Can Poker Work as a Realistic Side Hustle (UK)

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Can Poker Work as a Realistic Side Hustle?

For most people, the answer is no, and the reason is arithmetic. A reliable second income ideally produces money on a reasonably predictable schedule, from a predictable number of hours, without putting a significant amount of your existing money at risk. Poker produces money on none of those terms.

That does not mean it is impossible to make money playing poker. A minority of skilled players can generate a long-term profit, but doing so requires a genuine advantage over other players, careful bankroll management, enough playing volume and the ability to cope with periods where results are negative despite playing well.

The Hourly Rate Question

Start with the arithmetic, because this shows why poker earnings can be misleading.

Online cash-game players commonly measure their results in big blinds per 100 hands, usually written as bb/100. The big blind is the compulsory bet that helps define the stakes of a poker game. For example, in a £0.25/£0.50 game, the big blind is 50p.

Suppose, purely for illustration, that a winning player achieves a long-term win rate of 4 bb/100 after the poker site's rake has been taken. At a 50p big blind, four big blinds are worth £2, meaning the player's expected long-term profit would be £2 for every 100 hands played.

A normal online poker table might deal around 75 to 90 hands an hour, although this varies considerably depending on the game and format. Playing several tables simultaneously can dramatically increase that volume.

For example, a player managing around 320 hands an hour across four tables with a 4 bb/100 win rate at a 50p big blind would theoretically generate around £6.40 an hour:

320 hands ÷ 100 × 4 big blinds × £0.50 = £6.40

Move to higher stakes and the theoretical numbers increase. At a £2 big blind and a 3 bb/100 win rate, the same 320 hands would produce an expected long-term return of around £19.20 an hour.

However, that does not mean sitting down for an hour produces £19.20. It is a theoretical long-term average based on the player actually being capable of maintaining that win rate at those stakes. An individual session could produce a large profit or a substantial loss.

There is another problem: moving up in stakes generally means facing stronger opponents. A player capable of achieving 4 bb/100 at lower stakes cannot assume they will maintain a similar advantage simply by moving to a more expensive game.

Volume and the Format Choice

This is one reason anyone seriously considering online poker as a source of side income is likely to pay close attention to playing volume.

Live poker produces very different numbers. A live table might deal around 25 to 30 hands per hour, whereas a standard online table can deal several times that number. Someone playing four online tables simultaneously could therefore see more than ten times as many hands per hour as someone sitting at a single live table.

More hands do not automatically mean more profit, but they allow a player's underlying results to emerge more quickly. They also allow a winning player to apply a small mathematical edge many more times.

Live games can have advantages of their own. The standard of opposition can differ significantly between games, and a skilled player may be able to achieve a larger advantage against particular opponents. The problem is that far fewer hands are played, so building a meaningful sample of results can take considerably longer.

The Capital Requirement

Poker also requires something that many conventional side hustles do not: a bankroll.

A poker bankroll is money kept specifically for playing poker. It should be completely separate from money required for rent or mortgage payments, household bills, emergency savings and other financial commitments.

There is no single universally accepted bankroll requirement. Guidance for cash-game players commonly suggests keeping at least 20 to 30 full buy-ins available, while more conservative players may choose 30 to 40 or more to provide greater protection against losing periods.

A typical full cash-game buy-in might be around 100 big blinds. At a £2 big blind, that would mean a £200 buy-in.

A player keeping 30 buy-ins available would therefore require a poker bankroll of approximately:

30 × £200 = £6,000

Using a more conservative 40-buy-in bankroll would require £8,000.

That is a substantial amount of money to allocate to an activity where short-term losses are unavoidable, even for someone who has a genuine long-term advantage.

That money cannot double as an emergency fund, holiday fund or next month's mortgage payment. If a losing period reduces the bankroll significantly, sensible bankroll management may require the player to move down to lower stakes. Doing so reduces the amount of money that can potentially be earned per hour.

The capital requirement is not necessarily unusual compared with starting certain small businesses. A van or specialist equipment can cost considerably more. The difference is that a van still exists after a bad month of trading. A portion of a poker bankroll lost at the tables does not.

Sample Size Before Conclusions

Another difficulty is determining whether someone is genuinely a winning poker player in the first place.

Poker combines skill with a substantial element of short-term chance. Even when someone consistently makes better decisions than their opponents, the cards dealt can produce large swings in results.

This means a profitable few weeks do not necessarily prove someone has found a viable side hustle.

Cash-game players may begin to get an indication of their underlying win rate after tens of thousands of hands, but even then the figure should be treated cautiously. Results become more meaningful as the sample grows.

A player with a genuine positive expected win rate can still finish behind over a large number of hands. Equally, a losing player can experience a profitable run and incorrectly conclude that they have an advantage.

That creates a problem that does not exist to the same extent with conventional side hustles.

If someone spends two months freelancing, delivering food or doing other paid work, they can usually calculate a reasonably useful hourly rate. Two months of poker results may tell them much less about what they can expect to earn in future.

Tax Treatment and Record Keeping

Tax is one area where the UK differs significantly from countries such as the United States.

HMRC guidance makes clear that simply gambling systematically, or even being successful enough to earn a living from gambling, does not by itself make someone's gambling activities a taxable trade.

Anyone researching the UK tax treatment of gambling winnings should therefore be careful when reading information written for players in other countries, as the rules can be very different.

That does not make record keeping unnecessary.

Anyone genuinely attempting to assess poker as a source of side income should keep records of deposits, withdrawals, bonuses, fees, hours played, stakes and results. Without accurate records, it is extremely easy to mistake a profitable run for a sustainable hourly return.

Different tax consequences can also arise from related commercial activities. Someone earning money from sponsorships, affiliate marketing, content creation or other services connected with poker may have taxable income even though their gambling winnings themselves are treated differently.

Anyone unsure about their individual circumstances should seek appropriate tax advice.

Hours Against Income

The hours are where the plan can start to look less attractive.

Imagine our hypothetical player generates a long-term average of around £19 an hour while playing four online tables. Playing 20 hours each week would theoretically produce around £380.

Those hours are likely to come from evenings and weekends around an existing job.

For context, the Office for National Statistics reported median hourly earnings, excluding overtime, of £19.67 for full-time UK employees in April 2025.

The two figures cannot be compared directly.

An employee earning £19.67 an hour generally knows what they will receive for working another hour. A poker player with a theoretical £19 hourly win rate could play for several hours and finish hundreds of pounds down.

The poker figure only begins to have meaning across a sufficiently large sample.

There is also the mental workload to consider. Playing several tables simultaneously requires sustained concentration and decision-making, while losing sessions can make it difficult to judge your own ability objectively.

Anyone attempting to treat poker as a source of income should therefore establish limits on both the amount of time and money they are prepared to commit. Money required for everyday living should never form part of a poker bankroll.

The Deciding Calculation

Before describing poker as a side hustle, calculate what the numbers actually look like.

Start with the stakes you can comfortably fund from money you can afford to lose. Estimate a realistic long-term win rate based on a meaningful sample of your own results rather than simply assuming you can achieve the win rate of a successful player.

Then consider how many hands you can realistically play, the number of hours required to achieve that volume and any additional costs involved.

The basic calculation for an online cash-game player is:

Expected profit = (hands played ÷ 100) × win rate in bb/100 × value of the big blind

So, for example:

10,000 hands ÷ 100 × 3 bb × £0.50 = £150

That would represent an expected £150 profit across 10,000 hands for a player genuinely achieving 3 bb/100 at a 50p big blind.

But expected profit and actual profit are not the same thing. The player's real result over those 10,000 hands could be substantially higher or lower.

That is ultimately the problem with poker as a side hustle.

A skilled and disciplined minority may be capable of producing a long-term profit, and online poker makes it possible to play enough hands for relatively small edges to add up. But the combination of variance, bankroll requirements, uncertain hourly earnings and the risk of losing money makes it fundamentally different from most conventional ways of earning extra income.

For most people, poker is therefore better treated as entertainment rather than dependable income. Anyone who does attempt to approach it as a side hustle should only use money they can afford to lose and judge its performance over a meaningful period rather than a handful of profitable sessions.