Did these poker rooms have 20 tables running with wait lists, all to play stud? I'm guessing they had 3 or 4 tables, with not as many casinos to choose from during this time.

NL Holdem is not equivalent to stud. Casinos are still getting barraged with people that want to play NL Holdem and we are 20 years after the boom started.


NL Holdem is more comparable to blackjack than it is stud. It's become a tried and true reliable form of gambling for millions of people around the world.

Nobody said you needed to play 60 hours a week. Although, I would argue that as a "perk" of the job in the sense that your hours aren't capped like it would be as an employee. If you want to bust your a**, then you now you actually have an incentive and nobody is going to stop you.

Also, you really dont need to study 300 hours a year. Most pros will do this because they enjoy the game, but its not mandatory at all.

If the fish are playing the exact same way, year after year, then your game doesn't need any adjustments or tweaks. All of the GTO and PIO solvers are completely irrelevant to 5-10 and below. If you happen to be playing at a table full of bots, with no fish, then you are a moron for sitting in that game, and deserve to be crying about how you can only make 30k a year or some bullsh*t.

As far as who is saving and who is investing. How the f*** do you know what people are doing with their earnings? I'm sure most poker regs aren't saving wisely because the majority of all PEOPLE all over the world are terrible at saving.

Im taking money from morons who are using their expendable income on gambling versus being smart savers. If people were conservative and rational, than profitable poker wouldn't exist in the first place.

Not sure why you think poker players want different things than people with jobs.

Professional poker players also don't have to grind in crap hours and do it longer than those with a regular job.

At least you're indirectly proving my point that poker as a career is exactly as bad as most of us suspected.

Right...you want to bust your ass to make more money...for what?

It's pretty wild that you can't see that most people do not want to work beyond what is required, so they can enjoy whatever it is that they enjoy.

What you are describing is a punishment, certainly not a positive choice.

Umm...kind of want to make dig at your alias right now for some obvious reasons.

Right...it's so easy, why aren't there more pros? You somehow know the secret to this game.

$xx win rate multiply by yy hours = profit!

So easy, not sure why you don't just do 3000 hours a year, save up, and invest in passive income.

But oh wait...then none of this makes any sense. Mind blown.

Im not trying to glamorize poker you imbecile.

The whole thread is about the games "dying" or being "too tough". My point is that the games are still very beatable, but expect to have to play during the late night hours to get in VERY good games, as opposed to mediocre games that people are griping about.

You can still be a pro and play from 9am-5pm, but expect your winrate to be lower and expect the game to feel a lot less like poker and more like euchre or spades.

Mod scrubbed personal attack

So the game is dying...hence "still play from 9 to 5" will have lower win rate...

I mean, you said it yourself.

So there is no secret, just a strong will to win? You're kind of proving my point again.

I always find people who volunteer certain positive information about themselves to be somewhat...suspect. Hey man, you don't need to prove yourself to me.

Bodybuilder,

The types of people who pound their fists and know they are right about poker dying are generally not people whose minds you should want to change. The games will be better for all if they take their own advice and quit. Don't go out of your way to encourage/challenge them not to imo.

Games are dead. If you're smart enough to articulate how dead they are please take your own advice and abandon the sinking ship.

No poker player ever advocated playing from 9a to 5p so this is nothing new. There are guys on here that play day shift and beat the games for 10BB's an hour so its very possible.

Ive played day shift games and the action is significantly worse than any other time of day, but if everyone is a nit then they'll just let you see cheap flops with speculative hands and then they usually pay you off when they get drawn out on. The only problem is the pot size is way smaller than average and there are way more nits nursing there little short stacks rather than topping off and actually have a little bit of an ego.

Also, another advantage of a day game is you can raise over limpers and take down a lot of dead money with no rake and little variance. The fish just bleed slowly and get their entertainment from folding and hoping to hit a promotion.


The rest of your posts seem like trolling and you come off pretty inexperienced and unknowledgeable about what you are debating so I'll stop with the derail and let others comment.

Good stuff man, you're right.

Let's keep it an apple to apple comparison. You said it yourself:

"Expect to be lower." Are you not directly saying that the game has gotten worse?

Another sign that the game is dying: you are glad that people are leaving the game.

I can’t wait to revive this thread in five years when these “pros” thinking $60k grows on trees have disappeared.

Dizzy just posted an +80k/-10k year. If you don’t think variance is the driving factor you just don’t have a large enough sample size.

lol, unsubscribing

What does this weird Calvinist judgment that people who don't work forty hours per week are lazy have to do with the question of whether the poker economy is growing or shrinking?

I think you are pretty lazy if you can't put in 40 hours a week if poker is your sole source of income. You can't say that 60k is impossible while simultaneously claiming that getting 2000 years is "impossible".


If you want to only work 30 hours a week, that's fine. That's the other perk of being a pro. Although, I think the perk of being able to work 50 hours+ is going to work out a lot better for you financially than only working 30.


I've offered counters to the "game is dying" crowd by suggesting playing during graveyard shift or living in a poker-centric city like Vegas or LA. These options are really only applicable for someone who plays for a living though.
So in that sense, yes, I concede the games are worse than the Moneymaker era or even 5 years ago. But they are still consistently soft and a tried and true staple of how many recreational players like to spend their time. I would be more worried if you didn't see lists out the a** for games.

The fact that there are less full-blown-punters could have an unintended side benefit of squeezing out a lot of the mediocre regs or younger pros who throw in the towel.

Like I mentioned in previous posts, a lot of lineups consist of me, one to two LAGgy/ splashy pros, and the rest are degens and tilted bad regs. The nit regs all went to sleep at 9pm because mommy told them "nothing ever good happens past midnite".

If I'm not mistaken the guy was including PLO and he played a wide range of stakes? It's not the same thing at all.

Ime, the variance just is not that dramatic. Dozens of pros would say the same thing. You'll have maybe one losing month in a year and a couple of months that were "meh", the rest are all months where you ran close to EV and 1-2 where you ran super hot.

Please revive this thread in 5 years. My guess is that poker will look very similar to how it looks now. The strat threads will have the same "How do I play QQ OOP" threads with Gobbledygeek giving the same advice to limp pre.

A lot of pros would be willing to put in high-volume hours when they have juicy games at good stakes all the time. But for areas with a bigger disparity between games, the win rate in the beat game will often be so much higher, that its often much more practical to play less hours and really focus on optimizing for that game, and mantaining the best physical and mental state. Getting in a great 15-25 hours at peak hours will often be better than 60+ grinding it out and investing in worst games.

This is very true. Especially if you play 5/10 and higher when it runs.

My 50 hours+ suggestion was for 2/5 or below grinders (myself) that should be able to auto-pilot almost every spot that comes up and just sit back, relax, drink, socialize, and grind.

lol body keep fighting the good fight. variance doesn’t exist and 60k is a walk in the park if your mind wills it.

I can only speak to my own experience and the experiences of others around me, which include successful pros who have been playing poker as their sole source of income for more than a decade, and they tell me that you won't get anywhere in poker without a lot of hard work. The people that think that the professional poker lifestyle is about hookers and blow are going to go broke. The ones that treat poker like a business and pour significant time and effort into optimizing all aspects of their business will succeed.

I agree. Studying is important, but so is table time.

Anyone who does not already have a large bankroll and wants to take poker seriously as a career choice. Many start up businesses require 80+ hours of work a week. Poker is not really different. If you are one of the people who think the casino environment is toxic and spending 40 hours a week in the casino will turn you into a miserable person then professional poker is not for you.

I know tons of poker players try to start up businesses or have investments in real estate. They aren't necessarily trying to get out of poker. It's just smart to seek additional sources of income. My personal goal which I wish to achieve through poker is to make enough money to eventually shift my income away from poker and free up my time so I can spend it on the things I really enjoy, like mathematics.

Not going to talk in circles, but I completely disagree. I don't have any idea why you have this belief so I don't know how to respond.

Yes, I might be misinformed. I have never had a job with benefits. My wife has a job with ****ty benefits (employer pays half of her health insurance or something). However, I don't think you understood the point I meant to make.

I am 25 and I do not have any retirement savings, nor do I plan on starting. I don't think this is sad; it's just a conscious financial decision which I believe to be best for me.

Saying employer benefits are worth $19k is an overestimate because I do not voluntarily pay $19k for the same services. It's like saying a $100 gift card for Cracker Barrel is the same as $100 cash to someone who never spends money there.

All: This is not a "what are the right aspects of a poker pro" thread. This thread is about the state of the games, not about the state of pros. Stop the derail.

As for the pointless back and forth on the main question, I think much of it is regional. Also, I think the change in the games creeps up on people. Many players just don't realize that the concept of c-betting was once a high-level secret that the fish didn't know about.

Are the games harder now than they used to be? Without a doubt, they 100% are. Are they still pretty soft and beatable, yes. Will the trend be towards them getting worse, absolutely. How fast will that trend move, well now that is an interesting question. I don't think it will be very fast, especially for LLSNL, or even more especially for low BI donkaments.

Sadly, the rake trend is also not getting any better and low BI donkaments are already basically unbeatable for a decent hourly, even with the awful play. I could envision a time when the rake gets bad enough that the same is true of LLSNL, even if the standard of play doesn't get measurably better. Fingers crossed that this will not be in the near future.

Las Vegas personage here read through this thread thought I would contribute my view/observations...

Poker isn't dying in the sense that it is in some rapid decline, in fact I would suggest it has hit a floor or sorts. There are, however, some changes that should be noted.

Poker has certainly peaked and moved on some time ago this is not debatable. What people are neglecting to see though is that this "everyone is good/skillfull/better now" has also peaked. There is a threshold of knowledge that casual to moderate players are willing to go to and the info is all out there for them to do so (books, training sites, coaching). They are not going to invest the time and energy to go far beyond that so yes they are more informed but it has only set a new baseline. Even at this baseline there is a huge deficit between the theoretical knowledge and being able to apply it in practice (composure etc). If you move beyond that baseline you have a lucrative edge. Consider chess which as been essentially solved for ages yet a moderate skill player will wreck fields of recreational players and grand-master is hard to touch except by other such lvl players. Unlike poker there is not even the element of luck...these casual players will never beat the masters yet they continue to play and up to the level they are willing to invest in learning.

The other thing I see here is a concentration/contraction of live poker. Where there used to be many small rooms with moderate action and a few main rooms with very high volume, the high volume rooms have more or less persisted while the lesser rooms have died off. I would attribute some of this to the spread of poker to smaller local venues throughout the US.

Poker is also economically sensitive and as such responds to fluctuations. Casual poker is a luxury to most and this is the case for all luxury markets.

Finally I would advise any poker 'pro' to diversify their income streams whenever possible since poker is not scaelable in the sense it once was.
The best chance poker has for growth would be increased social media/influencer and mobile exposure which has occurred at a moderate pace so I remain guardedly optimistic.

*get good at PLO the skill gap is still much wider and the gambolz much ^^^

Completely agree. I have seen this baseline level of passive, face-up play from recs for the past few years. Pretty much the only improvement in play from recs is that they are folding their junk hands and don't have a 90% vpip. They have slightly improved pre flop, but not by much. Being a TAG in 2019 makes you a LAG in most low stakes lineups.

IMO, the recs are still just as bad post flop as they were 5 years ago.

If these guys haven't learned how to fold one pair by now, they never will. If they haven't learned to semi-bluff a big draw then there not going to magically start by now.


I think the baseline skill of your average rec has peaked and will remain the way it is for a while.