You picked a bad example to demonstrate that. A simple situation where you’ll win 1/5th of the time, you need to be getting better than 4:1 for it to be profitable. Nothing to do with people there. Of course, you’re right in general, but the example you provided counters your point rather than supports it.
Also, you said “just because the percentages look right” as if there could be a situation where the mathematically correct thing is incorrect due to the “people” thing. This is probably misguided. There are situations that are pure math, but the bulk of situations aren’t that clear. That’s where the people part comes in. But there’s never a situation like… getting 5:1 on a 4:1 shot being wrong, because of a nebulous people factor.
Well, just count the raises. A person raises and gets 3 callers, it’s 4 people for 2 bets each, 8 bets total.
SenorBeef, I’m wondering if you’ve experienced much of a stigma in your day-to-day life as a result of being a pro gambler. Have you ever applied for a mortgage or other loan, and listed your occupation as “professional poker player”? If so, how did you get on? And how do people you meet socially generally react when you tell them what you do for a living?
Also, I recall a statement on the Dope by a former pro poker player (I believe it was Sam Stone) who said something like: “most pro poker players probably have the skills to make a much better and more rewarding living doing something else altogether.” How do you feel about this opinion?
On a similar note, I’ve heard that playing poker professionally is a pretty boring occupation, that the game loses its fun when you’re both playing mechanically and playing to put food on your table. Is that true, in your view?
WHEEEE…allow me an every so slight thread hijack…
Bodog called last night, they were having a freeroll tournament tonight for the team from the WSOP last year, winner take all.
I came through 58 other players to take this one down, so I’m back to the WSOP for free again!
My GF had surgery today too, and she is in excruciating pain, and as I left the hospital, I told her, “Well, baby, just think about this summer, we’ll be able to go to Vegas when you’re back on your feet”…kind of joking, but just trying to get her mind on positive things…now I can’t wait to see her in the morning.
Yes. It’s certainly not interesting to me like it was a few years ago. This comes partly from burnout, but partly because I’m now playing for money and I just don’t care about it that much anymore. Most normal day to day playing is pretty automatic/mechanical due to experience… and yeah, boring.
I haven’t applied for a loan or anything. I recently updated my resume, and wasn’t quite sure how to address the issue.
People make a lot of stupid assumptions about me when I say I’m a poker player. 90% of the time, to most people, this equates me to dumbass gamblers, which is something I find pretty insulting. I’ve spent a whole lot of time and effort studying and learning to become as good as I am. I don’t play the game for the thrill of gambling or anything like that… and I’m not interested in any other form of “gambling” in the sense of casino games holds any appeal at all to me. To me, poker is like chess, a mental game, competition… only with a random element. I don’t get any thrill from that random element, and if I could somehow reduce it, I would.
Sometimes people will try to equate themselves with me by saying things like “Oh, yeah? I’m pretty good at roulette” (which, by the way, is a dumb statement in any context). I don’t really blame them - it’s not like they’re trying to insult me - but it does drive me nuts after a while. Imagine if I told people I made a living playing chess tournaments as a grandmaster chess player - and they said “oh, yeah, cool, I play a pretty mean game of ‘go fish’” as if it were the same thing.
The amusing thing is that sometimes if I try to explain to people why that’s a misconception, they’ll attack me and say I’m wrong. They’ll try to convince me that poker is purely a game of chance, just like craps/roulette/whatever and that no one can really be good at it. I’ve had people argue with me at length about this - people whose only experience playing poker is playing some wild home game every once in a while where no one knows how to play half decently - against me, with years of experience. It can be irritating.
So, in general, yeah, the assumption that I’m a “gambler” - not in the sense of being a risk taker, or whatever, but in the sense of being an idiot who throws away money gambling because he thinks he has a system is something that bothers me.
Also, I have a limited degree of experinence with it yet… but back home, to some people, being a professional poker player was exotic. Here, in Vegas, it probably sounds like “I’m an aspiring actress…” does in Hollywood - a nice way to say ‘bum’.
I agree with that. It takes a considerable amount of intelligence, aggressiveness/assertiveness, independence, and discipline to suceed at poker. It’s really not easy. People scoff at that - how hard can it be, right? But that always amuses me - if they thought it was easy to make a substantial amount of money playing poker, why wouldn’t they do it themselves? But it’s really quite difficult. It requires a lot of skills that people have a hard time with. So, someone who’d be able to master poker should be able to apply the same skills to getting all sorts of jobs. If I had any real interest in anything, at this stage, I’d probably bail on poker in an instant.
I have to respectfully disagree. I play the micro .05/.10 on bodog all the time (SYNW if you are looking) and I have bluffed my way to a lot of pots. I have to get a read on the table, of course, at first. I am no poker master but I am up to $300 from $10 right before Christmas. Not going to set the world on fire, but it is nice enough for the amount I play.
What I find shocking is some of the bets made on these tables. There is literally .35 in the pot and the person bets seven dollars or something like that (in fact I was at a table with .50 in the pot and someone bet $52!! Tried to justify the bet by showing AA.) I agree lots of folks play crap hands because it is so cheap, but I think that is fine with me. I have gotten pretty good, I think, at recognizing the chasers.
Here’s a question, but if you’re mostly a cash game player you may not have a strong opinion. What do you think of deal-making and players swapping percentages of themselves? I know som pros (notably Daniel Negreanu) are vehemently opposed to deal-making in tournaments (back when he was in pissy mode he wrote about how happy everyone was when he busted out of the first WSOP ToC because they were all salivating to carve up the $2 million) and Roy Cooke has written a number of times about players trading percentages and the possible corrupting influence it can have on the game.
I definately agree that you can bluff, but you have to establish the right table presence first. AND you have to bluff the weak players. AND you cannot bluff calling stations, who will call down any bet with bottom pair. I think the poster who asked the question is best served to not bluff, until he has a better grasp on the game.
I don’t play on bodog much any more, the games at Party are much,much more lucrative for me, and the new software sucks at bodog. I’ll probably make an appearance over there now and then for some MTTs that fall short of the guaranteed prize(I think this is the best thing about Bodog), but I’m KILLING Party Poker microlimits and the 10$ 5table SnGs. I stuck 50 in last Sunday, ran it to 700 on this Sunday, cashed out 600, then made another 100 in 3 hours yesterday.
If you really want to do something that is 1)fun and 2)educational, take 10 bucks to a micro table, and play basically blind. Start raising with 68 suited. Raise with Q4 suited. Bet like you hit almost every flop. If a flush draw hits the board , play like you have it. The only reason I won that tournament last night is because I was generating chips with trash all night long. When the blinds get bigger, you HAVE to find ways to still accumulate chips when you are stuck in a horrible run of bad cards.
Did you/will you list “professional poker player” (or “professional gambler”) on your tax return?
Hands up, who’d like to see Dragon Drop at a table with, say, Cyndy Violette, to watch the ass-kicking he’d get?
I absolutely support dealmaking in tournaments. The structure in almost all tournaments is absolute crap - way too top heavy. They do that so that they can sucker in someone thinking “wow for $200 I can win $15,000!” or whatever. But serious players want a good chance of making good money - not a slim chance of hitting the lottery. Dealmaking is just a way of adjusting the structure to be more reasonable.
I made a deal on that big tourney I won. The first two prizes were, IIRC, $106k and $57k. I had a 3-1 chip lead going into heads up, but that can change fast. Risking 2nd place wasn’t worth it to me. So we dealt for 92.5/70.5k. The deal was slightly unfavorable to me in straight equity, but I was happier taking a guaranteed 92.5 than probably winning 106 but risking only winning 57. In retrospect, I would’ve dealt most of the money and kept 5-10k up for grabs for the winner, just to keep it sporting. Once the money was split, I actually technically ended up coming in 2nd - neither us were playing seriously with nothing at stake, and we were both mentally exhausted.
As far as swapping percentages - I can understand the desire to reduce variance. Playing tournament poker professionally, to be honest, just sucks. However, it is unethical if it leads to any sort of collusive behavior.
Legally, you pretty much have to. There’s a whole lot of ridiculous bullshit you have to do if you want to follow the exact letter of the tax code. You need to list every winning session you ever had as income - and the number will be way out of proportion with your actual income - and then itemize every losing session as an expense. Practically - if you have a week where every day you’re +$500, +$500, -$1500, +1000, +1000, +$1000, -$2000, your taxes would look like:
Income:
$500
$500
$1000
$1000
$1000
= $4000
Expenses:
$1500
$2000
= $3500
So even though you practically only made $500, in tax terms, you had an income of $4000 that week. At the end of the year, you could have an income that’s 10x or more greater than the actual amount you took. It’s a real pain in the ass, requires good record keeping, and a busy tax accountant.
I object strongly, ethically, that these taxes exist at all. In most countries they do. (I also strongly object to being in jail, so I grudgingly accept them).
It’s charged as income, as in the same income that you’d make at a normal job. Poker is a zero sum game - in order to make money, someone has to lose it. You’re not letting them deduct that money that they lose (only in as far as it offsets wins, but effectively there is no deduction for losing money) - but you’re charging me taxes on it when I win. It’s a simple transfer of wealth, in as much as if that person gave me the money to go to dinner with. Taxing it just drains money out of a transfer where no wealth is being generated.
In sort of a silly hypothetical, let’s say every week we went out to lunch at a fancy place, and you gave me $100 to pay for lunch one week, and I gave you $100 for yours the next. Technically, if you wanted to follow tax code precisely, every time we gave each other money for lunch, the receiving party would’ve received $100 in income, and must file on their taxes as such. At the end of the year, we’d both be charged $2600 (52/2) on our taxes on income based on those transactions, even though in effect it was just passing money back and forth and nothing was actually gained. That’s what taxes on poker ends up amounting to. There is no ethical grounds on which I support it whatsoever.
You’re goiing to have to give me more background on your thought process, and what you consider real poker, for me to effectively answer that question.
I disagree. There’s a difference between receiving money as a gift and receiving money as poker winnings. If for no other reason than there’s no work involved in receiving a gift but there is work involved in playing poker. I don’t want to get into a whole debate on the ethics of taxation, though, so as not to derail the thread.
Your hypothetical is wrong, though, because there is no tax obligation on the part of a gift recipient. In your example, neither party would have to report giving the money either, because it falls under the annual $11,000 exclusion.
Let’s put it another way.
I’ve played poker in family games since I was a kid. We played 5 card draw, 5 card stud, and 7 card stud. Why? Because those are the hands that my dad taught us.
I always think of 5 card draw as “real” poker. The poker that real men who are real cowboys with real horses and real denim shirts and real boots play, in a real saloon while drinking real whiskey while real dance hall girls look on.
As an only occasional poker player, I can’t see why Texas Hold’em is synonymous with poker nowadays. So what makes Texas Hold’em a more interesting game than 5 card draw, or some other variation?
I disagree - it’s not “work” if it’s not generating any sort of productivity or wealth. It’s no different than winning a sports pool at work in that regard. But that’s fine, we can skip the taxation hijack.
The easiest way to explain it to you would probably be to just tell you to play it, try to win at it - see where the challengies lie. All of the games you named are “real poker”. 5 card draw, though, is an extremely easy game to become good at. That’s why it’s not really played anywhere - the range of skills that players can have are very shallow. You’re either a bad player, and bleed money, and don’t come back, or you’re good enough that, with other good players, no one is going to make any money.
Let’s put it this way - I learned to play hold em and then started playing 5 card draw as something of a novelty. I was already a pretty good player, just using general poker skills, because it’s a very simple game. On the flip side, if I was a good 5 card draw player, there’s no way I’d be instantly good at hold em.
It appears simple at first glance, but it really isn’t.
7 card stud, on the other hand, is a more complex game, with more room for skill differences. It’s about on par with hold em for difficulty and complexity, but each game emphasizes different skillsets more. 7 card stud is more math oriented, more technical and mechanical, requiring dead card memory, whereas hold em, due to the more limited information about opponent’s hands, is much more of a people game.