so recently I got in an argument with someone I know, it wasn't really an argument it was more them shouting at me and me disagreeing but avoiding the argument.

I tend to find arguing with this person about anything, is a pointless exercise as they are dominant shout over me self assured and an expert on spin it is like talking to a creationist.

I dont get the impression they respect me a lot, but anyway the topic of me making it as a professional poker player came up. they were militant its a very bad idea because its to much effort and I will probably fail.

There reasoning was very few people in the world are capable of it and your either born with the talent or your not.

and this got me thinking this isn't really about poker it can apply to poker but sports was mentioned to.

the question is, are most people capable of been a professional poker player/sports player etc if only they worked hard enough at it or just a select few who are lucky enough to be born that way.

I mean I have heard of both Michael Jordan (professional basketball player) and Phil Ivey referred to as freaks of nature people just born with an exceptional ability who were destined genetically to achieve there success.

but if this is true, then were they just gamblers who got lucky? as in lucky enough to have the talent waiting they could not know it they effectively put there genes on 24 on the roullette wheel hoping for the best and it turned out they had it?

I mean Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, he worked real hard to get in, and got in the next year. Someone could have said to Michael Jordan why try? your not good enough you don't have the genes I guess at the time it may have seemed a reasonable assumption after all if you cannot make a high school basketball team why would you think you could make the NBA?

from what I heard about Phil Ivey he used to sleep under a bridge at one point I heard this in the documentary when phil Ivey started out playing poker if he took some loses, (I am not sure how his luck/skill was when he first started) does he probably does not have the genetics for it and then stop?

there are numerous people who have been written off and achieved great things in life, perhaps the odds of there success no matter how hard they worked were low they were just lucky enough to so to happen to have the genes.

one thing almost all of these people have in common is that they worked real hard to get it.

I guess sometimes its hard to tell because you hear about numerous inspiring stories of those that worked real hard and against all the apparent odds pulled it off.

However you don't see many if any movies made about those that tried real hard, but just failed because they didn't have the talent. Are there another numerous 100 of those that worked there ass off and failed for every one that we hear of who succeeded?

or is it that they just did not try as hard.

I had a warped sense of my abilities growing up, which was caused by a few circumstances which is another story entirely. I really do not know what I am capable of.

but if I think it through I really do not see why i should not be capable of achieving success. It May well be that the talent of Phil Ivey Tom Dwan etc is way beyond me, but there are many talented poker pros no way near that level making six figures a year.

it may be that I never had the genes to be the worlds best footballer, but had I tried my hardest from a young age etc, should I not of at least been capable of making the starting line up of a league two/one side?

is success just for the lucky few who won a genetic lottery before they were conscious or is it something that almost anyone (barring a serious disability) can attain?

Masque has hijacked your account.

lol I have a lot of intellectual respect for that guy, so I take that as a compliment.

However whether I have capabilities less than or exceeding his, my communication skills and education level, at the time of writing this clearly do not match his.

I am flattered for that though.

It's about genes
and what you have to do

I'd guess something else
than professional athlete/poker player
for me and you

With athletics, it's mostly winning the genetics lottery. Professional sports are comprised of apex athletes, the 99.9th %ile of athletic ability, and within that, it's all hard work and mental toughness.

Mental toughness because each time you move to a higher level, EVERYBODY is better than your toughest opponent at the level you just left. The worst player on your favorite pro team is probably the greatest athlete in the history of his town.

Poker is a little different because it's not a physical skill. If you play live, you need a good memory. You need to be resilient and patient. I think you also have to be right-brained (i.e., creative). You have to be able to process complex information quickly and be capable of learning counter-intuitively.

And most important, you have to be a gambler. Poker is a skill game, but it still gambling (skill and gambling are not mutually exclusive). You have to be able to live with losing and not get out of control confident when you're winning.

You need discipline. You want to be a pro? It's like starting a business, except the average person will think you're a degenerate, but that should't bother you because you don't give a rat's ass what people think of you.

So, yeah, in some ways, it's like the genetic lottery of being an athlete, but it's not physical, it's being wired a little differently than "normal" people.

Is this an attempt for a scientifically sound answer?

First of all in order to call poker an income worth your time you need to make more than minimal wage. If you spent 12 h per day playing because you happen to like it say also, unlike a stupid low paying job, you need to still make at least 8$ per h (less than minimum actually) to may be able to claim to make over 25 days per month say (take 5 breaks for other things and rest) $2400 to argue you can pay rent and food (low rent impossible in my area by the way below 1700 even if you sacrificed a lot of standards to get such place but with roommates maybe 1k each is possible as some of those pros claim they started like etc).

So lets say you need 2500 per month to be a decent target to claim its doable.


If you have a wirnate that is very big but potentially doable live of 0.1bb/h and you start at the lowest possible stakes to prove to yourself its doable and get an answer within 2 weeks say you would try at some 1/2 game.

Lets say you had a bankroll for it of at least 2k = 10 buy ins to make a test . There is no way in hell a good player needs more than 10 buy ins with such winrate by the way. Risk of ruin less than 2% it would seem on a crude estimate if you played each session until you double to 200bb or bust to 0 and then restarted same table or elsewhere with similar wirnate near 0.1bb/h and volatility of 7bb/h.

Ok lets see now. Is it doable? If it is doable and you make money you can go at 2/4 etc But if you cant pass the 1/2level then what are we talking about anyway? Unless you have money to burn that you can start at some big level right away to see if its possible.

In that case you need always a 10buy in bankroll to at least be able to claim you didnt get terrible luck (unless its obvious) and it was due to skill that you failed. Anything that has less than 5-10% risk of ruin is a good test. But do you have to burn 10-20k to make the point at higher stakes say 5/10 right away? Or will you even have such small winrate there that its all luck and need more time?

This is why you start at the lowest stakes that maybe can prove your case without an expensive lesson.

At 1/2 and 0.1bb/h winrate if you have 12h per day at hopefully better than 1 hand per 2 min rates = 30 per hour in a big table with inferior and potentially slow recreational players too you are looking at 360 hands per day only. So in 25 days its 9000 hands at 0.1bb its 900bb profit or 1800$.

See, its not enough! It will however tell you in 1 month if you can try maybe 2/4 etc.


Now do you think if you have a winrate that is 0.1bb/h at 2/4 you would be asking here for reassurance?

Why dont you just go out and prove to yourself if you have 0.1bb/h at 1/2 and the next higher level because that is the test at 12h per day 25/30 (if you can survive so many per day every day of the week but 1 , i wouldnt without spectacular profits to make it interesting experience but still boring slow to hell, unless the dead time can be used to improve your reading skills and basically keep yourself entertained by the overall experience ).


It is possible if you are already good at it and even if not spectacularly good but do not have high hopes until you pass my 30 days 10 buy in test at 1/2.

You will need to make 2-3k per month in order to call it doable hoping to make enough to go to a higher level within a few months to a year looking to make it 3-4 there and finally cover your spartan living expenses.

Unless you run it to 4k per month its not worth it in my opinion. Its too hard work day after day so many hours probably in an environment that wont prove good for your health eventually.

This is all a pipe dream unless you do not pay rent and then you can make it with even 1-2k per month at leisure time and see where it gets you.


Success is a complex thing. I just told you how to test for it in one simple case of live poker.

Success in science is far harder than poker actually. Success in an avg job even good paying one if you yield to society at an early age and play their nasty game without hopes to improve yourself intellectually (without tremendous parallel effort) while doing that is a much easier thing. To make money in money culture you need to enslave yourself to a repetitive boring life or get real lucky to have a good idea that worked.

As always being very optimistic but pragmatic and willing to work hard in something you believe and put a lot of personal time and proper planning will improve the results. Planning and executing doable little steps is probably a safer approach. Always if your life has a plan you can stick to with some room for fluctuations but not a lot (need discipline) and the steps are not punishingly hard to come one after the other, your chances are better. Because you simply stick to the plan and measure success by completing each step carefully and this gives you a sense of success and courage to go the next level etc. Eg becoming a medical doctor is such a doable hard but not prohibitively hard plan. The steps are clear how you do it. Otherwise you need to get lucky and meet the right people and get stupid bs chances that others will never get because they tried the hard way by being kind. Basically you need to chase situations and demand that they work for you and get involved in exponential games in business or your own life's elevation. You need to be very aggressive but not an ahole because then whats the point to win by losing your soul. If you can find ways to make your money work for you instead of you working for it, exponential games become more possible.

But success can be measured in many ways. The real success is to be a happy person that can improve society with every chance to interact with others under the proper social structure and if its not available to try to create it. Otherwise we just add to the hell of the problems we accumulate in this planet while fighting each other over bs priorities.


I think its possible to make at least most people happy and feeling creative within a system like scientific society that is about giving opportunities to individuals to find what they are good at and in the meantime they are employed by the system that has endless projects going on to sustain its level of living standards with a minimal amount of reasonable work every day using science and technology efficiently to achieve that structure with reduced conflicts. In order for a person to do something good in their lives they need to have always the ability to have a job that covers their basic needs. A society that cannot secure that to all its willing to work members is a failed system. But if work is always available education will eventually take you where you can be most productive and successful. Its harder to be unhappy if you are always financially secure with reasonable sacrifices of work and permanent improvement prospects and you have no dead-ends.

Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.

It's a gamble.


PairTheBoard

Combination of the two. You're obviously gonna get better the harder you work at something but the guy that works the hardest is not gonna be the best every time

I think to make it in poker you need to be "naturally" smart. You need to be the type of person who always got super high GPA in school as long as you tried. If you have the natural ability to learn and improve mentally at a quick rate, I think you have the "natural skills" to make it in poker. Just because you have natural ability to learn doesn't mean you don't need to work hard to succeed. But it means you have the potential if you pair the two together.

I think it's probably more useful to frame the question as 'Is everyone capable of achieving greatness?'

I would say not everyone is capable of greatness but everyone is capable of becoming capable of greatness. What I mean is that usually greatness lies beyond the wall of one's perceived limits. You reach the outer limits of what you are capable of and the only way to go beyond that is to go through a transformation of sorts. This process involves a tremendous amount of resistance which has to be countered with an equal amount of desire and determination which may look like obsession.

It's like blowing up a balloon more and more until it pops. When the balloon pops, the tension is gone. Likewise, when the resistance is gone, the transformation is complete.

This is why if you talk to people who have done great things, you'll often hear them say that they expected to reach their high level of success even when there was no external reason to validate that belief. This is because they had already gone through the inner transformation that allowed them to be capable of greatness.

"What is possible" is "what is not logically precluded or factually precluded."

It is generally followed by an argument from ignorance.

genes>>>hard work in importance for success sports/games. Genes for poker<<<genes for pro athlete in importance for success. Guesstimat, top 10% vs top 0.1% can have success. Thank goodness.

Depends on who you include in the player pool to be in the top 10% of. I would probably say top 3-5% can succeed at a high enough rate to make a living.

It is much more true of poker than of sports.

I don't think I was fully clear here in what I meant. I mean I already know I could make a living from poker, I have the stats and statistically significant data to prove that.

I just don't know if I could make a worth while living from the game if I really put the work in per say.

I mean the issue with making a living from poker is due to tax regulation law changes politics bots site changes etc, it just cannot be guaranteed that your win rate today, will be the same in a few years time if your even winning or able to play in a few years time.

Right now I could make a little more then minimum wage from poker, and in truth I like poker and I don't like any job I have ever done. If you could cast in stone Guarantee that the state of online poker will be exactly the same for the next 50 years I would quit my job and just be happy with that.

the issue is you can't. I think anyone could make a living from poker if making min wage is the target. I mean all you have to do there is beat people that for the most part have put almost no effort in and are not really trying.

If you can bring your absolute best to something, been able to honestly say that you have really worked at it as hard as you ever can and you cannot beat randomly selected people who barely try then far from having a genetic advantage, it is likely you have some sort of disability.

what I am getting at is actually been able to compete and win at a high level and I should have been clear in that.

you probably do have to have the right genes to reach the level of Phil Ivey or the likes etc.

However I guess what I am wondering is do you have to have the right genes to make
$65,000 a year +
$100,000 a year +
$250,000 a year+
$500,000 a year +
$1,000,000 a year +

and to avoid the pedantic yes I know anyone could exceptionally lucky and bink a big tournament without really having a clue, so to be more precise have an expected value of these figures.

I didn't want to brag.

The kind of "pros" Op is referring to have more than just skill at poker. They have other attributes that make them marketable on TV. I would say there is some truth to saying only a select few people are born with these attributes.

I feel like the big pros who have managed to stay in the game and the spotlight for 10+ years all look for ways to generate risk-free income such as sponsorships and coaching once they have established a name for themselves. It makes a lot of sense, but it seems like thats the route all of them take.

OP if your goal to make a living is just to earn minimum wage you aren't going to have a very fun life.