High-stakes pro Bryce Paradis calling it quits
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Well known online high-stakes limit player Bryce Paradis announced in his blog over at StoxPoker yesterday that he was calling it a day and liquidating his online poker bankroll with the intent of no longer playing poker as a source of income. Paradis, who is best known to most by his online poker handle ‘Freedom25′, has been making headlines lately for his massive wins over various opponents (most notably David Benyamine) in the 1000/2000 heads up limit game on Full Tilt Poker.
According to Paradis, the decision to quit stems not (primarily) from the usual suspects (massive downswing, worn down from the grind or inability to adapt to the ever-changing online game), but rather from a basic lack of utility in further play. Excerpt from the blog entry:
I expect that this will likely be a very positive decision, and there are two major reasons for it. The first is the nature of the environment I’ve been playing in, in that the action can be very stop and go, and while waiting around for action and then dropping everything and focusing when it does show is not necessarily a problem (and was something I was doing gladly for a time) it is something that, for me, takes a tremendous amount of energy, and often time.
The second reason is based on an opinion of mine which not everyone may share, which is that money is only as useful as what you can do with it. Money does not have actual value, only functional value, and typically depreciates in value as you gain more. As an example: think of all the things you could do with a million dollars. Then think of all the things you could do with one billion and one million dollars that you could not do with just one billion dollars. We can all agree that there is a lot of functional value to a million dollars, and as long as the functional value remains high it may be worth quite a bit of energy to an individual to pursue it. With a billion dollars already behind you, however, the functional value of a million dollars becomes next to nothing, and we can all agree that it would most likely not be worth much energy to pursue it for the sake of the million dollars itself.
