For me the quandary is more complex. Making $8-$12 an hour playing VP is not the same as a regular job for identical wages. There is fluctuation and the bankroll requirement to survive the swings. Normal jobs don't require you to keep $15,000 lying around to get hired and stay hired.
Then you have the fact that most people who play something like FP .25c Deuces would not work a normal job for identical wages. This concerns me.
Now here's how it seems to me: Take an unattractive wage, add variance and uncertainty, and the potential for loss and suddenly you have people lining up to do it. (I believe the dynamic here is random variable positive reinforcement, which should be familiar to any student of Pavlovian responses & human conditioning.) All the science says that variable reward schedules are the best at manipulating people's motivational imperatives. $8 an hour is not as desirable to people as $8 and hour paid in random $250 & $1,000 chunks, as weird as that might seem.
Then it seems the more competition (which mathematically reduces the opportunity's attractiveness) the more attractive an opportunity appears to be to people. I imagine the logic here is, if there's a line, there must be "value" at the end of it.
I believe also in play is effort justification, which is a subset of cognitive dissonance, whereby people attribute more value to a result proportionate to how difficult it is to achieve.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effort_justification
If you want to make a dance club seem more popular, the quickest way is to make the line go slower. No kidding, they really do this...deliberately! Don't be fooled.
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The counter argument is that playing VP can be preferable to working a regular job, even if the wages are identical, or perhaps less. For those of you out there thinking this, I do not dispute that for YOU it is preferable. I ask only that you look very hard at why it is preferable, and make sure your reasons are sound. I hope you want to know that your reasons for preferring VP, aren't the result of casinos taking advantage of human perceptive weakness and variable reward conditioning.
Think what you will, but please at least think...and get some external opinions. People are NEVER aware of the own biases..."never!"
~FK
P.S. Please note that I am not criticizing anyone in the post. Only trying to make sure that everyone is making informed decisions.
--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "rob.singer1111" <rob.singer1111@...> wrote: I look at full-time vp players--if there's really such a thing on quarters--as unmotivated people who really don't have a family life and who are very addicted to the poker machines. Making $8-$12/hr. is something I'd expect for teenagers and isn't anything anyone can make a decent living on. As a supplement it's fine, but there is no such thing as a vp career without playing at much higher limits.