You sound like a young aristocrat who doesn't need to grind poker for a living! I would advise you to accept whatever high paid cushy job you end up with and do High stakes poker as a hobby. You likely won't even need to be a winner moneywise, but you may get as good as you can get for the action and competition with the top pros. This is a much more likely scenario for you than grinding out your income at a casino day after day! Good luck, but then you already have had some of that LOL!

Put a 3 year ban on Jsimo imo

Unless you are making a ton of money playing I think it is a mistake to leave any sort of career.

There are two types of situations where going pro makes sense:

1. You are crushing and making tons of money, far beyond what your career generates.

2. You have no post-secondary education, no career prospects, and you are currently working some min wage type job with no advancement opportunities.

To leave any sort of full time stable employment for poker, your hourly at poker should be at least double what the job pays.

15 year old who thinks he's extremely good with numbers :lol:

Fair enough if you actually are but the opinion I get (and holds true almost 100%) is that you're predicted an A* in your Maths GCSE.

The majority of people who could make it playing poker would have much easier lives doing a more "normal" job. There are benefits to playing poker for a living but your post and the way you describe yourself would lead me to believe that you wouldn't benefit from them.

That last one has to be a level lol

It's perfect because it's so obvious it's a level that it must not be a level

Care to explain why you think this?

Because it looks like it's designed to make people laugh, is your question also a level?

I am so sure, that it is not a level...^^
It is a little bit tragic and sad, and it makes me so happy that I am not 15 any more

you need money
you might make it ... don't quit school though

Come on guys, he has been groomed for success. Insta high stakes tourney crusher right there.

In poker where there's games happening all the time, all over the place, online and live, surely selecting your opponents are just as important as the level you are able to play at. You can be an average player but if you can play against players even worse than you at decent stakes, you're a long-term winner. Likewise if you're the 10th best player in the world but only play against the top 9 you're getting crushed.

What do people think? Are there enough bad players out there (online) or are we going to have to keep improving all the time to be able to win?

There are tons of "bad players" that are winners at the lowstakes, imo u dont need to be that good to print 1-2k a month from lowstakes. Yes, you need to constantly improve your game to keep being a good player, you need to re-adjust your game all the time to "beat" other regs.

Not to be rude, but the only thing you need to know is if you're unsure whether you're good enough you're not. I don't mean you, but that's the line in the sand.

Good enough for what?? This is my point. Good enough at low stakes against a bunch of fish or good enough at huge stakes against the best players in the world?

If you have a large enough BR you can actually suck at poker and still be a "professional" player". Somewhere down the line you will likely become a broke "professional player"! This is a nearly impossible OP to give a decent answer to BTW!

Why? With BRM.?

Honestly I think most professional poker players just take the game a bit more seriously and put more time into it. I'm not sure they really have some magical reading or math abilities (except for the top guys). A huge part of it is just the self-discipline. Not getting carried away with wishful thinking. Having the discipline to fold when you really need to. Only bluffing when you sense real weakness in an opponent or have a strong read on them. Stuff like that. I think a good amateur could go pro simply by taking it seriously.

My lastest simulation tells me you have to be at least 50% better than average to profit at 9-man SNGs with 10% fee and 33% places paid. I have no reason to think ring games would be much different. To be clear though, that's completely rake dependent. Also, I didn't include any other costs such as living.

If you can beat the players you pay with then you're a winning player. If they improve then obviously you will have to improve to beat them.

Think of it like a job. If you're good at it and work really hard then you'll get on, if you just turn up and go through the motions to keep the status quo, then you won't

In before merge.


You need to be good enough to have an hourly rate you can live off of.

on a scale of a very bad player to phil ivey, I would say you have to be really good.

I think that is the real dilemma at hand though when people talk about "becoming a professional poker player." People look at Phil Ivey and say "He is the greatest player ever" and then they look at their own game and see glimpses of manufacturing some of what he does but they fail to see his failure, and there is plenty in the soft skills but he will always have someone to back him, someone to help him out.

Alex Honnold, one of the greatest if not greatest free-solo climber (no ropes, no gear of any kind but shoes and a bag of chalk) of all time was asked by a reporter a few years ago "What advice would you give to someone who wants to free-solo climb? How do they know they are ready?" and he said (para-phrased), "I don't think you actually know. I just think you get to the bottom of the wall and if you don't get that feeling in your gut that you cannot swallow and still go up, well, then you are ready."

In poker, we all see that big wall, and we want it, but maybe for awhile we just need to stick to the tougher wall which is inevitably ourselves and when we are ready, we can go and try to excel our game to some new limit, but maybe after getting a job, managing our money, and not having ridiculous expectations but rather sound and practiced processes and the ability to rinse and repeat those to find small successes that add up to more than we could have ever gotten thinking we could climb some crazy, unrealistic wall like "becoming a professional poker player."

Not to be a dream killer, just an opinion...

Not to mention wasn't Phil Ivey a bankroll idiot who used to bust himself constantly by playing outside of his roll in the hope of hitting the good side of variance?

This is true, but anyone ever in need of help to get through tough times should just not play professionally. I've seen this countless times over the years, and while it works for a while, they almost all wind up broke and in debt. If you can't be self-sufficient don't play for a living, and certainly don't begin a career in poker.

This is just not the case in poker. It's very easy to tell when it's time. Money. Lots of money coming in. Lots of money coming in that well exceeds your current job's hourly (and preferably your job's expectation well into the future). When this happens, you leave. You leave when working your job is costing you money. I left when I couldn't afford to keep my job any longer.

Yes. One step at a time. I played the game for 10 years before moving to it full-time, and that was not 10 years of dicking around; it was serious study and play. I also would add that no one should ever look to grind a living playing **** stakes. I suppose if you're only hope is McDonald's then okay, but that just means you should get your ass in school first.

If you can squeak by and make your nut playing small-stakes, great, but keep your job and keep moving up. You will move up far faster if you don't have to keep taking money out of your roll to pay your living expenses. Don't spend any winnings, just keep moving up. There are donks at high-stakes, too. They are tougher, but once you dominate them the difference is the same, so why would you want to be missing out on that action, just for some freedom now?