The days are getting longer, and the gaps between worried emails from my dissertation supervisor are getting shorter. Exam term cometh. And with it, graduation. And with that, the real world, fraught with unfortunate trappings like ‘having a job’ and ‘earning money’.

Hoping to avoid starving artistically in the hedgerows, I seek help from Ken Cheng. Ken is a stand-up comedian and former Tab Columnist. And since he dropped out of his maths degree at Trinity, he’s been funding his BNOC lifestyle by playing professional poker.

Ken is mid-way through a game on the website Poker Stars when he lets me into his roomy flat in central Cambridge. As Ken clicks, cards and virtual money fly around a virtual table. Thousands of virtual dollars are won and lost as Ken continues clicking throughout our conversation. He assures me that people gamble with tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands.

“I’m not at that stage”, he says “It’s quite ridiculous”.

Ken first deposited on Poker Stars while he was still in 6th form, about seven years ago. He and a few friends played poker for fun, then made the transition to online gambling.

“I first deposited about $100 online. By the time I started Uni I’d made a few thousand. Since then it’s just been going up. And now it’s quite high stakes.

“I make easily enough to live on per month. Last month I made about £15,000. I’m in quite a good situation”.

As we chat I notice Ken’s total winnings have dropped by $1,000. He doesn’t flinch. “One day I lost $100,000”, he explains.

Ken describes his year at Cambridge as a “hindrance” to his Poker career. “I had to fit Poker around my schedule and social stuff, and work, which I didn’t do much of”.

Sitting through lectures, all Ken thought about was Poker. “That’s one of the main reasons I dropped out, because I was thinking a lot about poker but I didn’t get the chance to play it.”

“And now this is what you do all day?” I ask

“Not all day. I go out too” he replies. “But this is what I want to be doing in ten years time. There’s no job I can imagine myself doing that would come close to this. My passion for this outweighs anything else”.

Unsure I could ever drum up such dedication to a website containing so few pictures of cats, I call up Chris Humpleby. In his second year at Cambridge, Chris won £5,000 from an £8.50 stake he placed on a horse race. Since graduating, Chris has managed to turn his passion for racing into a career writing race previews for the Press Association.
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Chris isn’t in it for the money. “Even if I could never bet on horse racing again I’d watch it just for the sport” he enthuses. “It’s so exciting when you link a human to an animal. Racing is as much about understanding human beings as it is a sport; who trains the horse, who rides it, who owns it”.

Chris paints vivid pictures of “a constant cycle of making history, drama, heroes and villains”. With hyped up horses who might suddenly decide they don’t want to race that day, there are infinite variables at play at all times.
I, personally. have never trusted horses. They are difficult to reason with, and have large teeth. But Chris’ wholesome betting beginnings, watching racing in his Grandad’s living room in Carlisle, makes me forget my equine inhibitions.

“On Saturday afternoon when there was the racing on telly he’d get us to pick horses and put on fake bets – just daft things like that”.

“My grandad was a small stakes punter. He wasn’t into reading form or anything. He had favourite jockies and trainers and put bets on them”.

At Cambridge, where Chris read History before switching to education, he also had trouble fitting gambling around his academic work, and even more trouble drumming up interest in the horse racing society.

“It was just me and a couple of lads and we went racing quite a lot. Newmarket offered us free entry and they were going to lay on buses to get us there but we could never get enough people interested”.

“I think for lots of people at Cambridge gambling is associated with murky working men’s clubs. And not many people from Cambridge have been to working men’s clubs. Or horse races”.

Chris doesn’t deny that racing has a ‘murky’ side. Betting, he warns, can consume your whole life.

“It’s a very insular world. People who gamble all the time struggle to hold down relationships and friendships, even if they’re doing well”.

“Gambling’s really addictive” he adds, thoughtfully.

Writing race previews, Chris is on “the right side of the fence” – advising the punters so they can win a few quid against the bookies. But he worries that the decade he hopes to spend in horse racing will one day prevent him from pursuing a career as a teacher.

“I’ve been told people might have a problem with it, morally and ethically”.

But for now Ken and Chris seem more than happy to spend their post-Cambridge days with cards, or horses. With thousands of pounds up for grabs, it’s nice work if you can bet it.