Can you make a living with poker?

Factual Questions
1

One of my sons has been very involved in Poker, online and casual play, for years. To the point that it is starting to take over his life. He has recently taken some classes in dealing and applied to some casinos and it looks like he may be able to actually get a job doing what he likes. In the mean time, and that has been going on for a while, he claims to be making money with online poker. He sure isn’t getting rich. Sometimes he works at a restaurant job, sometimes various family members help out.

Anyway, the question is. How likely is it that he can really make enough via online poker to make ends meet? Can he make enough to equal, say, a minimum wage job? Also, what is the pay like for a beginning poker dealer? I’d rather not give too many details.

2

There are hundreds of people who rely entirely upon poker for their income. Of course, keep in mind that there are thousands of people who claim to do so.

Also, one must keep in mind that taxes are owed on winnings, and expenses for gambling are only deductible if you are actually a professional poker player, deducting business expenses, and normal documentation rules do apply to such deductions.

Tris

3

WAG but I can’t believe that online poker, even if you’re really really good at it would pay that much; not enough to live on at least. The limitations of online poker are just too great.

There are plenty of people in Vegas, AC, and other gambling towns that play live poker for a living.

4

Playing poker and dealing poker are completely different jobs that have little to do with one another. They’re only coincidentally related.

Dealing jobs depend on where you live. In general, the poker economy is slowly collapsing after a boom, and while I don’t know the dealing job market very well, I don’t think it has huge demand. Unless you’re in an area that only recently opened a casino and they need the staff. Dealers do get paid decently though, certainly more than they’re worth - maybe 40-50k a year on average for a full time employee.

If you want him to prove to you that he’s a winning player online, make him show you his pokertracker records. Or whatever stat software he uses. If he doesn’t use it, then he’s almost certainly not a serious winning player (it’s not that you can’t be a winner without such software, but almost anyone serious enough to understand the game uses something similar - even if only for basic record keeping). You can track very precisely how much you’re winning. You need some reasonable sample size at the stakes/games you’re attempting to gauge - 50k hands is a good number - for you to be fairly confident in your earn rate.

Playing poker for a living is extremely difficult. Because of the general negative effect of the rake, almost no one is a long term winner - I’ve seen estimates in the 3-8% range of players who are overall winners. If you cut that down to people who beat the games for a significant enough amount to make a living on, it’s even smaller. And it’s just getting tougher - there are so many smart, knowledgable players online with so many resources at their disposal that unless your son is very bright, very disciplined, and very dedicated, he won’t cut it long term. The future of online poker in the US is also unsure, with the UIGEA (unlawful internet gambling enforcement act) provisions coming online. It just requires jumping through some minor hurdles now to play online, but that may not be the case forever.

Tell him to get an education and/or a decent job and play poker in his spare time. If he’s a winning player, then it’s an extra income - bonus. But relying on it for a living is extremely difficult and very few people can manage it.

5

Most people lose at online poker but if you have skills and bankroll management you can absolutely make money.

Since it’s online you can play many tables at once and make a lot of money, much more than live poker.

6

I have an aquaintance who made a living off online poker for years. It was around the time when it was just starting to get big on TV and there were tons of newbies to the game. I don’t know how much he was making but I know he gave up a very good finance job to play full time so I’d guess he was making six figures.

He said the reason online is better than in a casino is that the pace is so much faster. You’re never waiting for a shuffle or deal, and every player is on a clock too. Also, he told me he’d have a minimum of four windows up at once since most of poker is waiting for your turn anyway. The theory is if you think you’re a better player than most others, you’d want to get as many hands in as possilble to take out the luck factor.

A couple other interesting anectodes he told me- It is much easier to win money playing sit-and-go rather than entering no-limit type tournaments. Also he said the more money you are playing for, the worse players you’re likely to get. Like the people playing for a hunded dollars a hand are more likely to be rich types who don’t really care so much about losing. That’s purely anecdotal though, don’t know any hard numbers to confirm that and you won’t find me playing a hundred dollars a hand to see for myself!

They had a group of “pro” players who would share info and look out for certain player names that they knew they could bank on to play terribly (and yet keep coming back). It was a whole system they had worked out. I think finding your way into one of these underground groups would be the first thing to do if you’re serious about it.

In the long run, he stopped doing it a year or two ago when they passed the laws that made moving money online much harder. He didn’t think it was worth the risk. But it’s entirely possible that he just wasn’t making as much money as players got better.

7

That was never really true. You did get some incompetant players who were willing to lose lots of money, but in general, the level of difficulty goes up as you would expect with increased stakes. In the golden age of online poker that you’re referring to, it would be more common to find these rich but bad players - but there aren’t many who are willing to lose lots of money over and over again for years, so they either get better or remove themselves from the game. And because of this, online games got WAY tougher over the last few years. You get very savvy players at low stakes where you wouldn’t expect them.

Live poker has gotten a lot tougher too, but not at the same pace - people are more likely to play recreationally in live poker. It’s more fun to get drunk and maybe joke around with everyone at the table and lose your paycheck than to systematically lose it playing at your computer.

In any case, the game is a LOT tougher now than it used to be. If you could send me back to the preboom years, say 2000, with a few thousand dollars and the knowledge I have now, I would have several million dollars within a decade. Oh how I wish I knew then what I know now.

Yep, this highlights one of the concerns with online poker. If you’re not willing to engage in shady behavior yourself (I never have) you’re at a disadvantage to people who will.

There’s not really a substantial risk with UIGEA, at least during the first few years when most of the provisions weren’t even in effect yet. The games got tougher and your friend had a harder time coping is the most likely explanation. Or he got burned out - it’s not easy emotionally when you can play 200 hours in a month, and play well, and still end up down 3 months rent from where you started.

8

I guess I should have asked about the legal aspect too. Even if he was making good money I still worry that 1) It is not fully legal and 2) Even if it is legal, it attracts a lot of people working on the margins of the law.

Good info so far. Thanks for the suggestion SenorBeef. While he doesn’t live with us we do help out sometimes and I think with might be worthwile to have a look at the stats you mention. He is easily smart enough and driven enough to cut it but that doesn’t always translate into good money management skills or good life choices, sadly.

I feel like I have to believe someone named Joey Tightlips when it come to gambling. It sounds like he is doing about what you are taking about.

9

Heh… The gangster with the heart of gold. It sounds like SenorBeef knows what he’s talking about too. The cold truth may be that it’s just much harder than it was 5 to 10 years ago. There has to be a reason all these people are going back to real jobs after making a living playing cards all day.

10

Ask him to let you watch while he plays online. Then ask to look at his transaction history. This will show you how much he has put in and how much he has taken out. He likely won’t let you see that. It is probably because he is losing money.

11

Having a real job is a better choice. It takes a peculiar combination to be a professional poker player - you need to be very smart and logical and disciplined and independent, which are all skills that could land you a pretty good job in the real world. So you need to be broken in some way where you can’t cut a real 9-5 job, hence, your remaining best option is poker.

12

In the San Jose clubs they had (or still have?) “prop” players who are payed $20 per hour or something to play poker (using their own money) to keep games going. This seems relevant to the thread even though it’s probably a bad proposition: you have to play at the table that management tells you to, which, almost by definition, will be the table no one else wants to go to.

13

Reminds me of the old joke about how to get rich playing lotto: selling a system to other players.

Similar, besides playing and dealing poker, he could sucker in newbies to teach them poker and - if he has the necessary teaching skills - earn a modest side income.

14

Could be wrong, but my understanding is that one doesn’t make a living playing poker as much as one makes a living gambling.

Surprisingly or not, the game of poker is a game of chance and no amount of ‘skill’ will ever change that. Conversely, successful gambling is less of a game of chance and one may become quite skilled at that ‘craft’.

15

While there is chance involved, poker is the one gambling game where skill is significant - which is why the house takes a piece of the pot, and does not gamble against the players.

My brother plays quite a bit, some online but also in Vegas and Indian casinos. He makes lots of money hanging around tournaments - not playing in the tournaments, but playing against the poker fans who hang around and who think they are better players than they are. He is well aware he loses sometimes, but does make money - but he doesn’t try to make enough to live on.

16

The first think you should do is to get him to compile a spreadsheet with all wins and losses over a fairly long period. We are very good about remembering winning and forgetting losing, and he might have convinced himself he is making more money than he really is. He should also factor in that playing poker doesn’t get you insurance, social security, and there is no withholding. He’d owe self employment tax, I’d think.

If he doesn’t like numbers, he shouldn’t even consider playing poker for a living.

17

I have a friend that is a professional poker player. He quit college and began playing online for several years. He eventually moved to Vegas. He plays in lots of live tourneys and cash games, but the majority of his income comes from on-line gambling. His earnings are very volatile year to year, but he averages net winnings about $250k per year and has had a couple of >$1 million per year net winnings. He also has sponsorships from various online poker sites which also supplement his income.

Pro poker players are similar to professional atheletes, it takes quite a bit of skill to be successful and some luck and not that many are really successful. Although, like pro atheletes, a lot of young guys think they can do it too.

18

I have some personal experience in this area. I was playing middle limit professional poker in the 1990s in Las Vegas, earning a bit more than I had earned as a casino executive.

And then the internet hit. In the early days of PlanetPoker (the first online poker site), 100 players online was a normal day, 140 was a busy day. Most of the people in the poker room thought I was nuts for playing online, saying I was going to be cheated out of all my money. Then came ParadisePoker ; the numbers steadily increased, getting up to 1000 and then 2000 players online. They ran a big two week promotion leading up to dealing their 1 millionth hand, giving away thousands of dollars in the process (I got $7,000 in bonuses out of that.) I left Las Vegas … came back to live in my little home town in the mountains of Pennsylvania. I was making far more money online than I was making playing $10/$20 and $20/$40 Hold 'em at the Mirage.

Then PartyPoker started advertising on TV and all hell broke loose … putting the owners Anurag Dikshit and Ruth Parasol on the Forbes billionaire list. Now there were 10,000 and then 20,000 players online. These days PokerStars always has over 100,000 players and goes over 200,000 during prime time and they have dealt billions of hands. So, yeah, online poker has grown … and is still growing.

Before the boom started in 1998, the general consensus around the poker room was that there were probably about 200 players who were actually earning their living playing poker. There were a lot more who were blowing their pensions and savings and quite a few who were able to “play for a living” only because they had a wife or girlfriend with a job.

These days there a lot more people who actually are making a living at online poker; I don’t have any idea how many, but there are indeed many who have made millions and many more who have earned six figures … however, there are still probably only a couple hundred or so who are routinely winning money at the highest levels. Some of the young guns you are seeing on TV now will be broke and gone in a few years; while you wouldn’t want them in your local home game, they are guys who got very lucky for a while and made a lot of money that they are now in the process of giving to the true professional poker players.

Leaving the elite levels, can a person earn $20k or $40k or $60k per year playing poker? Yes, absolutely. With the books and information available today, any reasonably bright person who has the proper discipline (bolded, underlined and italicized for emphasis) can learn to play well enough to be earning somewhere in the $20 to $40 per hour range in a matter of a month or two. That said, most people who attempt it will fail … no way to give a precise number, but I suspect the number who succeed will probably be below 2%, perhaps far below.

Some will fail because they didn’t start with enough money or played at stakes too big for their bankroll and their first unlucky streak puts an end to their adventure … it takes a bankroll to survive the inevitable up and down streaks. Some will fail because they don’t understand how gambling works; they will sit down, win $1200 in a few hours and take two weeks off, figuring they’ve made their two weeks pay … then, at the end of the year, instead of having played 2,000 hours and earned $30,000, they have only played 1,000 hours and only earned $15,000. But most will fail because they lack discipline. They will hit a streak where they don’t win for a few hours or days or weeks and will emotionally blow up and lose all their money by playing poorly in one way or another.

Many of the people who are successful at the highest levels year after year are the driven types whose every waking moment is filled with thinking about poker … some of them back off a bit once they become successful and make room in their lives for friends and family and “normal” activities but my experience has been that they have all gone through the process of living nothing but poker. And some stay in that “consumed” mode for a very long time … notice how many of the guys, not just the 22 year olds, but those in their 30s and 40s whose cheering section at the final table consists of their mother.

Dealing for a living is a different story. A lot of, but by no means all, poker dealers are people who tried to play for a living and didn’t make it. They can earn a decent income by doing something they like; good for them.

Wow, this is getting long. Ok, so … Can you make a living playing poker? Absolutely. My entire income since 1998 has been from poker and for each of the years since 2000 my income has been a multiple of the earnings from any job I ever had. Is it harder than it used to be? It is harder than it was in 2002 but it is much much easier than it was in 1998. Will you make a million dollars? Maybe. Will you make a million dollars in a year? Maybe, but probably not. Will it turn you into a socially isolated misfit? If you let it … but then again, ain’t it grand that “very smart and logical and disciplined and independent” people who are “broken in some way” that disallows being a successful corporate cog can still earn a decent living.

Have fun. Good luck.

19

You’ll probably get better information at two plus two forums.

In my experience, it works like this:
For every X bet, you’ll get Y% of X back. Good players have a profit of about 3-8%.

However, what they don’t tell you is the range. For any given set of games, the range can be -500% or +500%. As you can imagine, -500% is pretty rough if the given set is 3-6 months of games.

Therefore, you need a pretty big bankroll to play poker full time. While it is possible to profit consistently, the losing streaks can be ridiculous.

My worst losing streak was when I lost something like $150 over a weekend. I tracked my hands, and I lost about 18 of 20 hands with QQ, KK or AA (possibly the three best starting hands.) One of those wins (2 out of 18) was when the table folded around to me.

20

If he can’t do it after two years of serious playing he’s never going to be able to.

I have noticed the standard of online poker players has consistently been improving.