The two certainly have a lot of similarities. One major difference is in the rate the two games have developed at. The skillset required to be at a certain level at chess in 2012 is not much different from it was in 2002. This is obviously not the case in poker (and I guess this issue is pretty close to the point being discussed here)

FYP

whatever the average or a good hourly is at 200nl isnt necessarily relevant. the reason why a coach has a potential to be so valuable is that a miniscule change in winrate, like .1 pt bb/100 leads to +4k in winnings over 1m hands

and its not inconceivable, in an extreme example, that if someone is b/e at 200nl, they can become a 1.5 pt winner, which is +120k over 2m hands

While true, an often overlooked negative of coaching is when a coach doesn't improve your game and actually harms it. People seem to always see it as "If I get a coach I'll get better, if he just improves me this much I'll make this", but they ignore the "He could mess up your game and damage it by .xBB and you'd lose the cost of coaching plus the effect of that mistake over the course of y amount of time."

Even though this is true, You first of all need to be hiring a coach that sucks in order for this to happen and then not realise that he sucks. This has happened before and it will still happen, but IMO nowdays if you do your research, it's not hard to find out who is a good coach and who isn't. I think the player looking for coaching should done more research than some have done. I mean, just because someone has a coaching thread on 2p2 with some results and a couple of guys saying he gave good coaching, doesn't mean that he is a good coach.

Thats part of why this thread is created tho.

It seems like just about anyone can pay to have a coaching thread on twoplustwo, which is also heavily moderated to remove criticism and bad reviews.
And for every horrible coach there will be a lot of gullible morons who will post favorable comments which will be the ones that stay.

Such a tilting argument. It assumes that all you need to be a good, successful player is theory.

What about those who **** up due to not getting their mental game right? (Of which there are a significant number...)

It's true that it's a possible scenario, but how would you go about judging their worth as a coach in that case?
The logistics behind hiring such a coach without a solid track record would be a hassle.

You'd also have to question a person who would, despite a solid theoretical framework, not put effort into their tilt issues as there are a lot of very good resource to use.

I agree that it's not hard nowadays to figure such stuff out, but even if you just misapply someones advice, or if someones approach to the game doesn't jive with your approach to the game, things can go wrong. A lot of poker is based on image, and a lot of a players approach to the game is based on their underlying theory on the game. I'm not saying coaching is always or mostly detrimental, but it can be and that's all I'm saying. Even if someone is a good coach, it's not guaranteed that they're not going to have ideas that hinder your game.

No it doesn't. Read it again? I wrote that the only way you can know if someone has good theory is if they're winning. Other peoples opinions and reviews aren't always reliable whether they're made with good intentions or not. The only way you can truly know that someone has a good approach to the game is if they have solid results to back it up. There's a chance they might not be great at explaining the game to others, but you're going to be much better off getting coaching from a winning player hoping they can explain their approach rather than getting coaching from a losing or slightly winning player and hoping that they're understand of poker is stronger than their results suggest.

How can they, or someone less skilled than them, possibly know this is actually the reason for their failure? Yes, there must be some players that fit this profile. But I'll bet their ranks are dwarfed by the number of players who think they lose due to 'not having their mental game right', but really have other leaks in their understanding of the game they're just not aware of, like mental FGators'.

Since I can't tell the difference between the bad players and tilty theoreticians (if I could then I wouldn't need their coaching in the first place), the only reasonable thing is to restrict my choices to those who have both their mental and theoretical **** together enough to beat games bigger than mine.

The #1 Top grossing 200NL player On Stars last year made 79k according to PTR. He made SNE playing 200nl 24 tables at a time.

He had to average about 1,800 hours for the year to make SNE at the (then) going VPP rate when it was dealt instead of contributed.

Thats $43/Hour before rakeback, With rakeback he made about $105/hour so $125/hour is not Standard for a 200NL player. It's not 2008 anymore

The #2 grossing player was about $10k behind for the year and he was not a mass tabler. His winrate was about 3x that of the 24 tabler but his overall hourly was less. He played about 8-10 tables at once on average and table selected.

His overall hourly was not as high as the $24 tablers due to not getting as much rakeback/hour

The top table selecting 200NL reg made about $100/hour without rakeback on Stars last year so $125/hour is not average, not even close

I think some people need to realise that certain players just don't want to play poker any longer despite it probably being +EV for them. Harrington25 springs to mind.

Harrington25 would have a pretty good track record to back up his worth.
I'm talking about unproven winners.

every single decent reg on every other site than stars is making 40-70$/hr in rakeback alone at 200. Add to that any winrate between 1.5 and 3ptbb thats over 100$/hr. The bumhunters making 20-30k on each site are easily making 150/hr. my last 500k~ hand at 200 are at 112$/hr + rakeback and all my poker friends are around the same hourly

Are people even 24-tabling ipoker/prima etc?
Not to mention, even with the higher RB theres also significantly higher rake. So it doesn't exactly translate as well.

6bb/100 seems high for a guy 24-tabling nl200 but wtf do i know.