I guess the correct answer is: "There is no more money in poker, period" but....

I've been playing poker only since 2015. So I wasn't around in the glory days or whatever. But I've heard a few boom era internet pros say in interviews from that time period that while they sometimes liked to play tournaments, they made their REAL money in cash games. The larger luck factor in MTTs combined with their postflop skill edge over the vast majority of boom era fish made it so cash games were more profitable.

But with the recreational player pool having shrunk so much and with today's players so much better than they used to be, is this still true?

While I myself am focusing on cash games, I can see that the players even at 10nl are much much better than most of the people playing in $11 tourneys and $7 SNGs on stars. So even with the higher level of variance, I wonder if tournaments aren't more profitable today than NL cash games.

Maybe this is already common knowledge to people who have been around awhile but I just thought of it.

Most of recs prefer to buy in for 5 or 10 bucks and see 4 digits prizes, than grinding it out at a cash game. Seems clear to me.

Softer players don't necessarily mean you can still earn money at them it depends some on the rake (i.e. fee the site charges to play in the tournament) and payout structure.

Luck eventually becomes the overwhelming factor in tournaments if you make it far enough so softer also doesn't always translate to someone being able to exercise more skill either. Also tournament skills and cash skills are quite a bit different.

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Yeah GTO is always sucking the money out of cash games, but fear not! GTO will be restricted soon enough. This will revolutionise the game. I cant wait.

????

After years posting on these theory pages it is clear to me that I'm the most advanced Poker theorist in the world. For annoying reasons, I have not yet been crowned, but it will come. I've basically cracked everything and it's all really simple. The answer to your question is really simple too...

Ask this to someone who knows nothing of Poker and provided they have their head screwed on they will answer your queries for you -

"Everybody in Poker nowadays is trying to play using a strategy that directly sucks the profit out of Poker. This means that fewer and fewer people can make money from the game. The entire market is dying. There is another strategy people can use but they don't... Nowadays we have computer programs which allow us to see whether a player is using that dark strategy or the nice strategy. So what do you think the casino casino's should do?"

Laws and a recession probably had more to do with poker's supposed demise than game theory.

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Ahh but what if it was game theory optimal that lead to the downfall of our financial world. Economists use it more than us. Right?

Greedy people that thought the US government was going to prop up the housing market forever and then started selling shares in mortgages that were doomed to fail. It had nothing to do with game theory.

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im finding plenty of great cash games and i think poker has made a resurgence.

Tut tut, they are so sure of themselves yet they know so little...

Game theory is the study of rational decision making and so it was obviously important when those people made those decisions. GTO though, does anyone know how often its used in general throughout our economic world?? I know very little about economics. I have scanned textbooks and I think I remember them calling GTO maximin. I think they call exploitative minimax.

In that book, which was made for classrooms, it said -

"Those who attempt a minimax style (exploitative) are almost always arrogant ****.

It didn't really say anything obscene, it was a normal textbook, but I do clearly remember them slating the exploiters and calling them arrogant. Which makes me think that the economic world might well be experiencing exactly the same problem as the Poker world.

The phrase "GTO is the study of rational decision making so it obviously was important..." is like saying "neuropsychology is the study of the relationship between brain biology and psychological behavior so it was obviously important...".

Both of those statements are inanely true. They are practically irrelevant when discussing the direct causes of the recession.

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I think it's kind of well known, but I was still very slow to start switching over to tourneys. They are definitely much softer than cashgames of the same buy-in, but the amount of variance in MTTs is mind-bending, so I keep going back to the "comfort" of cashgames, even though cash players are generally much tougher opponents.
I'll add that I think cash will continue to get tougher, whereas MTTs will always be "soft". MTTs attract a different kind of player, and the format is much less "solvable", which means it's in less danger of being destroyed by bots or just very strong regs. Cliffs: I think MTTs are more profitable, but the variance is insane, so fasten your seatbelt and get ready to race.

Cash games are very very beatable both live and online. I am living proof. I can see a bad cash game player a mile away. It is so obvious when someone is playing their cards, make -EV moves, etc. If you can't see it, study the game more.

Yeah, seems a shame. Maybe I will realize enjoyable aspects of MTTs I haven't seen so far as I play more of them, but I really enjoy the challenge of post flop play. So much preflop shoving and getting it in with a pair on the flop feels mind numbingly boring to me.

I agree with you about post flop play but imho you're looking at tournament poker strategy the wrong way.

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