Reminds me of the grind a professional poker player goes through. Every day, wake up, play poker for 10-15 hours, study for ~5 hours, sleep. There's a reason they call it the grind, and why there are very few overall winning players, despite plenty of smart individuals playing.
My friend is a poker pro, and his life is nowhere like this. I'd say he plays maybe 100-120 hours per month. He's been a pro for 10 years now. His cost of living are low though (about $1500 per month).
With the advent of machines beating poker players, do you see pro poker players rethinking their careers?
The machines are only starting to beat people in HU (that is, the two player variant of poker). What most people play is 6 or 10 people variant, where complexity goes through the roof. Additionally, those AIs (unless there's some novel development that I'm missing) are about play game-theoretically optimal (GTO) strategy, which won't do that well in real casino setting - because most profits for professional players come from "fishes" (amateurs making terrible plays), whose weaknesses they map and ruthlessly exploit. A GTO bot is unable to do that.