Now that it's coming up on your 5 years that you answered at the beginning of this well, how would you change your answer now as to what you will be doing?

How are the live games? Still juicy, or really dry to the point of not being worth it?

What advice would you give to someone who wanted to play poker for a living?

yes, i have read it. i liked it and would recommend it to semi-serious+ players. a lot of the balance/info hiding stuff was stuff that i think midstakes players were already familiar with/practicing, but it was the first time i'd seen it all put down in print very coherently, and it should be of great use to a lot of players who weren't already familiar with the stuff.

wow, 5 years for one thread on the internet -- pretty neat.

i still plan to go to grad school at some point most likely, but in the meantime am still enjoying and succeeding at poker and so will keep doing that in the short term. live games are fine -- not as juicy as they used to be, but still beatable, and i'm certainly better than i used to be as well. i still play a lot online as well (more than live) and i expect at some point in the next year or two when they get online poker squared away that that traffic will spike back up again.

for someone who wants to play poker for a living? now is not an amazing time to do it, just because of the landscape: there aren't a lot of places to play confidently online with good game selection, and you have to live in only a few places in the USA to have access to lots of good live play. several of the prevalent games (LHE, NLHE) are also getting pretty information-saturated meaning the easy money is drying up. also, a lot of online pros have come over to the live side, making those games somewhat tougher.

all that aside, if you want to play for a living, i'd recommend getting good at a game that runs often at up to mid stakes (that could be for live or online) and seems likely to be popular in the future. for online, PLO seems a good bet, and for live, LHE will still go for a while/always if you're near a big casino center like LA, and mix games seem to go at most casinos. getting good at multiple games is preferable to expand your game selection, but it's probably harder to build your bankroll playing multiple games at low stakes as opposed to grinding the hell out of one.

have a lot of money/savings in the bank. ideally, have a regular job that pays well and then play poker on the side and see if you can perk the poker income up to where it's matching or beating the regular job. i think in general going from student/unemployed to poker pro is a bad idea. handling the variance is harder than anyone thinks/says.

study the hell out of it -- you are going to be competing against a field of people where many of them have natural talent and many of them have worked hard, so it's unlikely you're going to succeed without having/doing one or both of those things. by study i mean actually work on your game and not just play a lot.

that's all i can think of for now but i'm sure there's more.

I'm glad that this got bumped. Great read, at that. It's intriguing to learn about some of the pillars of 2p2 and how they came to be. It's an inspiration to all us aspiring n00bs that hope to one day rival the skillz of the 2p2 regs!

Grats, Babar, on your success!

tyvm

Good morning. Do you have a favorite game texture? Would you rather have most pots raised and reraised preflop resulting in lots of heads up play, or have a wild game with immediate position on the guy raising 80% preflop and lots of people calling your 3 bets?

i like the wild multiway juiceball game. more fun and more profitable

Limit Hold'em will go the way of 5 card draw and faro in the year _____?

faro reference itt

2009?

i had to look up faro. sounds like it died in the 70s or 80s more or less, and was always completely rigged?

5cd is rare yeah

i don't think limit holdem will go that dead in our lifetimes, since there's a pretty sizeable number of people who still play it, it's spread in basically every casino in the usa, and on all the online poker sites, etc. i suppose everyone has different thresholds for it. for some, who just want to play for fun, it'll always be there. for those who want to make good amounts of money at it just by folding preflop, those days are gone, dunno, 2008 or something or 2009 like doug said. for those who want to make a living playing it exclusively online, i think there will always be some people but for the majority i think that time is coming pretty quickly or is already here c. 2012

You mean like the 90 year olds who play $1-5 7-stud at the Mirage?

hi micros!

Snitch in the hizouse.

i've played a lot of hands over a lot diff stakes over the years, and i have found my sessions go one of two ways -

i'll be hitting everything and anything - every hand I seem to have sick TP holds, opponents spewing at me with mediocre hands, backdooring a flush when I'm barreling a solid reg who is slowplaying me -

then there are the bad times, where I can't seem to hit anything or people seem to run better than jesus against me every made hand


I've found this is almost ALWAYS the case for me- I can't figure out if it's a result of mindset, my aggressive style resulting in large swings, or just the nature of the game itself, but I wanted to ask you - have you ever experienced this phenomenon and if so, how do you deal with it? I have always felt like I play great during my boom sessions and awfully during my down sessions.