Job Title: Professional poker player Employers: Tournament organizers Openings: Pony up the entrance fee of up to $10,000 Salary Cap: About $12 million Number of Jobs: 300 to 500

Tom Schneider was stumped. Last June during the World Series of Poker, he was playing a side game of Texas hold ’em at the Bellagio when one of his opponents, a diminutive Vietnamese immigrant named Chau Giang, made a surprising $25,000 raise.

Schneider had a strong hand—a pair of 10s in the hole, with nonthreatening common cards, but Giang’s raise was a large one, which meant Giang could have had two pairs or even three of a kind.

Was he bluffing? At first, Schneider couldn’t tell. But then Giang leaned back in his chair and tried to strike up a conversation about football with a stranger who had just entered the room.
    
“He was trying to act extremely confident, like he didn’t care—which meant to me, he was extremely weak,” Schneider recalls. “In poker, weakness means strength and strength means weakness.” Schneider wound up calling Giang’s bet and even raising him another $10,000, and when it turned out all Giang had was a pair of sevens, Schneider won a $100,000 pot.     

Instincts like these are priceless on the professional poker circuit, where Schneider has been making his living since he quit a career as president and C.F.O. of several midsize companies five years ago.  
    
Poker, Schneider says, isn’t so different from running a company—except for the fact that decisions happen at warp speed, and you don’t need any permits to set up shop.
    
“When you sit down at a poker table, you’re opening up a little business that day,” he says. “Your competitors are sitting around the table. You assess their weaknesses and strengths and try and exploit them.”

Since hitting the poker circuit full-time, Schneider, 48, has won two World Series of Poker championship bracelets and made it to two World Poker Tour “final tables,” earning $1.3 million in the process. For his performance at the 2007 World Series of Poker, when he won two events and placed fourth in another, he was named the W.S.O.P. player of the year. He’s also written a strategy book entitled Oops! I Won Too Much Money: Winning Wisdom from the Boardroom to the Poker Table.
    
The balding Phoenix resident with the white goatee and the trademark hoodie started playing poker when he was 10. His mother paid him $5 a day to babysit his siblings while she attended school; Schneider used the money to stake himself in poker games with his pals, where he was always the big winner. In college, he majored in finance and earned a C.P.A., but poker remained his passion and he hoped one day to find a way to pursue it full-time.
    
After C.F.O. and president stints at two golf companies, Royal Precision and ProLink, his last company hit a rough financial patch several years ago and his girlfriend at the time encouraged him to follow his passion. Schneider quit his job, married his girlfriend, and turned to playing poker full-time.
        
While Schneider has done well as a pro, he says he does miss the camaraderie of working in business. “It’s much harder to have good friends in poker than it is in business,” he says. “In business you can create win-win situations. You can’t do that in poker. I’ve taken money from friends many times, and I don’t like it.”