Yeah idk why people are bringing up online players with 2/5z experience.

If you have no experience, you should learn playing online and save up money and watch a lot of videos in the meantime. That's pretty much it. Playing any significant amount of poker before proper studying is a waste of time.

What's the minimum required number of hands of live poker before one is able to say they're a winning player?

Is there even such a number or does the game change faster than you can acquire a meaningful sample size?

There might be other ways to tell if you are good player ...but there is only one way to tell if you are a winning player...and that is WINNING MONEY.

You could be a good player and still not win.....but being a winning player requires winning.

You’re right, but that’s not what people mean when they say “winning player.” They mean a player utilizing a strategy which expects to win money. Actually winning money is ironically not a great way to evaluate whether one is a winning player, unless the sample size is large.

Borrowing money for gambling is not as bad as most claim, but it can be disastrous for a subset of people.

It’s just like borrowing money for a business venture. No one looks down on someone for borrowing money for starting a business from a solid business plan. The only difference between this and borrowing to gamble is that there are many people who do not abpproaxh gambling in an intelligent way.

Not sure if serious.

We're talking about being a winning player in terms of expectation, not historic results. The latter is entirely useless on its own, only useful as an indicator towards the former, we only care about whether we're likely to make money.

Exactly. With the right person, I'd not just lend or stake money for them to play, I'd be willing to pay them an hourly to study poker/get coached by me, if they sign on a minimal hours and so on.

A thousand hours live is generally a good starting point

If your a total novice then it might take 1000+ hours of logged results to know whether or not you are a winning player, but if you are an experienced player its different. Id be willing to bet that if I moved to a completely new location where the games played differently or if I moved up in stakes, that I could tell in 100 hours or less if I was a winning player in THAT game.

In the end all we care about is winning money and your very long term results are the best gauge but a good player can tell in the short term if he is over matched or no matter what his short term results are.

gonna disagree because even being optimistic that’s 30,000 hands which online poker shows is not enough of a sample

i agree with Sol that it basically comes down to whether you’re good or not, regardless of results

the sample i’m currently tracking starts with my return to live poker 6 months after my first 350 hours as a absolute breakeven player beginning Oct ‘15

i’m +5.5bb/hr over 1550 hours but i don’t think that’s very good for the 1/2 and 1/3 games i play and feel i’m on the low end of variance for my skill, and that’s only an optimistic 45k hands, so a little more than double the hours would be the 100k milestone but then how much have the games changed since the start of this period and finishing that sample?

If something happened to me and I suddenly had zero dollars - I would have no problem whatsoever taking out a loan and playing. I know the same holds true for you. However, we are not talking about us here. We are talking about people asking for advice on an internet forum.

I have been in this profession for a really long time and I have seen some of the craziest sht happen to people when their backs are against the wall. Normally sane people doing completely insane stuff. This combined with people constantly overestimating their abilities is a very very bad combo.

I believe that people who are ok to borrow money to gambool with are in reality the ones who are least likely to ever really need to (not talking about selling action to play bigger, I'm talking about borrowing $ cuz u aint got none)- and that is a very small subset of professional players.

If you need to ask if borrowing money to play poker is a good idea - it aint

So you are confidant that you are a winning player even though you feel like your results arent your true long term win rate, right? That's what I meant.

Variance can cause your results to be below what you skill level should be producing for a long time, but if you are experienced you should still know whether you are a winning player pretty quickly.

Don’t borrow money to play poker. Get a job.

The comparison to borrowing money to start a business is ridiculous.

Don’t lend your brother in law $10k to start a landscaping business.

If I told you how much money my brother in law owes me for a business loan gone bad, you would throw up.

Agree with squid.

I've thought a lot about staking low-stakes live players, but its just a massive paradox. If theyre a good player with no money, that means they have big life leaks that makes it too risky. If theyre a good player with money, they dont need you to stake them. The only scenerio is a good player who happened to have incurred an emergency expense to wipe out their savings -- a rare thing.

ik it wasn't about staking but points remain the same

Played first session of 2018 after coming off my worst month in nearly 2 years in December. Ran fairly good for the most part and made strong value bets whenever possible. The only major losing hands were QQ where I went 0/3 for ~100 BB’s and AKs vs. straddler/shove short stack’s AA where we flopped case ace.

After the 4000+ hours I’ve logged over last few years it’s rather drab to report that the majority of this game comes down to how you run. Part of my evolution as a player was transitioning from my run good “I’m so awesome beating every stake for the 12-15 BB’s/hr with a 45’ giraffe for 1000 hours so I’m ready to go pro” phase to enduring the ultimate grind throughout 2016-2017 where no wins were easy and unfathomably horrendous run bad was around every corner and ensured unabated for two years.

A few people tried to explain it to me while I was in peak run good so naturally I dismissed it as sour grapes or whatever. But now that I’ve seen the light I can say it’s just one of those things every player has to experience them self in their own way to appreciate how utterly massive a role variance plays in your results over thousands upon thousands upon thousands of hours.

Even harder to eventually realize was that some people may never even reach that point during their live career. After 4000 hours and counting I truly believe it’s possible to just run extremely well for the entirety of your live “career” (3-10 years / 1000-10,000+ hours) that you’ll never truly appreciate the randomness of hand distributions if all you know is - raised pre, flopped top top, value bet 3 streets vs. a villain I had a good read on that would pay off with worse. When I was running very good, all I thought about was “way to go jbuz way to maximize value and bet 3 streets with a solid read.”

It’s only after months and months and months and months of going through the foreign and unfamiliar territory of what I now refer to as “dead sessions” where you may see an expected distribution of preflop and postflop hands but they consistently come at the wrong time, never extract value, get felted with second best monsters, lose your 95/5, 80/20, 70/30, 67/33, 60/40 and 53/43’s for stacks time and time and time again that it allows you to truly appreciate when you are blessed with “run good.”

I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I am so completely in tune with how my sessions play out now that I can objectively point out when I am running good. And the biggest eye opening realization to me was just recognizing you gotta ride the wave and stack paper and hope it lasts cuz you never know when things will do a 180’ leaving you with questions of “what is going on and how is this possible?”

I’m glad I have the right mindset now and especially glad I experienced the misery that is playing full-time while seeing results way below where you expect and actively going through the transformation that is the randomness of poker.

Especially glad to be back in the land of the living in a new career I’m super excited about and knowing poker is reassuming it’s place as a part time side hustle that covers most of my month to month expenses so I can focus on work and career aspirations.

I certainly don’t recommend anyone go pro as anything more than a temporary stop gap, but having lived it myself and ignoring all the warnings I realize anyone that is seriously considering it is going to make the decision for them self and largely ignore advice because it’s incredibly difficult to synthesize and empathize with experiences and advice that you’ve never dealt with first hand.

/end rant

hellova poast JB - if you ever make it to florida would love to buy you a beer - much respect

Im sure you probably really have have some run bad. Im gone thru 2 streaks of run bad that seemed impossibly bad so I know what you mean. However, based on things like your comments here
https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1...=#post53320498

I think you are probably overplaying hands in some spots. Bet/call in that spot is terrible. Also, its almost impossible to get 3 streets of value in today's poker games. There just aren't very many people THAT bad anymore so if you're still going for 3 streets a lot, you are overplaying a lot.

Johhny, that was beautiful.

Mike, lol.

I'm racking my brain thinking how to shut down Mike's comment and you crushed it.

Not going pro in the poasting game.

Whatever....if he wants to keep making the same mistakes and blaming his crazy variance on fate that's his business, but I bet his StnDev is 3 times what mine is. Some of this variance that everyone complains about is man made. That's my point.

He was crushing
poasters said, watch out for that variance
he said yolo and quit the well paying job that he hated
he wasn't crushing
he says, watch out for that variance
he's excited about his new career plans

the appropriate response to this heartfelt poast is not "yeah, but what about this leak over here"

I just so happened to read the thread where said he would bet/call the river, which is insane, and then I stopped over here and saw his post where he curses his 4000 hours of crazy variance. I stopped reading after the variance...blah blah blah...variance because Ive seen this so many times before. People blame bad play on variance. They think they just keep running into the top of peoples ranges when in fact everyone runs into the top of peoples ranges more or less the same amount over 4000+ hours but some people just lose less money when it happens.

I'm happy that hes happy about his future though.

grandpasimpson.gif

Not ganna comment on the validity of if he overplayed that hand or not (bcuz i dont feel like reading it for one)

However.... think about your statemenet of "people aren't bad enough to pay off 3 streets anymore". If thats true, can't we just print by tripple barrell bluffing bcuz they'll just fold like 95% of their range by the river? If the answer is anything other then "HELL YEAH", then you can indeed make plenty by getting 3 streets of value

Yes, we should be triple barrelling a lot more than we did 2-3 years ago.

Mkay fair enough, so long as you're willing to double down on your statement.

Though even then I wouldn't use the term of people being "better" then they were before, they would simply be (according to you) now over-folding instead over-calling -- an equally bad exploit.