College tuition has skyrocketed. Blue collar jobs have diminished.

Pretty easy to predict that less intelligent players with disposable income are going to be fewer and fewer, and that the next generation isn't spending disposable income in poker.

You know what they say about poker. Everyone thinks they are a good player.


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The best way, imo, to answer this is to get data from Bravo. There are too many anecdotal stories in this thread about what people are seeing in their local rooms, but as many have pointed out, there are also more rooms available across the country.

I think it would be cool to see the average number of 1/2 and 2/5 table running daily by year. Doubt that Bravo would supply that kind of info, or if they even track it, but that would be the best statistical way to answer this question, at least for live games.

The Melbourne games are easy but the rake is pretty brutal.

Welcome back, p4f. Good posts.

LOL. You kill me with your ridiculous BS.

Imo NLH is somehow dead. I am from Europe and here is no big NLH game anymore. When it comes to 10/20+ you can find some regular PLO games around Europe but not for NLH.

Was in the Hardrock Florida a couple of months ago. When I spoke to regulars a lot transitioned to PLO although there is a daily healthy 5/10NLH in place. But 5/5/10 (they play a rock) PLO is running on 2 tables and is supposed to be way softer.

Anyway. I think a lot of the punters on higher limits disappear to private games where professionals don't get in. E.g. you can even rent your table at the Dania beach casino and they play up to 50/100 there, just businessmen.

Action overall gets spread to more locations, game types and private games.

And don't forget that the middle class people are declining. Less people have more money nowadays. This effects for sure.

I’m not an expert but it seems you are exaggerating the value of benefits. The Dept of Labor puts benefits as typically around 32% of salary so that’s about $19,000. I also cited the median household income which is different than the median income per person. I also think a competent ABC pro can make well over $60,000, I was trying to be relatively conservative since I don’t have a huge sample yet. Maybe I’ve just ran like god playing full time for 7 months but I don’t think I’m by any means a great player, right now I would rate my abilities as approaching competent, and I’m averaging over 30/hr which is over 60k/yr

Yea if you want to get rich and live that baller lifestyle poker isn’t great, and I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t already have savings/investments, but I’m skeptical that you can’t make a good living if you work hard.

Be your own boss. 2 weeks off a year, 40 hours a week at $30/hr, easy $60,000 a year.

Education not required. Entry of barrier doesn't exist. Startup cost minimum.

Sounds super easy. Not sure why more people don't do it.

What are you guys' secret? Do you guys work on advance math on your own? Study physical tells like crazy? Have a long list of your opponents' bad tendencies? Post and analyze hundreds of hands a month?

I want to work hard and be able to make $60k/yr and be my own boss. What do I need to do?

Melbourne poker seems to be going strong. As chrisV mentions though 1/3 rake is 10% max of $15 and I actually pulled a dealer up the other day rounding up to $15 on what I thought was about $120...

There are economic factors helping poker in Australia. Go to uni for 5 years and earn $100k. Or become a bricklayer or a lollipop man on a building site joined to a union and earn $150k and get 2 rostered days off a month.

I work 8-6 in a good job for ~A200k. It’s not my goal to play full time but would love to be good enough to play 2/5 (maybe 200-300hrs a year) and some tourneys here and there and earn some coin on the side for a holiday a year or dinners out or some decent scotch

Very few pros are actually accomplishing 2K hours per year consistently. If you can do it, more power to you, but note that you are looking at a medium income stream as a 2/5 grinder.

The good news is that 2/5 isn't dying out in most markets. The bad news is that the 5/10+ pros who don't transition out of poker, to PLO, or move to another market to chase the games, are moving down to 2/5 when the 5/10+ games die.

Here in Peru I used to be a regular at the NL500 hold em tables about 3 years ago. A lot of tourists used to come and weekends and they where very easy to beat them. There where always 2-3 tables full with 2-3 regulars per table. Now the same casino only have 1 table where there are always 8 solid regs... actions has really ***** dryed up

There are still a lot of fishes but they are in illegal card rooms. I've been playing there for a while where it is NL200 but the stacks go from 500-2000 and is full of ***** degenerate gamblers who go all in blind and call everything preflop. It should be really profitable except for the fact that the rake is 6% with no cap, plus the dealer sometimes steals extra money when there is a really big pot. Why do I still play under this conditions? Because it is where the money is. I don't go to casinos anymore because it is full of regs.

Is it profitable to play in a table with 6% rake, no cap and some extra money stealed from the dealer full of degenerate gamblers going all in blind? Gime me your opinions

Another factor that people have failed to mention is what time of the day that you play.


If you played during graveyard shift, I promise you, you wouldn't be worried about the competition getting any tougher.


Graveyard shift eliminates all of the toxic OMC's and nit regs from the game. There may be 1 or 2 pros at your table, but they are the LAG pros that create a ton of action and keep the atmosphere very spewy. The quality of degen that rolls in to the casino past midnite dwarf the weak tight fish that are playing before dinner time.

The variance for NLHE isn't nearly that high. Did he play the same amount of hours each year? 2015 and 2016 would be impossible for any winning player unless he shot took 5/10/25 for half the year and got his a** handed to him. If he was consistenly grinding 2/5 for 2000 hours a year, there is no chance in hell that this guy would breakeven for TWO YEARS. That's a 4000 hr breakeven stretch.

40k is not high at all. I could easily make that full-time at 1/3.

And yet here we are, with a bunch of people that either don't play full time or don't have a track record talking about making $60k per year indefinitely being easily attainable. Fallacy #1.

Also - almost no pros are cranking 2000 hours year in year out. Fallacy #2.

In the height of our local poker boom, only 1 of our 7 rooms was on Bravo (and it was the second room to close). It doesn't tell the whole story.

All you have to really do is look at history. I'll admit that I have very little Vegas poker experience, but when I was going to Vegas on business trips in the 1990s the main game was 7 Card Stud. I mean, that game will never die (I've literally never seen that game run in my market). And when I first started playing poker on a regular basis in the mid 2000s the mainstay game in every single poker room you'd ever walk into was a lowstakes Limit game, that game is obviously going nowhere (a Limit game hasn't run in my room in the 4 years of the new room, and is more-or-less extinct in my market).

Those who think the same can't happen to LLSNL are kinda ignoring history, imo.

GbutI'msureeverythingwillbefineG

Interesting seeing everyone start throwing out numbers. I have about a decent amount of hours in a few poker markets. I think there are poker markets where games are not tough and 50k+ per year playing low-mid stakes is very doable if you put the hours in. The biggest problems are how fickle poker markets are. One small shift as far as reg strategy development, a couple more pros/serious regs being in a game, smaller buy in amounts, increase rake, a new home game stealing players, or a many other factors can quickly destroy a game. That's not even adding the fact that you need to play well and not lose your mind. Can being your own boss be great? Of course, but if you play long enough, no matter how good you are ( or how good you think you are), keep in mind there will come a time where you will run worse than you ever have, lose more than you ever have and question everything. This will have a devastating impact on you if you are trying to make a living. Just because you can (or think you can) do it doesn't mean it's to be done. Markets will shift but overall I think poker in this sense is trending in a direction that makes it less desirable for the majority of people. It's funny to me that people romanticize playing poker for a living. It's not a coincidence that the end game for people who play poker seriously is to not have to play poker. Even the best players that everyone looks up to, you can tell how their personality is affected. The crushers that everyone respects are often anti-poker for a reason because they see the game for what it really is.

Fallacy #1 - it seems so easy to make $60k in these forums, not sure why there aren't more poker pros. What can be the downside if that is easily above the medium income of $33k?

Fallacy #2 - nobody work for themselves would work as many hours as having a boss, ldo?

Based on this post of yours, I'd say there is approximately zero chance you are making $30/hr over a significant amount of hours.

1) you have to pay taxes on the additional $19k that you're going to use to pay yourself for benefits. So yeah, more like as I said, 50% of salary.

2) as a self employed person, you have to take on significant additional risk that should be accounted for in how much $$$ you make vs being an employee where the employer takes on the additional risk.

3) Are you paying taxes on that $30/hr that you're making? What is the tax rate you are paying on that earnings? Are you accounting for expenses to offset these taxes?

No offense, but you would have to be in the top 5% of poker players to be making $30/hr consistently for hundreds of hours at LLSNL poker -- "approaching competent" isn't even close.

If you are, great, congrats. I suggest you make sure you pay your taxes quarterly first and then put at least 20% of your winnings into a self directed retirement fund, that is completely walled off from your poker bankroll.

Next, take 10% of the after tax and after retirement amount and make sure you have an emergency fund of at least 6-9 months of expenses to account for paying yourself for sick days. Make sure this money is also walled off from your bankroll.

Yes as we all know, poker ability can be accurately measured by an internet post on the topic of salaries. You should start a staking business. Instead of graphs, potential prospects could send you 500 word essays and you can pick out the real up and comers.

What do you think is a better measurement of ability if not for the posts in this forum, self-reporting results and graphics?

I find it fascinating that everyone is portraying beating poker as something as straight forward as your mind wills it. If it's so easy, I can't see why there aren't so many more people making a living playing poker.

I know people doing more than 2k per year. They are the ones who are successful. People who think they can just trot along and play whenever they want are not going to be successful. Low volume was a huge problem for me in the past.

Hard work wins, just like any other "job." Any serious pro is playing at least 2k hours per year. The only reason not to is laziness.

@Lapi: Benefits are not money. I would not choose for myself the same plans that an employer would offer. There is no way in hell I would ever spend $19k per year on benefits so they are not worth that much to me. If it's something I would buy for myself anyway, then sure.

You are quite misinformed.

Successful people don't work more hours to make more money; they work less to enjoy the money they make. Only people who choose to work more are those who do not find their income to be sufficient.

Plus working more hours and having better success are not necessarily correlated.

No, serious pros would spend more time to challenge themselves and to improve their games. Such time is not the same as being at the table.

For any serious workers in any field looking to constantly improve and stay ahead of the curve, a lot of additional self-improvement work are done outside of working hours.

Poker is no different. To be successful in poker, one must invest serious time outside of poker to study. 2000+ hours of poker would probably require another 300 or more hours of studying.

How many people are willing to spend 50 to 60 hours a week playing and studying poker just to make $30/hr?

Plus people do not work longer hours to try to make more money without a purpose, not if they're already overworking at more than 40+ hours a week. It's not like poker players are saving their winning to invest in a business to get out of poker...

People who are playing significantly over 2000 hours? These aren't hardworkers; these are players who are barely scrapping by because of various obligations and splurges.

You are grossly misinformed. $19k is an estimate of benefit in employee's perspective, not a sticker price that employers slap onto the employment handbook to incentivize employees. Employers often spend much less than $19k as most of them take advantage of various group benefits.

The sad part of being a professional poker players is that most do not invest on themselves, not in the sense of retirement or medical. As a result, many of them find themselves in very rough spots after barely getting by in the years of playing poker professionally.

I'm not sure what the discussion has degenerated into at this point.


If a professional poker player isn't able to grind 2k hours a year, than there's a good chance this "professional" is a lazy piece of sh*T. A lazy piece of sh*t is also likely to make the same mistakes over and over and over and over again at the table and never learn from past f*ck ups.

It's because an intelligent, hard-working person doesn't want to be a degen and play a card game at midnite where he can go on a 5k downswing while all the rest of his family members and peers are out contributing to society with "jerbs".

This psychosocial aspect has nothing to do with how "soft" the games are.