Money jobs: Making money on the tables
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 12 December 2022
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ever thought about quitting your job and playing poker for a living? Well, today we find out what it’s really like making your living on the tables. This is the latest series from Business Daily, all about high value, high transaction jobs you might read about, see on the TV or glamorised in films.
In episode one, Leanna Byrne interviews professional poker player Dara O’Kearney. Dara explains what a day in the life of a professional poker player is really like and warns, if you’re playing poker professionally, every player goes through what’s known as upswings and downswings.
We also switch sides and find out what it’s like working as a croupier in a casino. Stefano Melani works for Centro Formazione Croupier, which trains croupiers for casinos across Italy, somewhere with one of the worlds largest gambling sectors. He lets us in on the glamorous and not-so-glamorous side of the casinos.
David Schwartz, an academic and gambling historian based in Las Vegas, Nevada, gives us the macro perspective on the gambling industry, detailing the rise of gambling towns across the world.
Presenter/producer: Leanna Byrne
(Photo: Poker table; Credit: Getty images)
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | World Football in Qatar is the podcast taking you behind the scenes with all 32 teams at the World Cup. |
| 0:07.7 | We're hearing from the players, the fans and people in Qatar, telling the truly global story of the competition. |
| 0:15.2 | That's World Football in Qatar from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:19.4 | Find it wherever you get your BBC podcasts. |
| 0:23.3 | It's 2007 and a man called Dara, living in Dublin, Ireland, who works in finance, gets hooked on a game. |
| 0:32.8 | And that game is poker. |
| 0:36.9 | Dara's a smart guy. He played chess, backgammon and bridge at a high level when he was |
| 0:43.3 | younger and loved strategy games. So for him, poker was part of the same family. He's also |
| 0:50.4 | very competitive. In his late 20s, early 30s, he took up marathon running, and by the time he hit his late 30s, |
| 0:57.7 | he was a successful ultra marathon runner and getting tired even thinking about it. |
| 1:02.0 | When Darif found poker, he fell in love with the strategy, the decision making, the competition. |
| 1:08.4 | I've always had this strong competitive urge, so I needed something to be competitive. |
| 1:12.4 | And at 42, I realized that I was getting a bit too old for the running, |
| 1:16.2 | and that was going to slowly disappear. |
| 1:18.1 | So I was kind of looking around for something else to do competitively. |
| 1:21.3 | And given I'd always had the sort of mind that was good at strategy games, |
| 1:24.9 | and it was around the time of the poker boom I saw poker on TV I thought |
| 1:28.6 | well actually that's something where my age probably wouldn't be that big a factor I started playing a bit |
| 1:33.8 | got completely obsessed with the game studying it and playing it all the time Dara started entering |
| 1:39.0 | competitions and winning within a year I was making more money poker, online poker than I was from my day job. |
| 1:47.1 | So at that point it seemed like the logical thing to do to just switch to poker full time. |
| 1:57.7 | From the BBC World Service, I'm Leanna Byrne, and this is Business Daily's money job series. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.