the point is that if you are an expert, which means you would slaughter 1,2 then you would move up quickly into higher games. an expert moves up without proper bankroll as most times he will not get so unlucky as to go broke. and if he does he will go back to the smaller game and pump up quickly again and go for it.

so once he gets over the hump he will be gone from the smaller game.

you may need 30,000 to be properly bankrolled for 30,60 but most top players at the game would advance up to that before going broke with 5,000 and probably much less. especially with some game selection and playing in a less fluctuating style.

and getting 5,000 at 1,2 for an expert might take two months or less in a good spot.

Thanks for the words of inspiration. I am not an expert yet...........but challenge accepted.

Speaking of slaughtering 1/2, there's a local underground game.

200-1000 max buy-in with 10% rake up to $10 (free food and drinks!). Game's a gold mine.

But is the rake beatable?

This is heavily NL-influenced. Stack sizes don't really matter above 10 BB, so everything is measured in BB not BI.

Buy in for $2,000 (4 racks of $5 chips, IIRC the game is played with $5 chips which is silly but whatever) and keep another $1,000-$2,000 easily accessible. If you lose more than 8 racks in a night, you're probably going to be tilted anyway.

MSLHE has a SD of about 12 BB/hr. Add a bit for the kill and your bankroll can be estimated with 0.25*(z^2*SD^2)/WR, z = 2 for recreational players and a WR of 0.5-1 BB/hr gives 200-250 BB.

This is unsolicited life advice, but quit poker and spend that time improving your job situation IMO.

The average American salary is $45,000. Sub-$25,000 is well below average. There's just so much you're going to miss out on.

You're right that 30/60 (with a half kill!) is not exactly an everyman's game. But with a semi-decent job, you can save up enough for $5k-ish shots. And if you are expert, one of those shots will stick.

Deposit online and get cheap practice. Post in SSLHE.

(I started with a $2 2c/4c bankroll on Pokerstars and $1,000 3/6 live bankroll.)

almost anybody has an infinite bankroll if they also have a nearby game that they can easily beat. so moving up a bunch of limits should be done most anytime you feel you are the best at that table or close to it.
personally and thats me i would rather jump up to where i can make some real money and risk going back down and grinding my way up instead of grinding for a year or two just so i can have a bankroll to insure that one time bad run doesnt wipe me out.

Lot of unwarranted assumptions in this post. There are places where an "average American salary" is very hard to come by for someone without extensive training and/or job history. There are lots of skilled, winning poker players who, through some combination of non-conformist personality, criminal record, unusual family/lifestyle demands, etc., realistically can't get a job paying anywhere near that. Even if they did want one, and made a serious effort to get it.

It may very well be the case that his most feasible option for bankroll building is grinding a ton of hours at 1-2NL. Beats the hell out of customer service IMO.

It also may very well be the case that you put your life savings on #7 and become a millionaire with a single spin of the roulette wheel - it's possible, but I'd bet against it.

Gambling winnings are worth less than salaries. It's a principle called Certainty Equivalent, the amount of risk-free money you'd accept in lieu of taking a larger EV with variance.

Imagine a game in which you flip a coin: heads you win $0.10, tails you owe $0.05; or, you can take $0.01 without flipping. You'd probably flip. Now, imagine the same game at 100,000x the stakes: heads you win $10,000, tails you lose $5,000; or, you can take $1,000. You may very well choose to take $1,000 if you can't stomach the variance of hitting tails three times in a row.

The math is complex, but in a nutshell, poker CE is about 1/2 of poker EV. Maybe 2/3 if you're really overrolled. So a $20/hr winner earns about the same as a $10/hr customer sales rep.

People get paid on rarity of skill. Neurosurgeons get paid more than baristas because more neurosurgeons could make a latte than baristas could slice an amygdala. Yes, you may have a criminal record and a terrible personality, but if you go into a profession where your skill is rare, people put up with that ****.

Nursing, web developing, IT, geriatric care, etc. are great choices if you want to make money. Yes, you have to actually know something to do these jobs. Yes, you can't walk in off the street and get hired and trained within the hour. But that's exactly why they're valuable.

I cringe whenever I hear about people wanting to play sub-15/30 LHE for money. Even a midnight shift jizz mopper at an adult bookstore will earn more. If you play 4/8 because it's fun and you don't mind winning $4/hr (with a CE of $2/hr), that's fine. But to think you're an expert player building a 30/60 bankroll is self-delusion.

Play 4/8 until you've got the skills to move up, suck it up for a few years and kick / kiss ass at your job until you're not easily replacable.

I never suggested he should play the 4/8. With that rake it's obviously close to unbeatable.

You may not realize it, but your assumptions come across as awfully condescending. First to the guy asking about building a roll for 30/60, and then to me (FWIW I almost certainly know the math as well as you do, but I'm operating on a very different set of values/assumptions). People who fit well into, and are well rewarded by, "The System," usually can't fathom the mindset of those who cannot or will not do so. Please don't project your technocratic values onto us.

It's no different than low stakes poker. Those whose play fits into a preordained system are predictable, joyless automatons, mindlessly chanting the mantras handed down to them by the book.

But they end up with the money.

You want money? Follow The System. (Or be so amazing you don't need The System.) You don't want to follow The System? Don't complain about not having money.

And I don't mean that in a snarky way. You really are free to choose to buck The System and live however you best see fit. You are also free to play JTo because it makes you happy. And if the money doesn't matter to you, it's a totally equivalent choice. But you can't complain about having a sucky job AND being unwilling to change it AND refuse to accept relative poverty.

And if spending the next four years of your life taking night courses to get a better job seems like an absurd hoop to jump through, run it by your grandparents or anyone old enough to tell you stories of the 16-hour days they used to put in at the coal mines after fleeing naked from their native country during the war.

Callipygian: I can't tell if you're deliberately being obtuse or if you really don't understand what I'm saying. I don't want to derail this thread any further though.

I tried to give useful advice to the guy in Colorado who wants to play the 30/60. He can make a good deal of money playing that game if he develops his skills to a reasonable (not high!) level. The fact that he even mentioned looking at POS jobs on the local Craigslist suggests strongly to me that he is not the sort of person who can make anywhere near that sort of money as an employee. You suggest he devote several years of his life to becoming a more valuable employee. I propose a faster, more direct route to his actual goal.

We agree that he can't beat the 4/8 for a significant amount. Given his apparent low value to the technocracy and his affinity for poker, I suggest he learn some rudimentary NL skills and grind long hours in the local 1-2 games. Even with the lousy rake those games are good for something like $15/hr, with low variance. He can play 70-80 hours a week: there are several rooms in Blackhawk, it's easy to game select and/or rathole by changing venues. In a few months he'll be able to take shots at the 30/60. If he keeps his expenses down (drive a beater, live in an RV, whatever) he'll be rolled for that game in a year, maybe a little longer.

$15/hr is $7.50/hr in CE. If he's going to put in 70-80 hours a week doing not-LHE, he might as well keep his job and work a swing shift at a 24-hour Taco Bell.

Image what the rake in California (Los Angeles) if minimum wage goes to $15 hr like the mayor of LA proposes.

How much are dealers in LA paid now?

There is no rake in LA, it's a fixed drop. Big difference, usually more expensive than a variable rake. But why would minimum wage have any effect on the price of poker?

they are business people although not always forward thinking.
they take out all they think they can and still have games.
only more competition will help the players.

as the player pool is shrinking and card rooms closing all over the country, new competition in Los
Angeles seems unlikely. I do agree, they're not forward thinking. No doubt many people in management understand what's happening, but telling their bosses that they should reduce the price for long term health is not a good move for job security.

If they look at it as rolling back the price to near pre-black friday prices it might be more palatable. After black friday, the price of poker almost doubled, because B&M rooms were flooded with players. That's mostly dried up, and now we're seeing the fallout.

I may be missing the point of the CE, but isn't this still ACTUALLY 15 dollars an hour?

look if you are a true expert at say ten twenty or even five ten. no i dont mean just a tight grinder. that isnt an expert.

i would expect you to be able to beat 30/60 by only playing when the game is good and good for your style of play. so if you can make packets of say 800 dollars why not take shots at those games. sooner or later you are going to pump up in one or two games in a row and be over the hump. then you can play more often while still grinding your smaller games to continue to build your bankroll.

ive played alot of 30/60 and getting stuck 3000 is more of a rarity than something to worry about. although it does happen. but usually when the game is nuts.

Simple: Cost of business goes dramatically up. Dealers in LA from what i was told make pretty close to minimum wage. So at say $9/hr current, to say $15 hr proposed, who is going to pay for this? The players are in form of a higher drop.

Also, who is going to pay for the dealers wages in non poker games?

That additional cost is made up in less than one hand per hour, so I think you're being melodramatic, or you don't understand how much the dealer makes the casino in a single hour.

You're also not taking into consideration the value to the casinos of all their poor players making more money to bring to the casino.

Seattle's economy is booming after they instituted a $15 hr minimum wage while most every other city, including LA, is in decline.

Yes, but it's $15 you can't use because next week it might be -$15.

CE expresses your WR as a variance-less number. CE approaches WR as your bankroll goes to infinity. That is, if you have $1,000,000 in the bank, $15/hr WR is going to be like $14.99/hr CE because you don't have to worry about busto.

This is the best point on the higher minimum wage, the more discretionary income available for many people in the area that some will invariably spend at the casino.

CA, unlike most other states and the federal standard, requires the full $9/hr to be paid to tipped employees in addition to any tips they receive rather than a lower hourly wage so long as the full minimum wage is made up for in tips, so dealers that get decent tips will make significantly more than minimum wage.

Still, it's likely around $2-4/hr per table (including off-clock dealers, waitresses, janitors) while that extra 6th or 7th dollar drop is bringing in $20-30/hr. The casinos don't see much change to the player pool after the change and assume the players will play at the same rate with higher rake, resulting in much higher short-term revenue but a decline in the player base that will hurt long-term as it becomes much harder for new or casual players to think they are good because they win a bunch in a few small-stakes sessions in a row and turn into regulars.

Without real competition (no ability to start new poker rooms) and with Indian casinos treating poker rooms as second- or third- tier operations I don't see this trend reversing anytime in the near future.

Great post, and I'd just like to respond to the point in the above quote; and I’ll be brutally honest here about what it takes to create a poker player. They don’t even have to think they’re good to become poker players, and they only have to win once, but it must be immediately. In behavioral psychology, it’s called intermittent reinforcement. In plain english, what it means to casinos is that if a brand new player doesn’t win very soon after starting, they won’t be back. Usually, if people don’t immediately get the rush of winning, they’ll be dismayed, think gambling is a lame way to waste time and money, and you won't see them again.


I’d wager a tidy sum that if you polled poker players, or any kind of gamblers, you’d find that most of them won the first, second or third time they gambled, and in that order too; i.e., most gamblers won on their first attempt, and the least won their third. I doubt many people would try a fourth or fifth time if they haven’t won at all the first three.

And that’s the situation the poker world is in now. The price to play has become so great that new players rarely get the rush of winning that is needed for them to get attached to playing poker and they so do other things.