Quote:
Originally Posted by 1moreHand
For example, even if actually I don't know much about it, bettors seems the richer professional gamblers out there, still I am not sure if trying to become a professional bettor is more plus EV than let's say, becoming a professional poker player, as in betting I guess things are not easier at first when you are building your bankroll, like with poker microstakes, but betting it's the same if you do it for 1 dollar or 1000, and this is definitely an huge obstacle.
Another example would be BJ cards counting, which surprisingly that takes the least amount of study for becoming a professional (I actually don't know if it's really like this or card counter just feel the need to enphazise the simplicity of their activity just because of how mystified it was from Hollywood) but still variance is so brutal.
Or again, winning in live poker is something probably still doable just after reading 6 or 7 books at the 1-2 of any casino, so when it comes to enriching a $7 per hour is maybe the most plus EV game out there, but then if we speak about acheiving 70$ per hour it's all another story and maybe there would be better games to do it.
Ugh there's just so much that you're missing.
How good a game is is defined by a ratio, the standard deviation divided by the winrate (SD/WR), the lower the better. Blackjack has a very poor SD/WR achievable, something like 15-30. LHE tends to be better, 10-20. NL is the best, 5-15.
The problem with poker is that it's not scalable. So while 1/2 can easily be crushed for $20/hr, 10/20 can't be crushed for $200/hr. On the other hand, blackjack is scalable, if you can beat $10 blackjack you can beat $100 blackjack for the same per unit rate.
A lot of "advantage plays" are really high SD/WR. You'll need to calculate out the risk (SD) to reward (WR) ratio yourself.
What a lot of people miss is that there's global labor arbitrage. That means that in general the rewards for work are proportional to rarity; when one opportunity becomes insanely easy or profitable, people gravitate there until it's less profitable. Poker mid-2000s was a boom: read a book, make $50/hr. That was unsustainable, a bunch of people did that and the games got tougher and tougher until they reached equilibrium. Blackjack in the 70's was a boom: computers were available to some but not all, a bunch of nerds worked out the math and beat the casinos until the casinos changed the rules.
Find something rhat you're good at, something you do better than others, rather than try to find the mythical easy money.