IME, this just isn't true at the stakes pros play at. A lot of people want to take on the challenge of beating a pro. Others just think of it as gambling and maybe they'll run hot.

I don't think it's professionals that bad players don't want to play with, it's the too serious players wearing sunglasses staring everyone down that they hate. If you're that guy, you need to work on your game.

Its pretty widely accepted that only 7-12% or so of players make money at all. If this is true, then on avg there is only 1 pro per table. The fish are really quitting poker because there is 1 pro at their table? Come on, man! That's just ridiculous.

Poker rooms are all over the place now. I cant even believe how many of them there are. The fish aren't quitting poker. The vast majority of the people I play with believe that everyone loses and that money just gets pushed back and forth between players before it all ends up with the house as rake. They are playing because its fun and they like to gamble. They don't give a rat's ass if a pro is at their table. The whales love having a pro at their table. They dont care about the money. They get a kick out of beating a pro at his own game now and then (even though he has no chance over the long run)

Most non-pros have lives outside a poker room and meet the poker fish in a non-poker setting.

Maybe so but here is what he said:

"Many fish state the reason that they no longer go out and play poker is because they are surrounded by professionals when they do."

That sounds to me like hes trying to say he rounded a bunch of them up and interviewed them. How many people has he run into outside a poker room and got a conversation going where he found out they played poker, they sucked at poker, and that they no longer play poker because there are too many pros out there. Or maybe 60 minutes had a segment on poker fish quitting? Its ludicrous.

I think you are missing my point.

I played for years in a 20/40 LHE game at FW. There were a ton of regs who played.

At any given game I would know 90% to 100% of the players well. And they knew me very well too.

So my point is that whether I answer the question that I am a Pro, that I'm not a Pro, or don't answer at all, it changes nothing. The Regs are trying to beat my pants off regardless. And they already have an opinion about whether or not I am a Pro and nothing I say is going to change it.

Every now and then a new player would sit in and take his shot. And more often than not they knew they were up against Pros. One guy lost about $1,000 in 4 or 5 hours. When he got up to go I tell him that he had improved in the time since he had sat down. He thanked me and sheepishly said "I wanted to see how I would do against the Pros".

Now in a 1/2 NL game if somebody asks the question it is truly funny. There aren't any pros in 1/2NL. At least not for long. Either they move up to where they can support themselves or they quit because they can't. So it doesn't matter. If I happen to be in a 1/2 NL game because I want to try something out for tournaments or the 2/5 NL game is full and I get asked if I am a Pro I will definitely tell them yes but that I specialize in tournaments (which is true). I actually want their best game so I'm happy to lay down the challenge.

Pretty much all of my close friends have told me why they don't go to the casino and play poker. Either they used to or they never tried. Knowing that there are pros, these are smart people who know they'd be a sucker against pros if they sat down and therefore won't play. One of my best friends pretty much said that the reason he never plays poker when he goes to the casino, is because he figures there's people like me there, well practiced and trained to take his money. These guys don't want to be suckers. And they recognize that they would be. It's a smart decision made by smart people really. And I tell them they're doing the smart thing by not playing, because they're my best friends.

The truth is that being a poker player is being a hustler. A hustler is most successful when he convinces the person being hustled that there is no hustle, or in fact ideally manages to convince the person getting hustled that they are actualy the hustler. The last thing a hustler should ever do when attempting to hustle someone is inform them that they are a hustler.

Really? I've never heard this before, so I don't know how widely accepted this is. I personally think it's actually way under 1%.

Fish don't know that only 7-12% of people are winners. They see half the table looking very serious, talking to nobody, being very adept with the chips, knowing all the employees by name, sitting with $650 in a $300 max game and folding every hand, mutter bout their opponenets bad call under their breath, etc, and just assume half the table are pros.

And I encounter many people at the table who claim to be pros who are almost certainly not. These people are bragging about being pros because they think it will impress the people around them, and it probably does impress some who believe it.

So it doesn't matter that 7-12% of players are winners, it only matters what the fish perceive.

1% may be the number in some over raked 2-4 limit game or turbo daily tourny, but there's plenty of winners at 1-2nl and above. I'd reckon more like 15-20% at low stakes and maybe more like 30-35% at a 5/10 game. But I don't see how anyone could actually know the figure.

I regularly see the large game running at my local casino with 4 or more players that I'm 100% certain are full time pro's. If there's a fish at the table with a loss rate of $600/hour, there can be a few pros feeding off this one fish. Throw in a couple of players with $150/hour loss rates, and a couple of breakeven players, and you've got a game.

I would never tell someone I'm a pro. Sure, a lot of people wont give a sh*t, but why even take the risk of scaring off the fish.

Plus, in my experience, your fold equity tends to go way down, forcing you to play abc mind-numbing poker. .

I've felt the opposite is what happens or would happen. I certainly know that I try not to give action to pro players, because I don't expect to have such worthwhile edges on them to exploit. I've always assumed that most intelligent fish would react to a pro player by trying to stay out of their way. I find that most of my profits come from getting my value bets called, so I want players to give me action in the way that you seem to not want.

I'm not talking about one high stakes game that has 4 winning pro's in the game. I'm talking about all players in general - the whole poker room at any given time. There's no way it's anywhere near 15 to 20%, I can guarantee it. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just way off.

Edit: ok, here is the problem and why you believe it's so high:

I love giving pro's action because they're the easiest and most reliable players to read. I have no problem 3betting them light OOP or playing creative against them.

You shouldn't be afraid of someone just because they play every day. A lof of them are spoiled kids with rich parents and nothing better to do anyway and are not winning in the long run.

And the way you make money (as a pro) is not only by getting your value bets called. You just won't have enough of them in a given session to live off of.

Interviewing fish who they no longer go out and play poker about why they don't is practically meaningless without interviewing fish who do go out about why they do. It's like interviewing only former patrons of a restaurant about why they no longer go and then shutting the operation down when they tell you "It's too crowded".

Further, it's the nature of competitive games that those averse to competition will be turned off. Do you think the fish you interviewed all lost to pros, or is it more likely that they tell themselves that either to feel better about their losses or because they think everyone who beats them is a pro? Do you trust a bruised fish to be able to set his ego aside and correctly identify the pros?

Add that to the effects of survivor bias and the general fact that the vast vast VAST majority of people who have played poker once no longer do, and you leave yourself with a ridiculous extrapolation.

I've lived off my style of play for 10 years (obviously it has evolved greatly over those years and always continues to evolve) and the bulk of the profits have always come from value betting with the best hands, I expect there are many winners whose profits come mostly from their good hands. At LLSNL I feel pretty certain most winning players are primarily making their profits by getting their value hands paid off. I think only once you get to MSNL will you find players making a large portion of their profits from non-showdown hands.

So you're saying that a typical table has on average less than 1 winning player on it? I don't see how that really makes sense in any game that is being raked reasonably.

Unless you just mean out of the total population of players, but it doesn't make sense to weight players who play 3 hours a year equally with players who play 1000 hours a year. Obviously pretty much all players who play less than 100 hours a year are almost certainly losing players. When I say 15-20% of players are winners, I mean that on average there is 1.5-2 winning players on a 10 handed table. If it wasn't for rake there would of course be more like 4-6 winning players on a typical 10 handed table.

You don't need a Kinsey Report on Why People Don't Play Poker to understand the basics.

For example, this:

Even as a poker pro, if all your friends are solid winners, you're in a bubble.

And furthermore, if you've never run into ex-players and had a conversation about poker, why don't you take it from those of us who have?

Like I said above, you don't need some comprehensive survey of everyone who ever quit poker. The fraction of people who quit because they admittedly lost too much money is high enough so that if you run into a few ex-players one of them will admit it to you.

In the case of my friends, it isn't even that they lost much money. It's that they don't like how seriously the games are taken by the people who play at the casino. Most of my non-poker (all my close friends are non-poker friends) friends have some interest in the game, and either used to or still occaisonally do play small buy in home games, or online for play money. They like the game, but they are intimidated by the environment in casino poker rooms. And the most intimidating thing to them is that they think there are lots of pros at the casinos, and whether they're right or wrong about that doesn't matter.

And if several of my friends feel this way, it's pretty likely there's a lot of people out there who feel this way.

Not that I have ever agreed with you on just about anything, but with this statement you have lost all credibility.

This is as far as l got into the thread before finding my answer to this question. Well said, sir.

Myself, I either say I'm a student as they tend to assume I'm a novice player with deep pockets lined with loan money... Or if I haven't showered recently, I will play the part of the degenerate gambler. I say I just left the blood store and I'm playing with my plasma money... I chase a couple CHEAP bad draws with bad odds a couple times then go for the big trap.

Underrated tactic, even without giving a back story

Equity specialist

Yes, much less than 1 per table. I don't know why you believe 1 out of every 5 live players are overall winners (I am not referring to the one 5/10 or 10/25 game in the room, I was referring to every table combined).

I will take FE over being paid off any day of the week AINEC. When I raise 5x with KQ, I'd much rather the limper fold his 33 rather than shove his short stack on me.

If you play at tight tables or in deep stacked games, you could probably have a win percentage of >70% of your sessions, regardless of the hole cards you are dealt, which is pretty sweet if you play professionally.

Having short stacks shoving 30BB's with any pocket pair puts us in crappy spots where we have to flip with our strong hands like AK-AT, when we could make way more from our opponents on these hands if they had a stack behind them. Needing to be dealt JJ+ in order to make $ negates our edge significantly as pros. Sure, we are a guaranteed winner in this game, but its for less money and more variance. If we go on a run bad/card dead stretch in a game like this, you could easily have a 1000 breakeven stretch. Which means, unless you have a fat bankroll, this could wipe you out as your roll keeps being dwindled by life expenses.

So long story short, you don't want people to know your a pro. Not only are they going to feel uncomfortable playing with you, they are going to become extra sticky. I'd like to be able to rep the flush card and nobody think twice that I could be bluffing, because it's really hard to make a flush when you play 10% of your hands or less.

I agree your conclusions about who you want to play with is self-consistent with your strategy.

This isn't a strategy forum but I disagree with your strategy, which is why I disagree with your conclusions.

I don't understand how you think every player is losing. Maybe in some weird poker environment where the rake is atrocious this could happen, but if 7 or 8 or 9 people at a table are losing, 1 or 2 of the others have to be winning. This pretty much applies at both the micro (random table) and macro (overall player pool) since they are pretty much the same thing. The losing players money has to go somewhere and when rake is reasonable it goes to winning players.