Fun Story - I have a buddy who is a professional poker player due to covid and making a eff ton of money. He used to play in person at the KC Casino's (We even ran into Wacky one of the few times I joined him a couple of years back) a bunch and had a real 9-5 normal ass job. He knew alot of people from playing in person and when covid hit and everything went online he started just cleaning up in private games.
He just plays by the book and plays 5-10 private games at a time for $1/$2 blinds folding everything except really good cards, even built himself a "Command Station" where he lines up all of his tablets with one on each game. Eventually he quit his job because he was making so much money then one of the people who runs a game started to pay him as a "fluffer" where he gets paid $100 a day to play in certain games between 10am-2pm because that is the "dead" period and no one wants to play a poker game with just a couple of people. He still gets to keep any money he makes during that time but he is getting $25 an hour just to be playing during those times.
Also if he plays X amount of hands per month in certain rooms he get something called a "Rake Back"? Basically the guys who run the room give him a cut of the rake for playing so much.
He has been clearing 10-20k per month the past 2 years and has decided to ride it out until the well runs dry. In his words "People are bored as eff and just throwing away money".
That's awesome, and he's definitely grinding the crap out of those games. Ingenious move to load up several tablets at once to play multiple games. The mobile apps (pokerrrr2 is the best one) with the best/softest games only allow you to play one table at a time. There are other apps pokerbros, pppoker that allow you to play up to 4 tables at once, but those clubs tend to be bigger and get infested with grinders.
Rakeback is typically a bigger deal in online poker, but it's bad for the poker ecosystem. You end up with a bunch of grinders playing 12 tables at once and only playing about 15% of hands. Basically playing GTO poker, breaking even, and getting rakeback.
That he's made enough connections to be a paid prop player is even better.