A former Boeing worker has taken his skills to the poker table, tried his luck, and his gamble has paid off like he never could have imagined. The worker, Adam Harrell, joined Boeing right out of the University of Illinois in 2006 to work on the task of developing software for the F-18 Super Hornet. Harrell was not a fan of being confined in a cubicle at Boeing so he decided to walk away from a promising career and try his luck in the world of poker. Harrell decided to start a full-time career as an online poker player and had this to say about leaving a job with security:

“I’d saved up some money and I figured what better time is there to take a chance on something than when you’re young. I didn’t want to find myself sitting in a cubicle 20 years later asking myself, ‘What if?’”

One of the main reasons Harrell decided to try his luck in the online poker world was because of a hall mate at the University of Illinois. His hall mate pulled down a cool $120,000 playing in an online tournament and Harrell thought to himself “Why not me?” Harrell’s first exposure to the game of poker came with hall and roommates in low ante hands but it turned him into a student of the game. Harrell realized the more he studied the game of poker the more it is not a recreational exercise but a thinking man’s game. Harrell added the following about playing the game the right way:

“You have to be in control of your emotions. If I’m having a bad streak, I take off the rest of the day to clear my mind before I come back. And if I’m on a good streak, I know it’s going to end.”

The typical poker work day for Harrell begins round 5:30pm and lasts until roughly 4:00am where he is playing in online tournaments against people from South Korea, Europe, South Americaand the United States. Harrell says that the majority of his competition is from the Continental United States of America. Harrell’s worst day saw him lose $7,000 while his best day saw him win close to $10,000. Harrell would not directly discuss his finances or how much money he has actually won in total since playing poker full-time. All Harrell had to say was that he was ‘doing ok.’

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