exact numbers out of privacy reasons of the other streamers, but just believe me that majority don’t make anywhere near a living off Twitch alone and thus rely on sponsorships. Sponsorships in poker are scarce, many companies don’t want to tie themselves to gambling as it still has a bad stigma. The main sponsors that streamers rely on are pokersites, because of this reason many are trying so hard to please them. It’s super hard to make a good living off poker while doing fulltime content creation. You sacrifice a lot of EV in poker for a little bit of ev in content creation. This was all okay for me at first, because I enjoyed it and I thought there was a lot of future ev. But the future EV in terms of fulfillment appeared to be way lower than I thought and the future ev of money also appeared way lower than I initially thought. It takes so much time and energy to increase that pay, that it becomes not worth it. It becomes a bad business decision. So if on a personal level (fulfillment, enjoyment etc) it’s not the best for you and also on a business level it is not the best path, you may want to reconsider your options if you have the ambitions and goals that I have.
Exploring new paths
When something is not quite it and even if it is good, I think you should always continue striving for better. It is risky to do so, it would have been easy to accept the position I was in and settle with it, but that’s not who I am. I have tried a lot of things to try to make it worthwhile and find a way to continue, but once you start exhausting your options you may just have to come to the conclusion that it’s not the best path for you.
As you may know I currently work together with Raise Your Edge, I really enjoy the marketing aspect of things, the content creation and the creative process behind it. So moving forward I will be focusing on building my own agency. It will start with determining the market I want to target, which will mainly be start-ups and companies that are currently not digitally relevant. 2020 has shown how important it is to be versatile and be digitally relevant, so I hope to be able to help people in that process. As skills progress and more specialists join the team, we can start taking it a step further and play in a different league. I will be documenting this journey, showing the behind the scenes, the decisions that go into it and by doing so help and also inspire people and get in touch with like-minded. I am looking forward to seeing where this path leads, hopefully to more fulfillment, happiness and fruits (only OG’s will understand that reference ;) ). If you want to follow me on that journey, I recommend to follow my new Instagram @dwstevie. Let’s keep movin’.
