I am not saying that you make McDonalds money playing LHE... you can def make well over $100/hr and will likely be able to for years to come. My point is that the hours we spend studying LHE when we are already excellent players are nearly wasted. When someone like DonJuan or myself studies LHE, those study hours are going to be worth a few dollars/hour at most since we are going to make only very tiny improvements in our winrates and are passing on better opportunities such as actually playing or studying to crush a game with a higher ceiling.

I def agree that NL is on the decline and facing many of the same problems as LHE. I think switching to NL mainly makes sense if you want to become a sponsored pro or some such. As far as live cash games, I think you can make a lot more playing LHE than NL. Online, I think NL still has an edge. But it is not such a big difference that I would recommend taking the time to switch just for online cash game purposes.

But I strongly disagree when it comes to PLO. Yes, it will be very hard work to catch up to the top PLO pros. But we do not need to catch up to the top pros. We only need to become semi-competent crap regs to make a ton of money because there are just so many awful rec players. Live, PLO seems to be doing great. Online, PLO also seems to be going strong. This is even more true if you are willing to play the 5 card variants that scare off many of the perfectionist pros.

I know very little about mixed games other than that the consensus seems to be that they are super soft live and will continue to be super soft for years to come. It does make me nervous that they only seem to prosper live. It also worries me when I look at Bravo and see how on and off they can be. It also looks super tough to move up the ladder. Finding games lower than 40/80 seems tough. And learning games like razz and badeucey and such seems very difficult since it is so hard to find small stakes games. But I suppose all of this could be considered a good thing since these problems obviously scare pros such as myself away from the games. Mixed games seem super fun though. If I ever get into mixed games, it will be for the fun and the high ceiling.

But ya, if you are perfectly happy making 100ish/hour and knowing that your income is more likely to go down than up, then LHE is fine. But I would def just focus on grinding instead of studying once you become competent enough to beat the Stars mid-high games. If you make it that far and decide you want to make even more money, I def think your best bet is to learn PLO or mixed games. I would love to make $500/hr at poker some day. That is never going to happen at LHE unless we experience some insane poker boom.

As a side note, I def think online poker as a whole is in serious trouble. I feel pretty confident in my ability to switch to live if needed, but for now I will continue to enjoy online poker while it lasts.

Yeah I look into PLO8 a lot and found a good book on it. I feel that it's worth studying and has lower variance and highest wrs just not as many games as plo. plo has too much tanking and the bottom line is that you can play 3X as many limit hands per hour so higher hourlies are still difficult.

I think rather than study PLO or mixed or nl just find other profitable ventures outside of poker. But for poker profit and hobby stick to the game you are an expert in, study minimally, and put in higher volume to increase profits.

Or don't study at all like I do some days and just grind and work on other ventures.

I am happy and a little jealous you are making 100/hr in this environment in lhe even if you are a row that is tough to pull off so congrats. But any time you are making 100 per hour you should:
1. Keep doing what you are doing and do more if possible
2. Protect that hourly
3. Dont compare it to McDs, that is actually a prestigious hourly.

Many people consider 3000 hours per year to be a normal full time high commitment job so you do quite well at 100 per hour.

A very small percentage of people at normal jobs put in 3k hours a year. That's 60 hours a week for 50 weeks a year. There are people who do it but it's definitely not what most people would consider normal.

Awesome posts all around.

UG GOAT

Goddamn I miss poker.

I always laugh when people talk derisively about certain regs earning only a "McDonald's hourly". I guess I can't speak for anybody else, but I would happily take half a McD's hourly and live under a bridge if it meant I could play poker (or any other game) for a living instead of standing for hours upon hours in a hot room wearing some dumb uniform and listening to bosses 10 years younger than you frequently reminding you to tuck in your shirt and answer the phone and take out the trash and etc. etc. etc.

Hopefully this provides another perspective to anybody who is considering quitting poker. Don't do it, ever. Nothing on this Earth is better than what you have right now.

I might be wrong, but there are other options for jobs besides McDonalds.

Well you might be right. What's odd is many people SAY they work all the time or 60 hours a week or something yet very few do. Weird to falsely brag about that. I do not think it's a 'very small' percentage of people though. But let's say UG is 'lazy' and works 40 hours a week. That's 200k.

Great posts yall

Thank you.

When people write 'good posts' are they making fun of me being an outsider posting novels in this thread? If so all good. If you really think they are good posts, sorry for being insecure lol, it's a poker forum tho and probably some sarcasm haha.

Riddle me this one. I have a meeting monday with a bunch of decision makers in my previous field. How do I explain internet poker as a business to them? I need an elevator pitch/30 second pitch/cover story for what I 've been doing. There is a female and a male I will be meeting with and both are over 60yo and may not exactly like what I've been doing. Usually I don't care what anyone thinks and I would just tell people I play poker for a living and to bite me. But these people are important and I actually need to win them over. I can start with running a business from home but eventually I have to say the P word and be completely honest. I just don't want them to think I go to the casino day in and out to play in a smoke filled card room with degenerates. I need them to take me seriously but I also can not brag and say "I;ve made X or been successful X years in a row" I am not a live player and have no cashes but that would be lame to talk about as well. Now they could be fine with it but from talking to people over the years some are not. It sucks cause I'm trying to go part time and break into another awesome field but I feel like I have a scarlet letter. People do not understand all the work, time, effort, study, and you have to actually develop an act, memorize, create, and be an entrepreneur. There are less lhe internet pros per capita in america than like any other field and being a lhe pro is a job that is maybe 20 times easier to get than a professional athelete but any job in the world is at least 100 times easier to obtain than a professional athlete so it's still a tough job to get and do properly, consistently and adaptively.

Here's an angle: I actually can play 400 hands per hour really well with zero mistakes/misclicks/getting lost in hand. I probably make easily over 1000 decisions in an hour if not 2k. This is more decisions than any job I can think of. I can claim "leatherass syndrome!" Remember when Dusty went to the doctor and they told him he will die in 10 years from multitabling!!??

"I actually have to quit poker. Doctor's orders. For my health. You see, I make decisions so ridiculously fast that I could die from it"

I'm serious though man. There is something not healthy about playing especially lhe so fast for so long. When you see cards falling from the sky as you are halfway in dreamland that is too much. Have you ever made an obvious check raise on the river and then your alarm goes off? Yeah, that's not healthy. You really should not cycle dopamine that rapidly either. Bad bad bad beats become like mosquito bites and you can finish up for 3k on the day and not even feel good about it.


So what's the pitch? Has anyone successfully transitioned from full time lhe to part time?

lol that is like a quintessential NVG original post

Well, I wrote "good posts" merely because I thought multiple posters made interesting comments (yourself included), but if it spurred a rant the misunderstanding was worth it. Rants are the best; now to read yours.

Don't be afraid about tl;dr post lengths; this forum could use all the traffic it can get.

i was serious not mocking

Just tell them you won a prestigious tournament in Maryland and you are living off the winnings while you transition careers.

He's not comparing his hourly to McD's pay, he's comparing the benefits and costs of studying.

For example, if you have to study an hour for every hour of play time in order to raise your hourly from $100 to $108, then your study time is earning a fast food wage.

BTW I could only stomach about 30 hours a week when I played.

This. I do miss playing for a living and I definitely quit too early (2007). Black Friday would likely have ruined me though. And with no Bovada in NY I'm pretty screwed for LHE. Once I sell my horrible business which lost money four years straight, I'll be looking for something else to do. The most similar thing I can think of to online poker and the lifestyle it gives is trading.

This is actually really good advice. It's kind of a back door/ don't worry about it answer. Brilliant. Was hanging with my friend and his wife tonight and she was saying don't even say the P word. You are an entrepreneur in a business run based on investing and would now like to transition to other areas which you have credentials for.

It's so simple: Don't bring up poker unless you are in a corner. You are in the entertainment business. It's so simple yet so many people try to make it into something complicated.

lo. I know of no players who have ever used a 50/50 study/play routine.

You stopped in 07? You're kidding right?

If you work 2000 hours a year that extra 8 bucks is actually worth something and that is exactly where i disagree with you.

Letigra, PLO8 is a cool game but it does not have much potential. I don't think there is a game where the fish get wrecked harder than they do at PLO8. The variance is low and the skill edge is high. Fish are very unlikely to have those big winning sessions that keep them coming back for more. I would never count on PLO8 to grow, but it is an extremely profitable opportunity if you can find a good game. PLO8 is def a great example of a game where you can kinda sorta learn to play a craptagnit style and occasionally bumhunt when you see a good spot. I was looking at Bravo last week and saw a 5-10-25 5 card PLO8 game running in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma because the WPT was in town along with some other mid-high PLO games. I bet that game was ridiculously sick and I bet a lot of pros were pissed that they didn't have the bankroll or knowledge of the game to play it.

When I was at Commerce a few years ago, there was a good 2p2 LHE player who was a great player and a super nice guy. I felt like I was slightly better than him at LHE and therefore expected to make more money than him at Commerce. Wrong. I remember I walked up to him while he was playing PLO one morning thinking he was on monkey tilt and had been up all night. I knew he wasn't very good at PLO and the game was at pretty high stakes, so I was hoping to snap him out of his tilt or at least tease/troll him a bit. But I quickly noticed that he was focused, in a good place emotionally, and was playing his ass off. I left him alone so he could concentrate. He later explained that the game was so insanely good that he knew he could just sit there playing a beginner book nit tag style for a huge hourly even if he sucked at PLO. An important lesson imo.

I suspect that there is a lot of money in being barely competent at a ton of games and knowing when to jump into a super soft game.

Also, it is normal to worry that you are being trolled at all times ITT. That's just how it goes.

And just ****ing wow... Pokerstars can go to hell. I just noticed that they rake the hell out of their play money games (5% per pot) and sell play money chips for quite a bit of money. Amaya just never stops bleeding its players to death. Raking play money games? What douchebags.

I figured this out because I have been trying to learn Badugi and 2-7 triple draw at their play money tables recently. It is actually pretty annoying because sometimes the stakes are high enough that we risk busting our play money rolls and would have to spend real money on play chips if we do bust.

The bright side is that people seem to play more seriously than play money players of the past because they don't want to go busto. I have been running into some players who actually play pretty hard and give me some good practice. I briefly played play money badugi with Shaun Deeb yesterday lol, or at least someone who was on his account.

Triple draw and badugi are quite fun and I can def see how easy it can be to think you have a clue, but to get completely wrecked by experts at these games.

I wasn't trying to make a realistic example, just something for everyone who was missing UG's point. Who knows how much study gives how much additional money? But for LHE it's not going to be much, and that time is probably better spent on other games.

UIGEA hit in the fall of 2006 and Party Poker left the US market. I did better on Party with no RB than a site I tried propping with 100% RB. (turns out playing 3 handed with Bryce and a fish isn't as good as playing with 4-5 fish, who knew).

When Party shut down I tried some other sites. The fish hadn't all rushed there. I imagine most of them assumed online poker was illegal now and never looked back. The games on other sites were tougher and the stakes lower. It didn't look good for the future, and honestly I was a little burned out, so I found other work.

You are neither of these things and anyone that is even moderately perceptive will figure out that you are completely full of ****.

This predates Amaya by a few years.

Hardly anyone in the U.S. wants to play it. It hardly ever runs in Vegas except during WSOP. Casino owners would hate to spread it because it has the worst of both worlds. The slow play of NL and the split pots of O8. Table rake would hit all-time lows.

Yeah, Stars play money actually kinda sucks for learning games. It's been a couple years, so some of this could have changed, but:

• The showdowns and pot pushing are super fast so it's hard to see what the other players are showing down and what the winning hand was (at least for me, I was learning O8 and had some trouble with low hands for a while).
  
• No replay or hand histories, which makes the above way worse. If I could at least look at the last hand after I fold this one I could figure out what happened but I can't so it sucks.
  
• Live poker level rake as mentioned.

1. Stars sells their own play chips? That is awesomely dirty. Keep on keepin' on, capitalists.

2. lol, bros, just play real money games at stakes well below your normal stakes. The main reason for this is that players at low-level real-money stakes are presumably trying their best to win, instead of just messing around. The other reason, which is maybe only a personal thing, but ... does it even count as "poker" or "gambling" if there's no money changing hands?