I've been playing poker for a couple years now but never really serious.

I'm looking to start at 2NL and attempt to slowly beat each stake and see how far I can make it up the stakes with a positive win rate.

Eventually (years down the track) it would be cool to play online poker for living, it's definitely one of my biggest dreams, but is it really possible just playing No Limit Hold'em? It seems like everyone has "figured out" NLH and it might be very difficult to get an edge at the medium and even low stakes.

I've heard a lot of people have moved to omaha because there isn't much money left in hold'em.

Would be interested to hear peoples thoughts on this?
Thankyou

Define 'decent money'.

2+2 definition- enough to live in your parents basement, eat your parents food, drink you dads beer, smoke your friends pot, and not have a girlfriend. In other words, set for life.

In my opinion you'd have to find really low volume sites that regs dont care to play on like Bovada, Seals with Clubs, etc.

Well I'm making 6 BB/100 (big bets) on average and I'm getting ridiculed by everyone I know for wasting my time.

4 tables at 50 hands an hour for 6 hours = 1200 hands
12*12*.10 = $14 for 6 hours work. I swung about $20 dollars during that period and made it back plus profit in a few hands at the end. It was quite a rollercoaster. Don't think the money is that good until you are crushing small stakes.

Either get really really good at cash.

Or get rather good at MTTs because online tourneys are redic soft for the most part even at the medium stakes. The fish love them.

Good point, let's say your averaging $1000 a week, that's decent money from poker imo.

Plenty of money to be made online:
1) Get staked for $1mill
2) Go play Gus.

Are people making a good (i.e. $100k+) playing online still? Yes

Are many people doing it? No

Is it still possible? Yes

Is it likely? No

+1

Also, all of these "can I make (money, fame, glory, a great living, a million $) threads always ignore the most important thing, the OP's skill relative to the competition he/she wants to beat. Poker never was a reliable get rich scheme. Pretty much anyone who didn't already have a ton of skill who took up poker with an eye to huge profits was making a big mistake, and that was during the boom. Now, you're looking at a shrinking market. If your reason for playing poker isn't "hey, I really enjoy it as a hobby", you're making a large mistake.

It is like a person who goes to the local bike store and sees that sweet Felt Team Pro frame on the rack on sale for $5300. He thinks, man that's exactly the bike I saw in the Giro last year and I could ride it. So, should he go borrow $5K and buy the bike with hopes of quitting his day job? He loves biking. He has the same tools that the pros use. Heck, he's been biking his whole life and his dad (who was good at biking) taught him to ride. Goes to biking forum "Is there good money to be made as top pro cyclist".

Answer: Yes, but...

Is there still good money to be made playing poker? Yes, but you need to be really good at poker to make it. There are a smaller number of people making that money than you'd think. The effort to get that good is probably much more than the effort it would take to make much more money at several other things.

If one of our OP's said, "I'm still doing pretty well in the Commerce 5/10 NL game, but I'm in a rut. Sure I make $100/hour, but I just can't get to the next level. I want to get inspired, move up to 10/20 full time, and maybe do half the year in Mexico grinding online. I miss crushing the online mid-stakes. Do you think there really is a future in it?" The answer would be different, because his starting point is so much further ahead. The answer isn't always that poker is unprofitable or terrible. It is just that your odds of making big money are small, and it is years away. Start playing poker for other reasons.

If you start playing and studying now there is close to a 0% chance you will ever be professional.

Well, nothing that was ever good came easy tbh. There's like 80 people applying for each **** minimum wage job in some EU countries, so nothing is really 'easy' these days.

With that said I do think the difficulty of online poker is exaggerated hugely round these parts. They act like it's as hard as getting a Physics PhD or something.

Reality is I think you just have to be prepared to put in huge hours and volume. I don't know about you OP, but after a couple of thousand hands max, I'm sick of poker for the day. There's only so many times you can get dealt AQo in MP before it starts to become groundhog day every day. Plus studying about ranges and optimal 3bet defence combos is a grind in itself, and ****ing boring tbh.

Plus do you really want to play 5000 or 6000 hands of poker every day? Sounds like a great way to turn a hobby into something that makes you want to slit your wrists.

I can definitely confirm it's easy as **** to make a couple of hundred dollars a month playing minimal amounts of poker when you feel like. If you want to go beyond that it's going to be more about whether you have the work ethic IMO.

There were something like 50k engineering PhDs awarded in the US alone in the last decade. Basically all of them are still PhD engineers. Are there 50k poker players making > $100k a year in the world this year. Based on numbers, you could argue poker is harder. The Daniels Coleman and Negreanu made a lot of money this summer. Compared to a big hit at a startup, kind of chump change. You could make the argument that poker is harder and less profitable than engineering. That's across the board and at the lottery winner levels.

Considered poker is an unsolved complex system that a small part solution of a vastly simplified game of poker would more than be worth the thesis of various maths and computing PHD's I'd argue poker is harder than a PHD.

But you make a couple of hundred a month from poker so what do I know.

Whether one the two fields is more difficult to do isn't really that important to me. If you're starting from near zero, whether one or the other is a better path to making a reasonable living seems a more important question. It seems pretty clear that most anyone who has the brains, drive, talent, and/or math skills to make a good living playing poker would be more likely to succeed (and make significantly more money) doing something else.

That said, maximizing money isn't really the goal in most people's lives. It shouldn't be, either. There is a small population of people who would enjoy a poker career more than any other. However like most hobbies, many more people think they would than actually would enjoy playing full time to make a living. As someone who knows a lot of pros, I'd say the poker room (especially live) is hard on the psyche.

As a biggest dream, playing full time online poker is a huge stretch. The fantasy promoting it as a great way to make a living is terrible. Become a soul crushing mid-stakes player before even considering it. By that time, you should have a degree and have the poker experience to know you want it to be a hobby.

Dunno what I've done to offend you but you seem to like belitting my poker achievements, so I'm going to bite back.

You still play 5nl. After over a year been registered on this site. That's absolutely ****ing pathetic and I'd expect pretty much anyone else on the planet would have managed better in that time.

I've little doubt I'm a far superior player based on what you've accomplished so far. 5nl. After a year. A year. A ****ing year. Jfc.

It's pretty much a certainty there's no decent money for you in NLH online based on that though, so I can understand why you feel the need to profess how difficult it is. Because if it wasn't so hard after all, that might be damaging to the ego considering how you've completely failed at it.

There's a pretty obvious sample bias here. Far more people get into the engineering field than try to 'make it' in online poker. The majority of the population isn't even really aware that online poker exists. And of those that are aware, it's a tiny percentage of that population that wants to play it professionally - on all poker sites, the majority of players are there for fun and maybe to earn a bit of money on the side.

Look at the time both 'careers' take. It takes 7 years to get a PhD (4 years undergrad, 3 years postgrad). If someone studied poker for 7 years, putting in the same amount of time as they would into their PhD, would you not expect them to be making decent money at the end of it?

Anyway having seen the content of some of the maths modules at my uni (I didn't study a math subject, just saw some of the course content) it is absolutely lol to me that anyone could consider poker to be harder. University level maths involves stuff that would completely fly over a randomers head leaving him with no idea where to even start to understand it. There's nothing in poker like that. Everything can be understood in theory at least and from there it's just a matter of study and playing to put it into practice.

400nl+ is pretty tough and its not easy getting there.

Rake is high
micro games are tougher
player pool is getting smaller, fish lose quicker
segregation
software gets more powerful to aid players bumhunting or solving situations

Some PhDs are pretty lol tbf

I think anyone with a PhD in Physics or Maths could or already are capable of being a winning poker player who makes decent money. I also think there are only a few winning poker players who make decent money that can get a PhD in Maths or Physics.

I mean, when somebody solves a poker toy game, we don't think 'wow, what a good poker player', more like 'wow, what a good mathematician'.

To answer OP, I don't know. I mean it's obvious that there are still chances to make decent money, but it's becoming a very time consuming game. It will take a while to make anything decent (years), unless you fluke a tournament.

No doubt, but if someone studied for 7 years (and I mean proper study, like one would do for an engineering PhD, not just watching some PAD and posting a few comments on 2+2 forums) I'd imagine they could expect to be around that level by the end of it. 7 years is, after all, a long time.

At any rate I'm sure you'll agree one doesn't have to be playing 400nl to make decent money. If we were to set the bar at 100nl instead, given 7 years proper study, pretty sure most people would have it beat.

I would hope so if you have dedicated 7 years of your life, are you saying this isnt hard work?

Is there really a reason to be mad? Can't we just all get along?


Based on reading here, even people who don't actually play poker seriously assume that they could "with some amount of work" become a poker pro. Sure, there are more people to start out to become engineers (accountants, whatever). The % of those who come out the other side with a good living is also much higher. I keep saying this, but I believe it to be clearly true. There are more people living in my county who write software who make $100k/year than there are people on the planet who are favorites to do the same playing poker in 2015.

I think it is uncertain.
A) I'm not sure 7 years from now there will be very many $100K+/year poker jobs, as players.
B) Everywhere I see dgiharris posting on this I wonder if people understand, it is way harder mentally, discipline, tilt-control, etc to be a long term winning player. Most people see the "learning to play poker" as the hard part. I don't. It is only one part, and the other stuff matters way more.
C) The bail out path of poker pro is broke, bitter, and a bad resume. The bail-out path of PhD engineer is likely a BS or MS degree and still a good living.

I have an advanced degree and have been a practicing engineer for 2 decades. You're missing the point. Is the math harder in Engineering or Physics? Almost definitely. If you showed me a smart 17 year old and asked me for advice between the career of pro poker player or Engineer, I'd say his chances of having a good life and making a good living are far higher as an engineer. It wouldn't be close. There are few pro poker players for some reason. Thus, I'll say it is not easy money.

I say this as someone who made ~$50/hour at the PokerStars tables for a decent stretch and who knows a considerable number of people who played full time. I would discourage anyone starting out thinking poker as a career. The arguments of "which is harder" are somewhat nonsensical. There is some evidence that the career path of being a pro player has been in decline since 2005 or so. The career of Code Monkey (computer scientist, what have you) shows little sign of going away.

I think there is a higher probability of success in taking up a field in engineering than in poker, but you have to be in the elite tier of engineers (top 10%) to clear 100k/yr and maybe only top 15-20% of poker players (all players, not just pros) to clear 100k/yr

I don't have hard numbers to base that on, but that's my impression

It depends where you live, lots of places between 20~40k would qualify as good money. I think that is plenty achievable.

Doug, why did you give up engineering for poker? If self employment really > variance ?