What!?

I guess you are talking about the nittiest of nits, but jeez. Depending on where you play, they provide liquidity, i.e. lots of recreational players want to play in full games, so if the room you are playing in only has one or two games going, the nit provides an incentive for the recreational player to play the game. The nit also, while clearly not giving a stack away, provides players like myself a source of income. The blinds and continuation bet flops add up. This is the United States, and if a nit wants to pay rake, then he is allowed to play in the games. He is certainly allowed in my game as I am going to take a few hundred dollars on average from him/her during a session and provide for humor as I tell him/her how they don't play any hands.

I would much rather have the nit take up a seat than a good player. Like the post above me says, nits take up seats and either get the game going or make more games. This way you can spread good players on several tables.

Where did I say that these people were miserable? They seem to be about as happy/unhappy as any other professional player at these stakes.

300/session from a nit on average? Now that's funny.

I wish I could 12-table all the nits live. That's easily a million dollars a year stress-free.

just put in 5k hours a year you lazy ass

Lucky if I hit 1k hours this year...

I think probably like $120-200 an hour is doable. Like everyone is so like bad and stuff.

Stumbled on this thread. Yeah hard to tell true winrate; best judge is your own analysis. It's still useful to think about for reference and for making life/poker decisions with regards to going pro, moving, moving up/down, changing games, going to play online vs live, etc though.

Anyway might as well post brags. Here are my recorded results since Black Friday:

Overall: $132/hour over 733 hours.

NL/PL only:

372 hours and $71/hour at $700 buyin or lower.

(1/2 pounds, 2/4 5/5 AUD)

183 hours and $190/hour at 700-2k~ buyin

(1/3 2/5 pounds, 5/10 AUD, 25/50 HKD)

124 hours and $370/hour at 2k+ buyin.

(5/10 10/25 pounds, 50/100 100/200 HKD)

Some other stats at FL mixed games I played, like 50 hours, not too significant.

These games are taken in the UK, mostly London, Macau, Hong Kong home games, and recently in Australia. Sample not huge, and I ran good throughout, so this is the high end, but from observation, I estimate a bit over half of this is achievable over long run.

It's actually a bit funny that my winrate is basically my average buyin amount divided by 10.

In my experience, abc grinders aren't miserable. Methodical/boring/unassuming, but not unhappy with their lifestyle.

Knowing one's limitations is different from being unimaginative or a lack of creativity.

If you haven't been accused of being miserable at the table you haven't run bad enough yet.

The only people that seem to grind that much are older people, which is fine with me because I'd prefer them over kids.

These guys don't last. I'm by no means a long-term veteran, but I've seen countless people come and go in the years I've played full time. The guys who are lazy don't earn enough to live on, and are fooling themselves that they have a full-time job. For a 5/10-10/25 nl grinder you have to put in considerable hours , and not a lot of people actually do this for years at a time, while maintaining their focus.

A lot of people can't handle playing full time for years on end, and thats not disparaging anyone - this isn't paradise, and there are a lot of guys who find a better life outside of poker and move on. But lets not conflate a relatively short time frame like 6 months - 1 year and the year-over-year results that a long term pro needs to generate. Life tilt is brutal and managing the ups and downs make up a large portion of long-term results. As you increase your hours you increase the severity/frequency of life-issues interfering with poker. Taking a week off after a really bad losing session is a luxury you can't afford all the time. 10 hours/week is a lot different than 35 hours/week for a lot of reasons outside of game selection.

Maybe I was a little off on the exact subject, it's just that there are a few full time players in my regular game who are just so depressing to be around because all they do is complain.

My point was that I don't have to respect a "pro" player who makes <$40 an hour and doesn't seem to be having fun. Games are always more fun when everyone is up beat and laughing/having fun. Other regs know I have a really good sense of humor and will sometimes poke fun at me for playing rags, it's great when even the player who lost the pot can laugh too.

Anyways, I have been averaging at least 1k live hrs a year for the last 4+ years and I have always had some kind of job/business. Heck one year I played over 1k hrs live, a bunch online AND worked 55+hrs a week, but that was mostly cause I owed bookies tons of money and I feared for my kneecaps. Now half the time I am too lazy to play on fri nights:P

Dude, you are way out in left field.

Some of the happiest pro players I know are nits. And some of the most miserable d-bags are SLAG grinders who maximize every EV situation. I see no correlation.

It sounds like you have some kinda axe to grind against a few players in your local pool.

Whatever the case, it has nothing to do with the topic.

Who said you have to respect people who aren't having fun with their job? Your arguing against your own concocted straw man.

You don't like some of the players in your game, ok, whats your point? Being a full time pro doesn't cause people to be miserable like that - in fact most of the miserable regs I know are like that because they are slight losers, and are slowly getting killed by it.

You are a severe outlier in terms of yearly hours for a poker player. 20 hrs/week on top of working 55 hrs/week is a lot!

I'm a nit and I'm quite happy with my life and generally happy at the tables, although I can get a bit pissy if I'm running badly enough. I play regularly with plenty of nits who are just fine with life.

Congrats on the good results, but comparing Hong Kong home games to Vegas is - and I'm assuming here - kind of a stretch.

Because poker is much more mentally taxing than being a manager at Starbucks (to use an example from this thread). It's easy to burnout.

Winrate, BB/hour, Variance, etc. in a live game scenario really interests me so here is my contribution.

http://i.imgur.com/rZ5Yf.jpg

This is my graph starting from 2010 when I moved to Vegas.

This graph represents roughly

- 80% Vegas / 20% California
- 55% 5/10
- 35% 10/20, 10/25
- 10% bigger
- A 10k WSOPME dump which i'll never do again (or so I say)

The graph does not include

- 2/5 play which is probably around a measly 20hrs
- Private games and really big games in Asia since those really skew my graph.


Not so many hours for a "pro." I go through stretches where I really dislike poker / much rather be traveling.

Edit: Drawing my own conclusions from my graph and what i've seen...I think it's still very possible to make on average 10BB per hour on average 5/10 and above on the west coast of U.S. Game selection and taking time off is important to me. Also my graph has been invaluable to me. Anytime I go on a 1000BB downswing I look to this graph to keep me sane.

nice contribution and obv great wr fut

fut

Good post.

Any way to parse out and post only the 5/10 results? The reason I ask is that a small sample of higher play can skew results disproportionately up or down.

By the way, good point about "looking at the graph" during a downswing to remind yourself that you are winning overall, and that anything else are just blips on the overall upward trend. That's why I use iPhone software to record every session, every stake, every time, as it happens.

Sorry to get off topic, but I currently put all of my results into an excel spreadsheet. I looked up an app for android, but it was limited in types of stakes. Does anyone have a suggestion for a good android app for recording sessions (if one exists)?

Thanks

If you're serious about this, then it's a no-brainer to spend $30 and download every single one and evaluate them yourself. Then, constantly download new ones as they're introduced. And if you're really really serious and can't find one you like on android, switch to iPhone and use PokerJournal or one of its equivalents.

I like this better than the phone apps anyway; if you have some experience using excel you can interpret your results a lot more in depth than the apps allow. Plus you can make all sorts of interesting graphs.

Also, nice graph fut. As clorox said, bigger games can skew the hourly a lot - even just looking at he few data points I can see on the screenshot, you're getting some swings that are way beyond what the typical 5/10 game allows. Half of the visible results are +/- >$8,000, and a quarter of results are +/->$10,000; I'm curious what just the 5/10 results look like. It also looks to me like your first session is 100 hours long, so I assume you are putting several sessions together in one line, so maybe that is why the session swings look so large. That or you had an epic first session .

Congrats anyway.