The short version: Jared Bleznick dropped out of college at 18 with $1,000, made about $100,000 playing poker his first year, and around $3 million a year at his peak. His rule: start at a limit you can afford to lose, beat it for months, then move up. His biggest regret is not investing his 20s money conservatively, because 5% a year over 15 years is a lot of money. Same rule, both directions.
Updated September 2026. Originally published August 2022.
Jared Bleznick started with $1,000 and played small until he had enough to play bigger. That’s his whole origin story, in his words. At his peak he was making about $3 million a year.
He dropped out of college at 18. He was never good at school, wasn’t going to graduate, and poker looked like the only option. His mother has a gambling background, so she was all for it. His father hated it. First year he made about $100,000 and still didn’t feel good about his game. That took a few more years.
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I wanted to know what a guy who has won $500,000 on one hand and lost $300,000 on another thinks about money, because I lose 20 bucks and it’s a week. The answer turned out to be one rule, applied to everything.
Bet $1,000 into a $10,000 pot
A lot of people want to make a million dollars playing poker. Jared made three a year. Part of it is volume, 10 to 12 hours a day, pretty much every day. “Poker is a volume game. If you’re a good player, the more you play, the more you’re going to earn. Everyone has an hourly rate.”
The rest is size.
“Everyone in business can do the big things that everyone could do. It’s the small things that get everyone ahead. It’s the same thing in poker. There would be $10,000 in the pot and I would bet like a thousand, when everyone would bet the pot, 10,000, 8,000. It took people a long time to realize that you can get the same information by betting 2,000 as 5,000.”
He was two to three years ahead of everyone on betting patterns, and the reward for being ahead was that nobody could tell.
“When I used to win all the time in poker, everyone thought I was bad, because I wasn’t doing what they were doing. They’re doing now what I was doing 10 years ago. And now I’m doing something different and they still think I’m bad.”
Same information for less money, over thousands of hands a day for years. That is where the $3 million came from.
The $300,000 hand
The $500,000 pot was pot limit Omaha, aces, most of the money in preflop, and the aces held. Nothing clever. “A lot of poker is situations where you don’t do anything wrong. The hand just plays out itself.” The $300,000 loss was the opposite. “I bluffed off all my money. I went with a read and I was completely wrong.”
After the loss he stayed in bed for about a day, got a massage, and ate a bunch of bad food.
“When I lose it hits me for like the first six, eight hours and then I’m over it. Every time I have a bad experience in poker I appreciate the good things in life and I reflect on that, and it makes me realize I’m just lucky to be right where I am.”
Eight hours to get over $300,000. That only works if the $300,000 was money he could afford to lose at that limit.
The regret
Jared is the oldest of three brothers, and this is what he tells the youngest.
“The biggest mistake I made when I was in my early 20s, when I was making money in poker, I should have taken most of that money and invested it at a very young age. I always thought I needed this money to play poker. But when you look 12, 15 years later, even if you were conservative and you invest in real estate or the S&P 500, 5% a year is not a lot, but 5% over 15 years is a lot of money.”
Invest it conservatively in your early 20s and by 35 you can potentially double your net worth without doing anything smart. He spent it instead. Not $10,000 club receipts, he was always with the people who paid. Food. A $400 or $500 dinner for two, at least every other night.
The funny thing is he doesn’t enjoy spending now. A few watches, some nice cars he doesn’t care about. When he was broke all he wanted was nice clothes. Now everything looks overpriced, and the more expensive the car, the more overpriced. “Once you reach a certain level, it’s really just a scorecard at that point. I just enjoy making money.”
He still wants the money early, though. “A lot of people make the mistake of trying to get wealthy when they’re older. If you make all the money when you’re 70, how do you enjoy that? When you’re 35, 40, that’s when you can enjoy it and live life.” That is the argument in Die With Zero, from a guy who has lived it, and it’s what I found asking 80 year old millionaires if it was worth it.
I keep 95% of my net worth in things I need to know the location of at night and 5% in risky stuff. Jared is the reverse, stocks, crypto, altcoins, real estate, random investments with friends. He doesn’t like the conservative 5%. And his one regret is that he wasn’t more conservative with the money that mattered.
Play small until you can play big
His advice for anyone who wants to go pro is what he did with the first $1,000.
“Start small. Start with a bankroll and start at a game where you have enough money that you can afford to win and lose what you’re playing with. If you realize over a few months you’re beating that game, you jump up in stakes. The biggest mistake is people jump up way too fast. You have to consistently know that you can beat each limit. It took me years. We live in a world today where no one has any patience and people want money today.”
I expected more degeneracy from this conversation. Instead the guy who bets $40,000 or $50,000 on a basketball game when he likes it has never done a drug or smoked in his life, and thinks too much gamble is most poker players’ biggest weakness. “You have to have the right amount of risk gamble in you and you can’t have too much.”
He has been staked exactly once, for one month, when he had enough money to play bigger but wasn’t 100% sure of his skill at that level. He made a million dollars that month, the two backers made $250,000 each, and he told them thank you, I’m free. Even at the top he moved up one limit at a time, with someone else’s money, until he’d proved it.
Growing up he thought he’d be a stockbroker. “Poker kind of saved me. There’s a good chance I could have been a complete failure if it wasn’t for poker.”
Start at the limit you can afford to lose. Beat it for a few months. Then move up.
From episode 261 of my podcast, Noah Kagan Presents. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
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