Hi!

My name is Ryan Daut, I'm 32 years old, and I'm a professional poker and daily fantasy sports player living in California. I grew up in NJ, went to college at the University of Richmond on a full mathematics scholarship, double majored in Math and Computer Science, did a short stint of a math PhD program at Penn State University before dropping out full time to play poker in 2007 and have been a professional gambler ever since.

More of a bullet point timeline of my adult gaming/gambling life:

-was a semi-competitive Starcraft: Brood Wars player in high school. At my peak was maybe the 10th best player in the USA, was captain of Team USA for a year before being unceremoniously impeached due to me being awful at being captain of Team USA. I am not a good leader.

-a friend of mine was the best player in the USA, moved to Korea to play professionally, but unfortunately for him and everyone else outside of Korea, the Koreans were much better, so he took up poker, started making lots of money, and convinced other Starcraft players to start playing.

-I deposited $45 online during my Junior year of college (2005). After 6 months I had turned it into $500. 6 months later, as I was graduating from Undergrad, my bankroll was up to $10,000, so I decided to play poker all summer instead of getting a job and then continue on with my PhD program

-Over that summer I made another $50,000 playing poker, but decided to continue with my schooling because I was paid to go to Penn State since I would be teaching undergraduate math classes alongside my own studies.

-Made another $50,000 that first semester and did poorly in my own classes (nobody told me Cs were a failing grade in grad school), but decided to finish out the school year before making decisions about the future.

-Over winter break, I traveled to the Bahamas to play in a World Poker Tour (WPT) event. It drew 937 players and I won it for just over $1.5 million. Despite winning the tournament, I managed to be on the losing end of one of the most famous hands in live poker history

-I immediately quit teaching classes, gradually stopped going to my own classes, eventually dropped out later that semester, and began playing poker full time without any other commitments.

-I started a poker backing business with Victor Goossens (owner of TeamLiquid.net, a successful Starcraft fan site and gaming team), where we stake players for live and online tournaments and receive a % of their winnings. We backed 2 WSOP (world series of poker) bracelet winners, a WPT winner, an EPT (european poker tour) winner, numerous other big live and online scores, and also some players that also us a bunch of money, and some others who scammed or stole from us. Once again, I am not a good leader

-On April 15, 2011 (called black friday), the US department of justice indicted the major poker sites operating in the US, so in August of that year I rented an apartment in Vancouver, Canada to continue playing poker.

-After black friday, the difficulty of winning at poker increased at a much more rapid rate. By the end of 2013 I was making a fraction of what I had in previous years, and by the end of 2014 I was transitioning over to Daily Fantasy Sports because that became more profitable for me than poker.

-I now play DFS full time, concentrating in NBA (pro basketball), NFL (pro football), PGA (pro golf), and MLB (baseball), and with the exception of my big WPT win in poker, am making more money in DFS than I ever did in poker (am up roughly $900k in the 18 months I've done this).

Nowadays

my hobbies include having my life run by an 8 pound toy yorkie named Boo, falling off of climbing/bouldering walls, taking astrophysics classes, learning everything I can about cryptocurrency (including unsuccessfully day trading Ethereum and Ethereum Classic), losing money in daily fantasy baseball because it's the worst, watching sports such as MMA/tennis/golf/basketball/football/boxing, and seeing how many episodes of Archer my girlfriend and I can stay awake for after consuming edibles.

Ask me anything about playing poker professionally, the poker staking industry, poker in general, daily fantasy sports, season long fantasy sports, sports in general, or anything else you think I would be qualified or unqualified to answer.