Mind you for the most amusingly pointless “pro” I believe there’s some autistic kid in germany who massively multitables $1 double or nothings, who apparently is definitely not a bot.
Makes a couple of grand a year. Someone here will be able to fill you in.
Ok I found the link to them: The Ultimate Micro Grinder - Supernova playing 1$ DoN - Poker Beats Brags and Variance
Thanks again for the info, especially TURBLE’s excellent essay. You last sentence so perfectly describes the situation here. My son is an extremely smart, obssesive person who lives and breathes poker these days but is “broken in some way” so far as daily work goes. He ain’t going to be a corporate cog; can’t do 9-to-5.
Just to be clear, if it were up to me my he would get a nice boring 9-5 job and a mortgage - That’s how my mind works. I’m as boring as it gets and it looks to me like he is out on a limb, sawing away but that may just be my perception. Looks like there may be hope.
To give credit where it is due, keep in mind that that great phrase came from SenorBeef earlier in this thread. It resonated strongly with me, too.
Me personally? No.
This couldn’t be more wrong.
The only casino game you can possibly get a positive expectation at is blackjack, but casinos know exactly what you’re doing and have effective techniques to identify you and remove you from the casino or techniques to prevent counting from working like no mid-deck entry or continuous shuffling machines. At any other type of casino game (craps, roulette, bacarrat, whatever), you can’t win in the long term. It’s simply mathematically impossible. People will claim to have their various systems, but they’re all idiots.
Poker, on the other hand, really isn’t a casino game in the same sense. Yes, it’s often played at casinos, but that’s not a necesary part of it. The casino does not act as a player, you do not bet against the casino. They make their money from taking a small cut from every pot. So unlike blackjack, they don’t care if you’re a winning player - it’s not costing them anything, you’re paying the fees as much as anyone else.
As far as the whole “luck vs skill” thing, it’s difficult to explain because most people don’t have a very good intuitive understanding of probability. There’s no supernatural luck - luck is just looking back at the results of random events and deciding when they’ve favored you.
Of course the fact that TV and movies always get poker completely wrong doesn’t help. They try to give the impression that being good at poker is somehow being the guy that gets dealt really good cards and wins hands. It’s a red herring. Over any reasonable sample size, everyone gets the same cards - everyone gets roughly the same amount of luck.
The difference is that you the right play at the right time which carries with it a positive expectation, and force your opponents to make a worse play and hence carry the sucker end of that bet.
There are short term swings. I can play good poker, outplay every at the table, and yet go home that night with a loss. More rarely, a bad week. More rarely still a bad month. That’s the fundamental appeal to bad players - despite playing badly, they can have short runs where they win. Then they convince themselves they’re good, downplay the bad times and remember the times the short term variance went their way, and keep coming. If the daily results always tracked the quality of the decisions, bad players would never win, hence, there’d be no games worth playing.
But over any sort of reasonable sample size, say a year, bad players will be losers and winning players will be winners. Over a large enough sample size there’s effectively no luck at all - the short term variance will even out, and everyone will have the same amount of luck.
Quite right. Credit to SenorBeef, well said.
This reminded of one of the reason I don’t like to gamble. I used to teach math to adults and was approched by a group of guys who wanted me to assess their “system” for winning money at roulette. Anyone who has ever seen the game has probably imagined the same system: Bet on a single color and, every time you lose, you double your bet. Given infinite money you could continue until your color comes up and basically win your inital bet each cycle. This is a very bad system but these guys would not see it because they couldn’t imagine the improbable - that their color might really not come up over the course of 6, 8 or even 10 bets and the amounts you would need to bet go up exponentually. Even if the house didn’t have a built in cut the system is bound to lose eventually.
Nothing would convince them. I guess I’m a bad math teacher. Anyway, they had to try it and took something like $6,000 to a casino and lost most of it. Still they didn’t learn anything. They thought that they lost because they didn’t bring enough money.
A.k.a. a martingale.
I know a number of people who make money playing poker. A few of them very successful doing so. Winning a few Poker tournaments goes a long way to paying your expenses.
Most of the poker players I know are college students who grind money out here and there but still need a ‘real’ job when it comes to paying bills.
I made a “living” at poker from 2000 to 2003, right at the height of the craze. I put “living” in quotes because I was in high school at the time and thus my expenses weren’t very high.
My secret: You know how they say “play the man, not the cards”? Well normally people that say that mean that you should make decisions at the table based on what the other guy’s actions/tendencies are. But a better application of that idea is to choose tables where the fish are.
Where are those fish? Not online. Not in casinos. They’re in backrooms of delis, they’re in fire halls on Friday nights, they’re in the church basement (!), they’re wherever people meet to get away from their wives, drink beer, and talk about football. THOSE people are the ones that will give you their money, not the online players or the casino addicts playing the $1-$2 Sit&Go.
I won $400 from those people almost every night. I remember being pissed off when I’d play for 4 hours and only take in $50. I won so much and so often that I was actually angry if I didn’t win enough! The most I ever lost in a night was $200. The most I ever won was $1200. I’d come home at 3 a.m. with bills stuffed in my pockets that I wouldn’t count until I was waiting for the school bus three hours later. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think I was selling drugs.
Once you’re actually at the table, you need to stay DISCIPLINED. I came into the game with the discipline of a chess player (who sit still for 5 hours straight and do nothing but think slowly and methodically) so it was easy for me to avoid chasing straights and flushes. I was proud of my ability to fold. I stayed addicted to my chips and not to my cards. And the money just kept coming in.
So that’s my adivce to your son. Get off the browser, leave the casinos, and get to the fire halls. That being said, I think your son is lying. I think he’s losing money and lying about it. It’s a classic sign of gambling addiction.
It is absolutely possible, in fact easy, to make a living at poker. But you won’t get rich, and you won’t have much fun. Just read a couple books and play super-conservatively – you’ll win an amount better than minimum wage, but it’s very boring. You have to play at the small-stakes games where you grind out $5 here and $5 there. You’re making a profit, but it’s just like any ordinary job. After a month or two, it will stop being fun and you will definitely think of it as work. You’re not beating the system, you’re just grinding away at a job, the same as any low-level office worker and making about the same income.
But most people who try it realize they’re not getting rich, then lose their discipline and try to gamble for higher-risk/higher-reward by taking more chances, playing for higher stakes against better players, entering high-stakes tournaments, etc. A few succeed, but 90% of them will lose.
If you have the discipline to stick to that “slow-and-steady, make better than minimum wage, but don’t expect to ever get rich” style of play, then go for it. Otherwise, find a real job.
It seems evident that it’s very possible to make money playing online or live poker, if one is skilled. Nobody has mentioned that it’s a zero-sum game: For every dollar you win, somebody else loses. This is what I dislike about it - unlike “a real job”, no wealth is being produced.
Actually, looking only at the players, it’s a negative sum game due to the house’s cut.
I’d like to point out, as I always do in these threads, that the Martingale is NOT “a very bad system”. In fact, it’s not even a “slightly bad” system. It’s a legitimate betting pattern that yields the results that it promises- every time your bet wins, you get your initial bet increment as profit.
The problem is that people then take it an apply it to roulette. THAT is the error. Every bet you place down on a roulette table has a negative return (of what, like -2%? -2.5%?). It doesn’t matter what bet you place or where you put it. It’s always going to lose that percentage in the long run.
Let’s say that I bet on 34, 35, and 36 every time. Let’s say that someone else bets on red every time. And finally, let’s say that you play the Martingale. After a sufficient number of spins to constitute “a long run”, who leaves with the most money?
Answer: We all tie. We’ll all walk away missing 2% (or whatever) of each bet we put down.
The Martingale is no better or worse than any other betting system. So the only way to beat roulette is to not play.
That’s not the flaw with the martingale system. It would work, if you had an unbounded bankroll and the casino did not impose a cap on bets. Neither of those are the case. But if they were, he system would work, and you could slowly increase your already unbounded bankroll.
which is another big problem; gambler’s ruin. Betfair here have a “zero lounge” where the games have no house edge (the roulette has no zero, for example).
But you’ll still lose because of gambler’s ruin.
You’re missing the 0/00 in your calculations, that’s why the martingale doesn’t work in roulette. It’s not a 50/50 chance to win a color, it’s actually around 45% to win and 55% to lose. Over time with an unlimited bankroll, you’ll lose around 2% every 100 rolls or so, which are even more devastating because of doubling.
Roulette’s edge comes from the fact that there are either 37 (0) or 38 (0, 00) possible places for the ball to fall, but the payoffs are treated as if there were only 36. The true odds of hitting either color are (for a double zero wheel) 18/38, but it pays out as if it were 18/36. This is true of any bet - betting a particular number is 1/38 but pays 35:1, etc. The 5.26% house edge is always there.
Martingale doesn’t work because there’s no such thing as an unlimited bankroll. There’s always a risk of ruin. It just shifts the variance around. You either win a little bit or lose a whole catastrophic amount, but no matter how you stack it all together, it still works out on average to be 5.26% in the house’s favor. There is no way to turn a series of bets with negative expectation into a positive expectations.
I’ll add some more thoughts here.
Nearly all winning poker players keep records; they can show you precisely how much they earn per hour for each type of game they play … and those records are needed for dealing with the IRS. Then again, most losing players claim they know how much they are winning but will only offer stories of spectacular winning sessions as proof.
Walk into a poker room and take a look at the low limit tables. On a randomly chosen table you may or may not see one or two players who actually win in the long run; people who win at low limits in live games tend to move up to higher limits so they can win more.
Most of the players will be marginal; they win or lose fairly small amounts, having learned through experience, or perhaps a quick reading of a decent book, how to make their money last until their next check comes in … a few might actually be supplementing their income by a few dollars an hour. Low limit games sometimes die out toward the end of the month and then fill up again on the 3rd when Social Security checks arrive. Those marginal players form the “core” of the games, keeping things going so the big losers and the actual winners have a game to play in.
And you will have one or two players who are totally clueless and are in the process of quickly losing all the money they are willing to put into play.
At the middle limits, say $10/$20 to $20/$40, the game makeup is much the same except that it is much more likely that there may be a couple of players who actually play for a living or for a significant part of their living. You still have the marginal core of relatively small winners and losers and the one or two clueless gamblers who support the winners and the casino.
So, on the subject of earning minimum wage or thereabouts … yes, that is fairly easy, and a lot of people stay stuck at that level. To earn more, one must play for bigger stakes … and the bigger the stakes, the more better players there will be on the table and the better you must be to win … and that is where the books and the studying and the “consuming” come in. You can learn enough to be a marginal winner at low stakes by reading a good poker book, but to consistently beat the middle limit games requires rereading the book many times and spending a lot of time thinking about poker away from the table. Many of the people you are trying to outplay will have literally worn the covers off multiple copies of their book, struggling to understand the difficult concepts that most people either skip altogether or just skim through and think they actually understood. The one who keeps rereading and rethinking will have frequent “Ah ha!” moments for a very long time during his poker career when a complex concept suddenly becomes clear.
To earn more in live games, a player must play bigger limits, but the internet games have brought about a peculiarity. A player can pretty quickly learn enough to beat, say the $3/$6 game for, say $6 per hour (not a large amount … a strong player would be able to win more than $12/hour at that level). A live game player winning $6/hour at $3/$6 who tried to move up to $10/$20 might lose or might end up only winning $4 per hour; he probably needs to be able to beat the small game more soundly to do well at the higher limit.
But an internet player can play two games at a time. With his attention divided, he wouldn’t be able to beat both games for $6/hour and earn $12/hour, but he might beat each game for $4/hour and end up earning $8/hour. And then he might go to four games at a time, earning only $3/hour per game, but making $12/hour total … and then 20 games at a time, earning less than $1/hour per game, but still increasing his total win. The problem is, he is not advancing his poker skills. He is not learning how to beat bigger games.
The low limit online games are full of players like this. Any game you join is likely to have two or three players who are playing 8 to 20 games at the same time. These are the players with only minimal poker skills earning low wages in a mind-numbing manner. Doing what they do will never lead to being a better player able to beat bigger games for a meaningful amount of money. To progress, they must cut back down to one bigger limit game and actually study. Most of them won’t; they will burn out and pronounce poker to be a mind-numbing grind for low wages.
I say they never really learned to play poker; they learned a few basic skills and applied them in a mind-numbing mechanical manner. Real poker is anything but mind-numbing; if your mind isn’t constantly active, you’re doing something wrong. If you know what to look for, there is always something to observe and think about on a poker table, even on the internet.
So I say it is the fear of risking more money by moving up in stakes and the lack of actually studying the game (as opposed to thinking about buying a poker book … or thinking about reading that book you kept on the nightstand for a few weeks) combined with the internet exploit of playing multiple games with minimal skill that causes the fairly common scenario of the minimum wage burn-out.
A reasonably bright person will be able to earn $20/hour at $10/$20 Hold 'em with a month or two of playing 40 hours a week and reading / thinking about poker for 20 or so hours a week. Study more and earn more and move up.
Missed the edit window.