Clearely, if the question “Are there professional rook players” interests you, you are a true fan of rook. To get the answer, I must compare the question to a similar field. What makes a professional card player?
- They spend a significant amount of time playing or promoting their card playing.
- They make a significant portion of their income from card playing.
- They likely do not have a side job, and purely use card playing as the main source of income.
These comments lead me to find out, how exactly might someone who loves to play rook, and may even be very good at it, be a professional rook player? Well, quite simply, there is currently not a way to make this happen. OK, yes I have heard of some decent size rook tournamants where the winning teams gain some nice lawn chairs or even tickets to a football game, but not quite the payoff that someone might get from say a major poker event.
The truth is, the rook card game just was not meant for making money. And the crowd that follows it is not that much into the idea of making money off playing cards as well. You have to realize that some people refer to rook as missionary poker becuase the missionaries that played it did not believe in playing with regular decks of cards.
In all likelyhood, there would need to be some major deal with ESPN or something like that to get enough of a following for rook to actually think about ever becoming a professional rook player. Until that day, we will just have to enjoy tailgaiting at our football game with our new lawn chairs!