Can a professional player operate without internal motivation, just for money?

Is it essential to like poker? or can we succeed without us liking it?

Strange way to ask the question, try playing any game you don't like. As for the title of the topic, playing for money is the motivation behind it.

It may seem strange, but it's not about me, I like poker and I also like to win money, I ask it to find out if there is a case of a professional player who doesn't like poker but does it to earn money and then invest it in something else, thank you very much for answering and greetings from Argentina!!!

oh, thats tough one tbh. I am playing for 9 years already and at the start of my journey i liked to play a lot. But now sometimes i play just because i need, it is my job. I still like it but sometimes i think i do not want to play for 10-14 hours straight

absolutista2021 said:

Is it essential to like poker? or can we succeed without us liking it?

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Poker, especially tournaments, are very long events, so if you don't like it, you'll spend almost 7 or 8 hours suffering in a normal tournament...
I believe you need to enjoy it so you can even think about studying game situations and seeking self-improvement...

Of course, you can succeed at things you have to do to make money - even if you hate them.

But enjoying your work always helps. Poker is no different from, say, day trading or sports betting in that regard.

Nope. If u don't like & enjoy something, u don't work hard on it & the best results doesn't come. Better find something that u enjoy working on.

This is a very interesting question. I would say this: if a person needs money to live and poker is an opportunity to earn the income necessary to support themselves, the motivation will be the money itself, and nothing else matters.

I can’t truly answer the question because I’m not a professional player. I think if you don’t enjoy what you are doing then you won’t be doing it very long, maybe you save enough money to invest and you try doing something else for a living. A lot of professionals make lots of money outside of the game itself but are still involved with poker, like they write books, do training videos, do analysis, etc. playing poker just for the money would be such a grind, it takes so much money for the travel, food, hotel, tournament buy ins, you have to constantly have enough for all your bills, medical treatments, all that stuff, I think it’s just super hard to do this for a living so I give a lot of respect to the pros that can.

For lots of players poker is a job, and just like other jobs people get sick of doing the same job every day.

They may enjoy playing a game with their buddys, but getting 100 games in day after day is not as enjoyable for them.