85 average is crazy high. You see about 3 flops per dealer lol

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Pretty sure I've answered this before, but:

1) Lots of people only have one stake to choose from (my room, like many, only runs one stake 99% of the time).

2) As far as I see it, your argument is actually reason to believe we'd see *more* long term crushing lowest stakes winrates, not less. I'm pretty sure there are quite a few people who would simply stay where they were if they're destroying their current level risk / stress free. Not to say there aren't those who move up for various reasons, but I'm guessing even quite a lot in that boat would move back down if they found the risk / stress / reward not nearly as enticing as their easy peasy game.

GcluelessstakesnoobG

because poker players have shown to be a risk adverse and rational thinking group of people time and time again...

if you're making 10+bb/hour at a lower stake, there isn't much difference in play between the one above you and the one your at now. you might not crush right off the bat, but chances are, you're gonna be ok at that higher stake for a better $/hr overall. 10bb/hr at 1/3 = 6bb/hr at 2/5.

Thanks for sharing this.

Dizzy is a very good player, but Id be willing to bet he would have no problem admitting that he made his share of mistakes looking back....and he still hit close to my 15BB/hr number at 1/2 or 1/3.

Another thing I said was that if a top 2/5 player had financial reason to do so (like some big prop bet) that he could go back down to 1/2 and play 1000 hours and hit or break 15BB/hr. Id be willing bet that Dizzy would be on that list.

Whoever thinks those number are impossible are some of the people I was talking about when I said they are close minded and playing too ABC.

I beat 1/2 for 18.5 BB/hr in 2015. Could I still do that today? I don't know. I'm sure I ran hot and the games were most likely softer than today but I don't play 1/2 so idk. What I do know is I won't spend 1000 hours to find out.

How popular is this thread? I'm just wondering if there are enough interested people here who could subsidize this experiment if you (or any of the well known crushers) were willing to take such a deal. The delta between 12 BB/hr @ 2/5 and 15 BB/hr @ 1/2 is $30/hr. If we had 50 people willing to donate $200 to the cause we could subsidize 333 hours of this 1/2 experiment. This topic is so nebulous I'd be willing to throw a couple bucks at it but I'm probably in a super minority here. Would be an epic experiment / PG&C thread though.

Thanks for this. It gives good insight into just how much the difference in skill level can effect results tho I think we're talking about the most dramatic difference available; that of age. I remember playing in a pool of old(but less old) rocks and only doing about 3.5bb/hour: Now my pool is older and not rocky but just too loose pre and too passive post.

I don't have a point beyond what I've mentioned. I would just like to get as realistic a picture of what true win rates can be as possible.

I'll always be skeptical of the higher numbers, like I would be with Amway guys, Uber drivers, bar tenders, etc. I'd like to be wrong on this though, cuz, as I said, I wouldn't mind making 6 figures as the second best 2/5 player at the table, earning a mere 10 or 11 bb.

Maybe the typical 1/3 rec really does lose $58/hr. It seems very high, but I don't really know. Maybe I figured it wrong. It's a part of the puzzle though. The money has to come from somewhere. You can't tell me more money is coming out than going in.

The market equilibrium thing continues to be a sticking point. We've seen it over the years with, well, Uber is a good example. At first, people DID crush it. Now there are way too many drivers. I'm not an expert but it seems like it used to be fairly easy to make a killing reselling on e-bay, but now it's hard because a million people moved in. Being a youtuber, kind of the same thing. Why not poker?

I'm not smart enough to know when outliers are just examples of survivorship bias. Being in the top .1% of poker players certainly wouldn't be. Maybe being in the top .1% of grinders, or long term winners? Maybe someone gooder at math could chime in.

I do think there's probably a distinction between saying, what would a perfect poker cyborg make, or even what would phil ivey make, vs saying what you'd make as one of the very best players in your pool. If "cieling" means the cyborg rate, then yeah, it could be pretty damn high.

My past 2035 hours have averaged me ~$39/hr playing mostly 1k cap. Often there are UTG straddles so, it's sometimes 100bb, not 200 as advertised, and I've also ran well in the ~100 hrs of straight 5/10 I've played (~123/hr), but I gotta agree that overall, true possibilities are closer to what Mike's saying than what we might experience ourselves. It's hard for me to think of a single session where I didn't wish I played at least one hand a bit differently, and I can easily account for at least $10k I gave up with just oddball spews/hero downs in specific, documented hands. Overall, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that I gave up near 30Gs of potential in that 2k hr stretch. Strat aside, much of that is mental leaks. I'll run hot and make a dumb call/bluff, or I've been running hot and make a bad fold or don't go for value because I think I can't be running good for this long. Conversely, I'm just now making a strong comeback from a 500hr+ BE stretch. 350 hr of that was basically taking pure losses. I know I made plenty of ******ed errors overvaluing overpairs, saying to myself "they gotta hold up at some point." Then, I've had sessions where I was just trying to make a hand since I perceived nothing as working and lost chips by underbluffing. On the strat side then, I know I leak a bunch of $ defending bb improperly, or defending 3b OOP. All that leads to further errors post, obviously. Anyways, all I'm saying is that this game has a lot of unseen potential. It's impossible to always play perfect as a normal human being. However, being imperfect, we often assume that we are, which leads to a drop in improvement. Sometimes, we just run hot too & profit despite our bad play, not because of it. Also, this community is made of people playing in the softest NL games out there. We play live low stakes. These games are softer than any micro stakes found on the interwebz (maybe some of the new Chinese apps excluded), so perhaps the groupthink created here isn't necessarily the best. I've been on 2+2 for a while but I didn't really see major improvements in my game 'till I solicited paid advice. I mean, there are posters on here that I respect & learn from, but not many of us are seasoned professionals, so a lot of the threads here are kinda like the blind leading the blind. ...Ummm... didn't think I'd be typing this stream of consciousness right now, but yeah I think 2/3 and below is and will always be super soft, it's just that skilled players who can crush at the clip Mike stated don't have the incentive to play so low. Places that don't have 2/5+ running regularly don't have any pros in the games at all, so if one did sit in, it'd be lights out.

thx - this is back when i knew how to win lol

np!

Certainly made a lot of mistakes. Was I on a heater? most likely. Could I have played better? certainly. I don't care to argue what I think realistic win-rates are, just posting my personal results as a data set for the forum.

Of course GG constantly posts about needing to see results, no one can post a graph, etc and then completely ignores it whenever someone does. smh.

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at the end of the day variance in live poker is crazy, sample sizes are small, and game conditions are vastly different for different people/locations. for all of those reasons I don't really get the desire to argue about win-rates.

just play the best you can and don't take anything for granted. as you see, I crushed 1/2 and 1/3 for ~1k hours - then moved up and crushed both 2/5 and 5/T for another 1k+ hours. Now I am in the middle of a large downswing that is the result of a variety of different things and am break-even over the last 700 hours. poker can be crazy sometimes and the mental side is tough for anyone.

Ty for posting your data. 700 hours be, what the hell! I didn't think something like that was possible for a crusher! Do you think the massive downswing has tilted you in such a way you couldn't pull your A game anymore?

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lol I am not calling myself a crusher that's for sure.

the downswing is due to a mix of things. I have certainty ran much worse than I used to, especially in big pots - but poor play is a substantial part of it as well.

I also now play a fraction of the volume that I used to due to other factors in life (positive for life, negative for poker) so my game just isn't as sharp and I'm not as mentally in it when I do play. And when you aren't winning/playing well, it is hard to find reasons to put in more hours vs less.

At my peak I played 808 hrs in a calendar year; the next year I played 367; and YTD have only played 149 (all w/ full-time job). I would like to pick it back up at some point and grind out of the downswing but it is a tough task while playing such a small amount of hours.

If current win rate ceilings are in the following ballpark currently :

15 BBs for 1/2
12 BBs for 2/5
10 BBs for 5/10

What do you think were winrate ceilings 15 years ago?

I think you could make seven figures in 5/10 if you had today's knowledge in 2004.

edit: What I'm getting at is that people crushing in 2004 didn't know as much as is known now, so it's hard to accurately gauge, but people were making crazy money in poker in the mid to late 2000s.

basically.

i remember watching old videos where coaches (i think vanessa selbst was one of them) talking about specifically this new concept they stumbled upon: betting the flop after raising preflop with air. they figured out cbetting was, like, profitable because they observed people just folded otf. they were playing low limit online and basically mashing the bet button 100% of flops. and then they would just get to showdown and see what the player called with and everyone who got to showdown had a hand or a descent draw. basically no one knew about floating back then. it was amazing though and they were amazed by the results. it was honestly really fun to watch because they were actually excited about it and it was a different time where people ad to figure this stuff out on their own because solvers were years away.

that led to floating and reverse floating. i actually miss those days, not because the poker was easier, per say, but because it was just more fun. it was less about being a robotic math machine.

All those pros from your room 5 years ago that aren't there today -- it's not because they made bank in that time period and retired. The obsession with theoretical max attainable/sustainable win rates is nauseating. Half the pros I run into are disheveled looking people seemingly one downswing away from throwing in the towel. The other half built their nut during the online days when live poker was a gold mine and are sitting on 6 figure BR's they could never build up today if they needed to.

Sounds like you are saying all today's pros suck.

I too find this obsession with WRs (both theoretical and actual) really strange. Win rate is a metric obv. But no one plays perfectly or near perfectly all the time. They just don't. Particularly as the hours stack up.

Just play your best. Pay attention. Analyze spots you are in and try and improve the way you play those spots. Rinse/repeat. And obviously and probably most importantly,. Try to be as honest with yourself as possible. Self awareness in any endeavor is often the biggest differentiator between long term success and something less than that

You are fine with that. You should try to stay around d*d/wr big blinds for your given stake(it's deduced from the kelly equation), with d your standard devation over 100 hands and wrate your bb/100h.
So in your case, let's say you have a wrate of 10bb/100h and a standard deviation of 100bb/100h. Well, you need 1000 blinds to play the game which means you are golden

It doesn't matter much if you are a committed rec (even a winning one) and your financial interests lie elsewhere.

To some degree, it doesn't much matter if you are pot committed to being a poker pro. If it's either poker or pizza delivery, just work hard on your game.

It does matter if you're making a significant financial choice. I really am thinking about working on my game and playing more 2/5. I think 1 part time player (I'll always do other stuff) can probably only guess at their true win rate. But knowing the range of realistic possibilities helps that guess.

This is all vague, but let's say there are 200 people in Vegas attempting to grind 2/5. If I can become like the 25th best player, would that mean $55/hr or $30/hr? Pretty big difference. Worth knowing.

I have no idea how many hours. As far as live casino hours since the mid 00s, maybe 5k hours or so. But I played a ton in home games in my teens and early twenties too. If you counted those plus online play, I don't think I even want to know.

I can't focus on every hand and I'm not sure the mental effort is worth it for many. What I found useful in the past is to take notes on regs I find myself playing with often. Then I pull those notes up when they sit at my table.

As a disheveled looking pro who built his six figure bankroll in the last couple years, you don't know what the **** you are talking about.

Live poker still is a gold mine. That's what they've been trying to tell you.

High six figs?

I tend to agree, live games are still very profitable.

Congrats you are an outlier.