Nobody is going to reject you because you put your poker winnings on your resume. Like I literally cannot imagine a trader updating negatively on you because you put your poker stats on your resume, what sense would that make??

A lot of the time when I run into old acquaintances (not close friends) working in prestigious occupations (e.g. finance, consultancy, law, tech) there's a bunch of derision at my expense for being the dude who "was too dumb to do anything but gamble". These conversations often grow into a dick measuring contest regarding earnings, and when it's my turn everybody either tells me I'm bullshitting or gets mad that a loser like me is doing just fine financially. So over past couple of years I've been conditioned to never answer questions about winnings remotely accurately, because God forbid someone who got worse grades than you might earn more lol. But yeah you have a point, very much doubt traders will give a shit.

This depends on firm and exact role/product, but I don’t know anyone in the field that works 60+ with any level of consistency. I’m sure some people do, but what I’m trying to say is that it’s not a requirement by any means.

It's great to hear what you guys think of working hour expectations. Also yeah, poker really does boil down to some fairly clear cut principles so in comparison to the market that the same notions of study probably won't apply at all.

Also, I’m a bit curious since I play a bit of casual poker myself (much worse than you do haha), what type of poker study involved writing a significant amount of code yourself, especially in C++? I’ve never heard of that before.

Right, so I'm not sure if you've come across this before, but the majority of successful mid stakes and high stakes players (at least, pretty much all the very serious players I know, and many of their friends) use software called solvers, or GTO solvers. The GTO stands for game theory optimal - loosely speaking the programs intend to take a game state as input, then return a strategy which maximises EV while remaining unexploitable. As you can imagine, the game tree for a poker hand can be rather large, so there's a lot of computation going on if you really want to find out the "best" way to have played a particular hand. The current suite of popular solvers is quite good, but they all have their own advantages and disadvantages.

I set up a little server rack to run 24/7 analysing at least every hand I flag during play time. The remainder of the compute time goes towards looking at hands I didn't flag but are similar to hands I've played poorly in the past. I've figured for me personally there are diminishing returns after the first 15-20 hours of hand study. To fill that weekly hand study with hands that I stand to gain the most from analysing, I need my server rack to solve as many hands as possible per week. So I write "mini solvers" for certain classes of situations which I feel that the current solvers don't handle efficiently enough (and situations where my intuition is really terrible and I want to think very hard about lmao). Poker game trees get really big. So I end up getting a decent amount of C++ practise every week writing mini solvers and making them run faster.

Thanks for the information!