Thought I’d just check how many poker players we’ve got here on SDMB.
How long have you been playing, do you play seriously or just for fun, what’s your favorite game, what stakes do you play, do you prefer online or live play?
I’ve been playing NLHE for some time now - don’t really know if I’m any good, though. I started out playing cash games, but now I’ve switched over to single and multi table tournaments. And only micro stakes, in the $1-$10 range basically.
I do enjoy playing live a lot more than playing online, really, but I don’t have anyone to play with.
I haven’t played any other than on-line in the last couple of years. But there was a stretch of time where I was renting a portion of a house from a fireman aquaintance and he and his fireman/policeman buddies got a steady weekend game rotating from house to house. I was making out pretty good. We did the standard $20 buy-in Texas Hold-Em tourney style, sometimes with secondary buy-ins. Sometimes we’d play three or four tourneys in one night, depending on the time.
We all got used to each other’s styles, but in the end, I was cashing in every weekend, even if it was just getting my buy-in back. But I had my share of wins.
Poker covered my car payments for about a year … that was nice.
I play weekly in a local pub league. It’s free to play, with cash prizes, sponsored by the pub, for the top two players. It’s not very good poker, but it’s something.
Every three or four weeks, I host a home game: $20 NL Hold’em tournament followed by either a second $20 tournament or a .25/.50 cash game.
I go to Atlantic City two or three times a year to play 1/3 NL Hold’em.
I play online, mainly microstakes, a couple of days a week.
I’m not saying I play well, but yeah, I guess I play poker.
I very rarely play in tournaments here in Vegas. I’ve played 3 casino tournaments and split top prize once. Didn’t place in the money any other times. I play casually for 5 dollar tournament style buy ins every week with my family.
I love to play poker, going to Tunica MS this weekend, and I will mainly play poker.
I like playing cash games, but I seem to excel at Tournament No-limit. I usually cash or come very close to cashing. I am probably up about 3 grand in the last 15 months from Tournament poker.
However, I don’t like playing tournament NL poker as much as I do cash games. But either I am not as good at cash games or I am not as lucky. I probably will play one tournament Friday night and play $4-$8 limit the rest of the time. I don’t like no limit cash games.
Another Doper Thursday night gamer here…do drop by and play.
Play a little online and also at brick n’ mortars…biggest hand won…about $700+ on a 1-2 NL a few years ago…actually witnessed by a couple other dopers here!
Online is a much cheaper way to learn the game. The competition online is much tougher at equivalent money levels. You don’t learn people’s tells but from what I can see that sort of thing is a very small part of poker.
I used to play poker to earn a living. $10-$20 and $20-$40 limit games, pot-limit and no-limit. Texas Holdem and Omaha Hi were my favorite games. I also wrote some articles for various poker magazines for a while.
I haven’t played a hand of poker in quite a while, online or otherwise. To be honest, I kind of burned out on it. I didn’t like online poker very much, and I got tired of the rummys and low-lifes I wound up playing against in the poker clubs. TV poker incited a whole new generation of loud-mouthed players who think that poker is best played by trying to put everyone around you on ‘tilt’ and generally jabbering like fools - criticizing others’ play and giving free poker lessons to anyone who would listen (or who couldn’t avoid listening). It drove me crazy. The income wasn’t worth the aggravation, the late nights, the smoke, and the stress of bankroll swings, so I went back to a real job.
I play as disposable income permits. Enjoy small Holdem tourneys, and Omaha-8.
I’m probably at a level where if I were to really focus and buckle down I could probably break even or eek a small profit out of it (especially at Omaha, most players are ATROCIOUS). Among the current barriers are the fact that I already work in the industry and therefore tip out FAR too much to make a profit, and a lack of a legitimate bankroll to start playing seriously. So I’ll play a tourney or cash in a random $100 if it’s burning a hole in my pocket.
I have money in FullTilt but don’t play much online either. Cash games are just too tight (5NL table with 7/9 players with VPIP <18). I’ll play an occasional SNG though.
What’s your annoyance with NL cash games? The style of play, or the fact that it’s harder to think of the chips merely as chips when each one is the exact equivalent of actual money? Or perhaps something else.
I find it much harder to distance myself from the money-worth of the chips when playing cash - losing $140 on a bad beat is a lot harder than losing 4,000 chips on a bad beat. It’s a psychological thing for me.
I can easily understand this. Especially the pressure from bankroll swings, and also having to work late nights (and often, I assume).
I’ve never even thought of going pro - I understood from the beginning that I would hate the lifestyle.
Did you make good money, though? Or were you basically grinding it out for a decent, but not great, pay?
I tried playing online seriously for a while but lost interest due to the amount of time required to make any profit. A while back I discovered that I had $30 in my account at PokerStars and ran it up to $1000 in one day playing 5 SnGs with 4 cashes including a first and a second. I withdrew most of it and just play one every once in a while now. It takes about an hour and a bit to get to the money, maybe 90 minutes to win one. They are just right for what I’m after - a bit, but not a lot, of play, a chance to win a few hundred and no financial strain.
Sometimes when I’m doing work at home at my PC I find one of the PokerStars Team Pros and watch them play while I work. A little while ago I watched Joe Hachem lose about $20,000 in 15 minutes playing Hi Lo Omaha.
While posting this I have started playing a tourney for the first time in days. I’m inb the top 20 after a few hands.
I am not really sure, perhaps the chance that my bankroll could be lost on a bad beat. Like this hand:
I am the small blind in a 2-5 NL game. One caller of the BB, I raise to $12 with AH-8H on the small blind, the BB re-raises to $25, and previous caller folds. I call, I am heads-up with BB who has been caught bluffing a couple of times and has been playing a little loose.
Flop was QH-10H-AC, I bet $35, BB raises to $70, I call.
Turn JH, I got nut flush, I bet $100, BB raises me all-in. I think he has A-KH for nut straight (and a draw at 2nd nut flush) since he raised before the flop. I call knowing that there is one hand that beats me.
We turn over the card, and yes he has K-9 of hearts, the only hand that can beat me and I am drawing dead. Ouch. He re-raised pre-flop with K-9 suited.
I haven’t played on-line in quite a while as I don’t have a lot of time on my hands, and I don’t play a lot live for the same reason, but I enjoy NLHE with the occasional bout of PLO, at which I am still very much a beginner. Live I tend to play cash at the highest stakes my local casino offers (a massive £1-£2, min £200 buy-in) - not saying that to brag (obviously, at those stakes!), just it happens to suit my disposable income. I can only afford to play at that level a few times a year, though, other times I may play at lower levels just for fun, and I would play at a lot lower than that on-line, at which I used to enjoy $5 or $10 SNGs.
I used to play a lot of live tournaments when I was a student, but I’ve lost patience with them a bit now as it takes so long to get to the money, and the speed at which the blinds go up and the standard of play makes it a crapshoot much of the time.
At the casino I used to play at, you could volunteer to deal in the tournaments, for which you would get your buy-in back from the other players at the table paying 10% each. You also got a free meal on the house, and could then deal in the private cash games later on for tips. That way, it was possible to go the casino of an evening, get fed, and make money without ever winning a hand of poker. Dealing is hard work, though, and I was rarely able to avoid blowing any of my earnings on blackjack, so it certainly wasn’t enough to make a living, and I’m not good enough to do that by playing the game either.
If I won enough to retire (and then some) in the lottery, I would seriously consider turning professional - I quite like the lifestyle as I’m naturally a night-owl, and now that smoking is banned indoors in the UK that is no longer a problem either. It would certainly be difficult to avoid blowing a large bankroll though.
My biggest tournament cash was ~£600 for third place in a ~70-player, £75 buy-in live event. I would join the SDMB game but I’m rarely available at the right time and have no internet at home at the moment.
Why? I would only make that bet if I was willing to fold to a raise after me. He could have pocket rockets for all I know at that point or another pocket pair, or A anything more than an 8 leaves me dominated.
Been playing for 5 years. I prefer sit & go’s and tournaments to ring games. I play in a pub league and online. NL Hold em is my main game, but i like some Omaha now and again just for fun.
biggest tournament cash was $6022 for 27th in pstars sunday million in Feb 2007
I play online and occasionally in the local pub league. I’m best at tournament play, and almost never bother with ring games (I’ll do a SNG once in awhile)… Texas is my best game, but I’m a decent HORSE player as well, which is a bit more challenging. I’m a stay-at-home mom, so trips to actual casinos are pretty few and far between for me, but every year or so we take a family cruise, and most of the cruise ships have casinos - I’ve always done very well playing poker against the tourist crowd.
The late nights were really hard on my family. It was okay when we didn’t have a child, but that was one of the factors for me - around here, all the big limit games started at 6 PM, didn’t really get going until about 8 or 9, and the most profitable hours were between midnight and 4 AM. I’m a natural night-owl, so the hours didn’t bother me too much, but it played havoc on my family life.
Yeah. Like many things that are fun to do when you feel like it and in moderation, playing poker for a living becomes tedious really fast. You know what sucks? When you’re sitting at home and you really don’t feel like going ‘to work’, but you tell yourself that you have to treat it like a real job. So, you get dressed, drive across town in the dark, sit down with a bunch of people you don’t like, and proceed to lose a thousand dollars. Then you get to go home with the knowledge that you’d have actually been better off staying home watching movies, which is what you wanted to do in the first place. At least in a regular job, you know you’re always getting paid.
I did okay for the limits I was playing. No one gets rich playing $10/$20 or $20/$40 limit poker. I think the first year I played I made about 80K, and then the next year I had a real bad stretch of cards and lost money over a 3 month period (which really sucked), and as a result I only made about 40K that year. That was my last year playing for a living.
Before those years, I played lower limits just for pocket money - 3/6 and 5/10 and 10/20 limit poker, and I managed to make a solid 2 big bets per hour at 3/6 and 5/10, and somewhat less in the 10/20 game, because it was generally full of pretty decent players. I still made the most per hour at 10/20 because of the higher limit, but not as much in terms of the amount I was betting, so the swings were worse.
Then again, why would you be buying in for your entire bankroll? That doesn’t sound like a good plan.
That’s a pretty decent cash! Good on you, sir!
I can’t even imagine the stress of knowing that you can hit a really bad run at any time, and will then be forced to scrape a living anyway, use your savings etc. I don’t think I could do it, even if I were good enough of a poker player to make a good profit.
