This (well, except that I switched to sports betting rather than real world).

It's certainly still possible to make a living playing 2/5 or whatever, but it's pretty miserable imo. I guess YMMV on that, but the outlook on game quality is somewhat negative and poker is a non-transferable skill, so anytime you want to get out of the game you're staring at a massive resume gap. Most jobs where that is true (professional athlete) pay vastly better than normal jobs as a result. Even at 100K a year poker isn't a great deal when you consider what you aren't getting.

Live poker is far from dead. Don't you guys ever watch LATB for God's sake??

SMH... Let's compare apples to apples:

$60,000, but then with paid benefits, it's more like $90k that you're going to have to make at the poker table to make a good comparison.

And even at $60k, you should be paying taxes, so probably down to $50k in take home.

Ask your local poker pro... How's that 401k retirement savings account doing? Getting a good match from the ... Never mind.

Sigh. So much logically wrong here.

1) The question was not if it's dead, but if it is dying. Almost everyone has said that it's not what it was, but it's not going to completely die either.

2) One example of bad play does not say anything about overall trends.

3) LATB is played in what is generally argued as the biggest poker city in the world. Even in LA, though, the number of high stakes tables are declining, though the mid-stakes and low-stakes are doing well. In much of the rest of America, high-stakes is gone, and mid-stakes is very rare. In a lot of places, 2/5 is the biggest game.

I still play poker, and still enjoy it and make money off of it. I'm definitely not trying to discourage people from playing. As I said in the first response to the OP, I think it will make a great side-gig for many years to come. The environment for full-time is much tougher, though.

I don't know if this is true or not, but the same pro I was chatting with also said he tried to get onto LATB (he plays locally and in Vegas each summer and does some travelling through the US) but he couldn't get a spot. Apparently the show goes out of their way to find the most fishy and ridiculous players imaginable, characters like Armenian Mike, and then only allow regs in who are politically connected in the poker world, ie. personal friends and friends of friends, and often you're required to kickback a portion of your winnings to the game host. There are apparently lots of private games that operate like this, some at very high stakes, and unless you play the politics game well, you won't be allowed in.

I also recently chatted with a Bitcoin millionaire from Vancouver, Canada (again, I cannot confirm the truthfulness of any of this) who says he plays in some of the fishiest 100/200 games he's ever seen, like softer than casino 2/5, because Vancouver is full of crazy rich Asian gamblers who know nothing at all about poker except what they've seen on TV - they are still at the pre-poker boom level and showing no intention to improve! But to get in that circle, you need to actually be one of them, or have someone already there vouch for you, or else you'll never in a million years get through the door.

I just had a thought: I've heard of quite a few big names in poker move to Vancouver, Canada, including Justin Bonomo, and also a few other big names that I cannot think of right now. I'm sure they won't admit it publically, but could these rumored high stakes private games be the reason??

I believe that. The fishiest games right now are the super nose bleed stakes. There are millionaires that love to donk off at the poker table, but the rank and file just can't afford to constantly lose at poker that would make a decent player a living.

There are still some 2/5 pros in my room but they don't look happy to me. They are working on a super thin line to make $30 an hour.

But there is always something around the corner that can give someone who's good at poker a big come-up. I guess I can thank my poker skills for seeing the value early in BTC, but one would think a skilled poker player would do better looking for other opportunities. If you are truly good at poker you can find something else that makes you over 100K per year imo

I don't know if this question is directed towards some of the guys here who more or less make a living from poker or torwards the general public like myself. Because I think the answer to this depends on everyone's perspective. But I will say this, if it's relevant to the conversation at all.
I was scrolling through some of the older posts out of curiosity, just to see how different the game was being talked about; played.
It was a bit for a shocker at how unsophisticated compared to now the posts were. And I'm only talking about back to 2011.
I won't bore with details but just go back into the not so distant past.
The quality of strat talk compared to now was pretty primitive.
So, I don't know if the poker is dying but it's definitely getting harder and harder.

This.

Gifyou'rethinkingaboutbecomingatypewriterrepairman ,youmaywanttorethinkthingsG

Baaaahahahahaha!

I can't remember where I found this, but I saw a infographic video that estimated the hourly wage of a specialist doctor to be less than a teacher! Due to the extremely high cost and length of medical school, late start in career (translates to less working years), and the disgusting number of hours per week that doctors work (often over 100 per week in some fields, like surgery), the end estimate is that after paying off debts and dividing the massive salary by the massive number of hours worked, the average doctor makes less per hour than the average teacher!

Doesn't seem to hold water, would love to see sources. Quick run of the numbers:
Doctor delay years: 15 to be generous
Teacher median salary: $60k
Doctor added education cost: Dependent on school, specialty lets solve for x
Doctor added hours per week: 100 - 40 = 60 (super generous since many teachers work long hours too and I don't know a single doctor who works 100 / wk).
Total career difference in years: Lets assume both retire at 65ish, so 40 years for the teacher, 25 years for the Doc.
Teacher totals: $2.4 M, $29/hr ($37.5/hr if you discount the summer months)
Doctor totals: $12.5 M (@500k/yr), $96/hr (@100 hrs /week)
In order for doctors to make less per hour they would need to pay an extra $8.73 M ($7.625 M if we use the $37.5/hr summers off rate) in education costs and interest.

Maybe we can debate the hours / cost for making 150k but for 500k this isn't close.

Poker isn't dying; it's returning to its equilibrium.

We've seen this before: In 1987 hold'em and seven-card stud were legalized in California, and suddenly the games grew, fueled by new players who had no clue what they were doing. People who did have a clue made bank. And the worst players went broke, and the bad players got a little bit better, and the games got less soft, and then tougher, and then found an equilibrium that roughly tracked the state of California's economy through the '90s.

Fixed-limit poker is in decline. The number of tables of limit hold'em has shrunk over the past five years, especially at the higher stakes. At the club where I play, there are three levels of limit hold'em: 3-6, 6-12, and 30-60. Occasionally, like once every two weeks or so a 15-30 will be spread for a while. What this means is that there is no ladder for aspiring players to climb out of the rake trap, and the low-limit games are a separate ecology from the big game. (The big game had been 40-80 for a couple of years, but recently it has dropped back to 30-60 -- another sign of decline.)

But no-limit hold'em is going strong. Normally two tables of 2-3-5 are going most of the time, and on busy nights four tables are common and five not unheard-of. There is a solid base of 1-1-2 games, too.

Local licensing requirements do not permit the spreading of PLO or mixed games, the current fashion in the wider poker world.

One thing no one has yet mentioned in this thread is the advent of solvers and their impact on higher-stakes online games. Apparently, the highest games that are going regularly now are 200NL, where almost-perfectly-GTO pros camp out bumhunting the less-good pros while they wait for a fish to sit down at a higher table. GTO knowledge is trickling down to the lower stakes, and the games are getting tougher. The fish are still biting, but the sharks are now wearing adamantium armor plate.

And that knowledge of GTO and balance is carrying over to live poker, which is why many player are moving over to PLO and mixed games, which in general have not yet been a fertile field for solvers.

+1
We have to ask ourselves.
How many poker rooms did Vegas have, for example, in 1970?

Vegas has too many variables that are more correlated with current and special events than everywhere else. Simply put, Vegas is not a good indicator of overall health of poker.

It is easy to see how poker is dying. Poker was a new thing where anyone can go out and compete to win cash. It didn't take much to participate and everyone thought they had the "special" skills to beat others.

Now the game is firmly established, routine, and even the most delusional whales know that they don't have the skills to beat the game.

Whales are few and far between. I had a mental list of all the bad players around town and I rarely see any of them.

Losing players are losing far less. The "bad player" pool of money that had 80 - 90% players contributing? That pool has shrunk significantly. It was easy for losing players to "win" often enough from this pool to dilute the fact that they are losing players. Now that pool is much smaller, everyone in that pool is winning less and less often, and even the most delusional players can sense that they are losing players.

Are there still a lot of games? Sure, especially if your room is driven by promotions, which is basically an artificial way of recreating that "bad player" pool.

Let's face it, the game is dying hard. Need something new to trick the general public into participating with their money willingly.

Y'all remember that we were having this exact same conversation in 2006, right?

Not all of us were playing poker in 2006 AB, let alone involved in the forum. Well, I was playing but that only means in 2006 I probably was starting to figure out that a flush beats a straight.
Genius suggestion! Let's start the next topic, " Should we ever limp and not raise? "Or, "should I become a pro?!"

Plenty of players were still getting into poker for the first time after 2006.

Do you see new players coming into poker in 2019?

Eventually the sheep will have to be slaughtered if the profit of wool continues to drop.

*let's keep the streak going and respond at precisely x:04*

I think the recent human vs. AI challenge goes completely against this. Humans are not playing close to GTO at the highest level when a pseudo GTO bot can destroy them over a statistically significant sample HU. Libratus is not even perfectly GTO so there is a possibility for the skill gap between top human and perfect play to be even higher than what Libratus demonstrated.

-------

Do you ever feel like you are living on a different planet than everybody else? This is how I feel when everybody condemns professional poker as some miserable, dying lifestyle.

I'm not particularly in the mood to nitpick every post in this thread, but lol at comparing poker to the median household income. The last time I checked
poker is played as an individual, and the median individual income is closer to $30k in the US. Also, I think it's slightly arrogant to act like six figure jobs are just lying around everywhere for anyone to pick up. It's hard to make a decent living, and if you're banging out six figs a year, or even something like $50k, you're doing better than the majority of Americans and you probably had to work hard to get where you are.

I would argue that for some people poker is a better option than college with sky-high costs for education. Honestly I don't know why people go to school anymore for anything but the very top earning fields.

The game is not going to die as long as people keep showing up, which happens as long as we keep the atmosphere fun for fish. It's a really hard sell for me that the average fish are ever going to be half-way decent. The other day I saw a middle aged reg who has been playing poker half of his life come in with Janda's Applications. He's one of the better non-professional players and a game of 8 of him would still be easily beatable.

Everyone in live poker is beatable everywhere I've played, except maybe the top .1%. If you think games are getting tough, make yourself tougher because nobody is close to their personal best yet.

Are you planning to make consistent money from poker?

Do you see the same players consistently losing the same amount of money for the next 3 years, 5 years, or 10 years? If a casual reg is picking up poker books, can you realistically expect to consistently win the same amount?

I can see the argument that you will continue to improve to stay ahead of weaker players' improvement, but can't you not objectively see that you are much closer to the ceiling than the weaker players and the gap will only become progressively smaller?

So that leads to the only factor for poker to continue to be consistently profitable for certain players: how many new players will join the game?

It’s like everything else. There will be players who are weaker while others get stronger. Human nature dictates there is often an imbalance. Look at the finance industry, its also shark infested and some people are still able to carve out a. living. If you think its boring and you are jaded by the fact that the game is declining from the peak than maybe you don’t love poker enough. WSOP 2018 set records so I’d argue poker is still very alive and won’t be dying anytime soon. Tournaments have plenty of rec players. If you are after lots of money instead of the love of the game you are better off looking for something else.


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My point is that even the players who are picking up poker books are still hopeless against the best players. I see people around that have been playing since the game was 5 card stud and they are not punters, but they are still easy money. They had years to get better and they didn't. Why would I expect the next generations to be different?

I am not close to the skill cap if the best players in the world are not close to the skill cap. Rec-regs are absolutely nowhere near the skill cap and the fish are hopeless. The skill gap is not narrowing at a significant pace when the most experienced players in the room are horrible. If the attitude of the masses towards poker changes and they start treating it more like chess and less like blackjack then maybe the games won't be worth playing anymore.

You're right that we need new players joining the game, even if it's only for the fact that a lot of the older players who slowly bleed money will eventually die (sorry for the morbidity). I don't see this as a problem. There's a lot of diversity in most of the poker rooms I play at. I see all races and experience levels at the table.

I'd be shocked if there were more than 2 people on here that have cleared 60k five years running.

Some guy just posted nearly 270k lifetime (which is top 1%) and his last 6 years were: (2018) +44k, (2017) +39k, (2016) -2100, (2015) +750, (2014) +98k, (2013) +85k

Games are unpredictable and variance is the driving factor. If you play in 6betme's Melbourne game or MikeStarr's Florida game which are the two easiest games on the planet you may be able to predictably clear 40-50k but those games are the exception.

Yes, but these players aren't the ones contributing to majority of your profits. They will continue to exist because they have inadvertently discovered a budget balance that allows them to continue to play.

Poker is now filled with many of these players and more of them are continuing to trend toward the same balance.

It's a good makeup for a social club, not so much if you are looking to make a living.

They did get better, not all of them started as moderately small losers. And the ones that are still playing from those days, these are cream of the crops. You don't find many of these for a simple reason that it is an accomplishment to be one of them, even if you don't see how it could be a positive feat.

What next generation? That's my question.

There is an absolute ceiling and there is a relative ceiling. Most of us in these forums are far from the absolute, but very close to the relative ceiling. Hence we are still posting in LLSNL and not playing in high stakes.

Rec-regs exist because they aren't losing beyond their ability to absorb the loss. If there are a ton of these red-regs that are losing at high dollar value to make up for a significant portion of your poker income, congratulation, you are in a very good place.

There aren't that many groups of people outside the population of retired and wealthy folks that fit such bill, and unfortunately it is also a dying population. Plus these folks are peculiar and they have the financial ability to find new means of entertainment to kill time.

It is an easy group to sheer, but it does require more than just poker skills.

Old fish are gone. New fish aren't finding their way into the water.

That's the thing...the attitude toward poker has changed significantly. That's what happens when it has been under spotlight for almost 20 years. There will never be another event in poker similar to Moneymaker. I can't see something like that happening in the old analog world when everything is trending toward other direction.

I can see where you are going with this, and yes, there are a lot more new immigrants playing in these rooms that weren't around in the earlier boom days.

However, these are also some highly skilled tech workers. And yes they are often pretty bad, but they are certainly no dummies. These players are far smarter and more successful than the majority of the old boom players.

If these are the players that are filling up the room, expect the game to die even faster.

Half the threads posted have an early 20’s V. The next generation is fine, and so will the one after that.