Me too (I was in the *exact* same boat at 2000 hours).

Took me another 1500 hours to more fully comprehend what can happen.

But that's just me, looking at it thru my lens. Maybe you'll have a different viewpoint at 3500 hours than you do now at 2500 hours. Or maybe you won't.

Ganythingcanhappen,andmaybeitwill,butmaybeitwon't, imoG

That's not so bad a result though. While I've *worked* 200 hours in a month (often), I've never cracked 100 hours of poker in a month (gotten close a few times). But I can tell you that my *work* performance suffers when I start getting too much over that, so if you're also working another job beyond poker I can see getting burned out putting that much time in.

Don't *force* yourself to play in 'bad' games. If the table is ****ty, get up and leave. There's probably more value in getting up, going home, and reading a poker book/article or studying ranges and doing hand analysis off instead.


Now that July is over with, how about some July results?

$1/2 NLHE: +$764 over 21.4 hours: $35.70/hr -- w00t!
$1/2 RxR: +$1151 over 23.6 hours: $48.77/hr -- double w00t!
$1/2 PLO: -$1650 over 14.9 hours: -$110.74 -- mother ****er!

Total +$265/59.9 for $4.42/hr -- meh.

Some of the RxR/PLO sessions are $5 bring in, others are $2. I should really track that but sometimes it changes as the night goes on too. :shrug:

I hesitate to make many conclusions because "LOL sample size" ... but I really feel like the PLO is a bad game. I've only got about 500 hours total for both RxR and PLO combined with pretty breakeven results so far for both. Which given the crazy variance in omaha probably means next to nothing (hell, this month I lost 2-3 $1k+ multiway pots that would have un-****ed my results), and I know I'm not as good at is as I am at HE, but it just *feels* different sitting at the table between the two. The pure PLO game gets gigantic and swingy/spewy that outpaces my BR, while the RxR games seem smaller and make many of the players play *really* badly during the NLHE rounds. /rant

I have never played 1/2 so no experience but the 5/10 guys will raise the flop more often. The 2/5 guys bluff all the time. Most of my profit in 2/5 is bluff catching.

Just my personal experience, but in 5/10 you really have to get creative. At 2/5 you really don't. The fundamentals of checking when you are supposed to check and betting when you are supposed to seem to work, for me, much better.

For example, i had a hand the other day at 5/10 where i limped behind with JJ and the button raised and i just flatted and check raised the 872dd flop and gii vs 99. I would never feel the need to get that tricky in 2/5

On thd other hand, at 2/5 I made about 1k in 12 hours and looking back, all of my profit was from bluff catching after playing std flop and turn

Ok so you need 100,000 hands to be within 1 sigma (what Ive been told) so you can be 95% confident after 3300 hrs that your true win rate is represented by that sample size. So 500 hours is a hefty chunk. If you cant win after 500 hours you might not be a winning player.

The thing is, this is all misleading because if you have a high win rate you can assume you will ALWAYS show a profit after 500 hours. If you played an infinity of hands and chose any random sample of 500 consecutive hours, the chances that any of them are BE are not very high. Thats like 2- 3 months of not making money.

The word winning does a lot of heavy lifting here. It's different if your true skill is that of a 10BB/hr winner and different if you are a 3 BB/hr winner.

The sample size of your hours should give you a range within which your observed results will deviate from your true winning rate. The larger the sample size the narrower the range of observed results would deviate from your true win rate (which also moves along*).

So for example, after 100 hours, your results may be + or - 25BB from your true Win Rate. After 500 hours they may be + or - 10 BB from your true win rate. And so on.

I am pretty sure that a more statistically inclined poster can provide more accurate ranges than I.

* A lot of posters argue that your skill changes along with the skill of your opponents. But I don't think any change is usually as radical as the one you experience as when you first learn the game and it doesn't compare with the statistical noise you may experience. In other words, I would expect your true win rate to move a couple of points upwards or downwards.

Poker is different. You have to (you're supposed to) do studying away from the tables, there's also waitlists and games breaking that you have to deal with.

I'm only responding to this post because I feel a moral imperative to correct such blatant misinformation in a thread that is probably viewed by a lot of well-intended newbies. (I guess also to showoff my knowledge and stroke my e-peen and get that sweet sweet internet cred but whatever)

This post is ridiculous, and the fact that from the first sentence you reveal you have 0 clue what you're talking about should be a huge red flag that should prompt people to ignore what you're saying.


A) You'd need a very low standard deviation to achieve a 95% confidence interval after just 100,000 hands. What numbers are you using for standard deviation? Keep in mind your raw winrate -- aka bb/100 or expected bb/100 -- has nothing to do with the width of a confidence interval. (Note: It can be argued that a high winrate player can be more likely to have a lower std dev bb/100, but that's a different topic that was discussed a few pages ago)

I'd contend you're using extremely unreasonable numbers to obtain your conclusion. FWIW I've played over 5k hours of mid/high stakes live and have seen the revolving door of poker first hand. I've seen guys assume 50bb/100 winrates with 50bb/100 standard deviation (or at least their glistening confidence implied this sort of delusion) and a few months later I'll see them with a nub stack at 2/5.

Human beings are naturally self-deluding; some anthropolgoists argue it's actually advantageous from an evolutionary perspective for a species to be self-deluding. This combined with the overload of greed and results oriented thinking you find in the poker world causes a lot of poker players to be abnormally delusional. I think you're squarely in this group. I mean, you led off an argument by admitting you had to outsource the foundation of your argument to an apparent moron and nevertheless proceeded to spout off ridiculous claims that apply to and condescend a large number of people.


B) High winrate players can certainly have losing 500 hour samples. This is hardly debatable. I personally know pretty much all the biggest winners at the biggest games in my area and we all have 500+ hour breakevens or losses. Maybe if game conditions were ALWAYS perfect (e.g. you never played in a mediocre game for 6 hours before the game got good) and you were ALWAYS playing your A game it could be possible, but once more I think your assertions are founded on flimsy and absurdly optimistic assumptions.

Some might people run a little good and fade 500+ hour breakevens for a while, or even their whole career if they're lucky enough. I have a 3500 hour period with no 500+ hour breakevens myself. But in the long run, it will happen to all of us.


"I can calculate the movement of stars, but not the madness of men"

But whats ur graph tho

this is naive.

do you have a normal career?
do you have children?

there are all sorts of outside factors to everyones lives. to think poker players have to study outside playing somehow elevates them to more time allotted to work than a normal person is lol at best. teachers, as an example off the top of my head, never STFU about how they have to do a ton of work outside school.

adding children into the mix just makes parents realize how much free time they had before having children. after i had my 2nd kid, i now realize how much free time i had with 1; when i only had 1 it felt like i had no free time. silly me...

there are people who have all that ****, and still can go to the gym and eat healthy and whatever else you think is super difficult.


tl;dr: poker is a time suck just like any other job

+-1 sigma gets you 67% confidence. 2 sigma gets you 95%, and 3 gets you like 99.5%ish (approximate numbers all).

Then cutting from 3300 hours to 500 is a only 1/6 of the sample. Not a "hefty chunk" at all. These things don't scale linearly either.

There are plenty of long term winners here that have had or shown 500 hour BE or losing stretches. The statistics also bear that out as a reasonably likely possibility.

Also, you your really think 500 hours is really 3 months? A 166 hour month is "standard"? That's full time play without any off table work. Not realistic for the majority of players.


This is my understanding as well, although my statistics is woefully inadequate as I don't remember much of it from undergrad anymore. Bip! should know.

The discussion of skill improvement is an interesting one. I'd agree that the initial period when you get into the game and learn the fundamentals, maybe read some books and learn some new concepts, whatever, has the biggest impact on most player's skill basis. Those tend to be big easy to observe improvements. The gradual refinement of our ability to read opponents and situations just based on experience is a lot more subtle and we end up just 'knowing' the right answer. It is there, but it's hard to notice.

If you're not putting in study time off the table to actively improve your game you're not going to improve as much as I think people are assume you will over time.

The skill of your opponents is an even more interesting question. In a small player pool they *do* adjust to you, while in a larger pool that's not really a concern. There's also a selection bias where really ****ty players (tend to) go broke and quit, so if there's not a steady stream of newbies looking for a game the *average* opponent will get better over time, before we factor in their experience personal improvement.

What does having kids have to do with poker? That's a time sink regardless of whether you play poker or work a "real" job. I didn't say other jobs didn't require hours away from work. But poker definitely does so more than most jobs. Unless you're in a 9-5 that's really a 9-7 and you still have to worry about work out of the office, in which case you're probably in the wrong job/career but that's another debate. To make it more clear, why do you think 1500 hours is "standard" for full time poker? That's less than a 9-5.

Are you generally obtuse or are you doing so now to perpetuate what you think is difficult?

Your 1st comment:



My point was, and I'm pretty sure I was specific about this, many people work normal jobs for 200+ hours, have children, and can still cook meals and go to the gym. Considering your bio says your a student grinding in Vegas, I think it's safe to assume you have no children, so you wouldn't realize how easy your situation is compared to some people's.

You can keep commenting on this, but I'm done derailing the thread

Yeah but everything has that kind of stuff. I'm a lawyer. I'm supposed to keep up on the latest developments, I'm supposed to take out clients, I'm supposed to be available on weekends and nights for emails or calls, etc. I also commute every day. I have two kids that I take to school every day and am supposed to spend quality time with. I have a wife I'm supposed to take out for a date every so often and connect with. I like to play poker and degen when I can.

Everyone has a lot of stuff to do, poker really isn't very different in that regard. The main difference in poker is that people can completely make their own hours, and in some sense that probably attracts people who want to "work" less than someone in a 9 to 5 kind of grind.

I am interested in seeing a ranking of off-the-clock hours requirement for poker vs other jobs.

Curious : how many non-poker jobs have you had?

A summer bank internship. Another bank job I quit and a part time job serving in a restaurant during school.

I don't think live poker has much in the way of off-the-clock hours?

Assuming you really mean "off-the-table" hours ... if you want to get better it does.

For online poker yeah absolutely.

Why wouldn't you need/want to do the same thing to get better live?

Maybe if you're content to just play $1/2 against droolers for marginal winnings you can just go play. But if you want t move up or increase your WR you should do some off the table work.

This is true for most career paths

ugh so much pie in the sky its painful

2 facts - most small biznesses fail and most people aspiring to be poker pros fail

Most fail at poker for a number of reasons
1 lazy
2 not enough hours logged at the table
3 overestimate their skillz

It is not rocket science but it takes a very strong work ethic/ discipline to make it as a 2/5 grinder. Over the years I have seen a mere handful with this ethic. I cant tell you how many I have seen have a "good week" and take the rest of the month off. This is one of the main problems with poker...it is never ending (kind of like the post office).

Poker as a job is extremely boring, lonely, frustrating, depressing

I have to imagine these are the reasons y so many struggle with hours. I no longer put in the full time volume - but I did it for years. I was highly motivated. I had a mortgage and a kid to support.

I imagine when you are 20 something and dicking around with 50 roommates you dont feel that urgency - and are then pretty much destined for failure

Excellent post squid. I think another reason it's so hard in poker is because there's no room in the middle. Work for any corporation, and there are positions you can ride out for years doing very little and still get a paycheck. There's really no other ecomomy like poker. There are no partnerships on the felt...once you sit down your best friend will take your entire roll without mercy.

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This is very true as well. Plenty of days I go into work and don't feel like working. I put in a C or D effort. I still get paid the same $X that pay cycle.

In poker if you bring your D game, not only do you not get paid the same, but you will most likely lose a lot of money.

Exactly this. I have a job that I'm paid well to do, but I'm also very autonomous and have little to no oversight. All that counts are the results, and my bosses dgaf if it takes me 2 hours our 80. There are days where I'm just not up to bringing my A game, but my base salary still gets paid.

Autonomy is the double-edged sword that the vast majority of early 20-something 'pros' don't posses the maturity or work ethic to handle. Most of us don't develop it until we have external motivating factors that drive us, such as mortgage/family dependencies like squid mentioned earlier. Poker offers unparalleled autonomy, but none of the security.

I honestly think this is the biggest factor on why my hourly is better as a rec player rather than a grinder. I only play when I want to...there are no external factors driving me to get in time on the felt. Poker gets to be my escape from the daily grind, and not the source of it.

Yea, the ability to game select as a rec player and simply walk away if the table is ****ty or you're not feeling 100% into it really helps your hourly win rate, even if if hurts your monthly or yearly winrate.