Powerball is good if you win it, too.

Plus you don't need to be the best to have higher EV, even in deep stack situation.

Love playing with nut peddling players in deep stack situations, because they rarely put up much fight for 40 - 80bb pots and easily threaten by their own stack size.

If you are a winning player, then having a graph and clear records of your poker hourly over time is a great way to show your Mrs that you are both a winner and that it isn't gambling.

I have found the best way to explain the need to not spend winnings is to talk through a bankroll being the same as a tradesman's tools - without it, you can't work. When you have enough hours logged, you can also use the up and downswings in your graph as reasons why you need to not spend your profits (or all of them)

But I do find it beneficial to occasionally dip into the roll to pay for life stuff as a way to show the benefit to the family of my poker habit and to justify the time I spend away from home

As Spike has said, often it is time away froom the partner/family that is a bigger issue around poker (or other hobbies) than the 'gambling' aspect. That's certainly the case for me - in my (generally very happy) marriage with three kids and lots of work, time/lack of time alone is the key variable metric that can send tensions to boiling point

It's not as simple as that, because the size of the pot will never get near that threshold without multiple raises on a street or two, which means you'd have to make massive overbets to achieve the result you're implying. That means your opponent has to show up with the near nuts way less often to negate that play. Not to say that makes the described opponent unbeatable by any means, just that it isn't that simple, and it's pretty lol for you to use that tone in your post as if you were the first person to think of exploiting narrow stack off ranges in deep situations.

Pretty sure YGO eats your soul 99/100

That's a relief to know. How often YGO eats my soul has always been a burning question in my mind. I wish I could get an assessment from someone who hasn't lost 100 buyins or whatever it was in a live 2/5 game though.

This is why it is sooooo much more profitable. DUCY???????

If your opponent's range is capped to a one pair hand that means you raise that mother****** to a dollar amount he/she is too scared to call. Yes, that means you actually have to be a meanie and bluff. But, when they fold, that means you win the monies, VARIANCE FREE.

In 100BB games with multiple stacks at 50BB's or so, you can never get your villain off of top pair and overpairs are essentially the nuts.

Getting people to fold isn't variance free because sometimes they don't fold and you lose a **** ton.

Ok mr. "But how much did you lose?"

This is where the skill of "picking your spots" comes into play. Hand reading, player profiling, observing the game flow, are all rewarded much more in deep stack play. Target the tight abc regs on the right board textures and you should be making money on your bluffs.

Plus, having to showdown a bluff gets you ACTION. Even the loosest of the loose will start folding to your big bets if you always have it. But even just showing one bluff or getting to showdown with a drawing hand where you were the aggressor will be enough to get action from all the fun players and loose regs for the rest of the session.

I'm not saying bluffing in those games isn't right or profitable. I'm just saying that to say bluffing is variance free is not even remotely true. Sometimes they're gonna have it and it's gonna cost you. It might still be +EV but there is variance involved with bluffing a range too.

The problem is that as x gets larger, your necessary fold equity increases as well. What happens is that eventually it becomes correct for villain to only stack off with the nuts, and this is exactly what happens in sane 500bb+ games. In fact the worst player type to use frequent overbets against is a tight-passive player.

This is what Renton was getting at: for every extra bet that has to go in (or every extra xPSB you have to add to your sizing), it becomes so much rarer that extra money goes in that it doesn't end up having nearly as large of an effect on things (purposefully being vague, because it obviously affects some "things") as people intuitively assume.

Of course, if we're the best player at the table a disproportionate amount of every chip in everyone's stack goes toward us (it's just that at a certain point those chips have infinitesimally small leverage), and being able to competently use overbets and employ range opacity and all that is going to help you more the deeper you get, but I become equally skeptical whenever anyone thinks their profitability skyrockets in massively deep games, either because they think winning the bottom set lottery is going to make them a millionaire or because they feel like they can win almost every pot.

Your original statement was that getting villain to fold is zero variance.

Now, you're saying it relies on being super-sentient (and worst case scenario, you can always win your money back by hitting the nuts on the next hand!)

DGAF plays the deepest games with the most aggressive, force-you-to-sweat-for-your-huge-stack-you-know-you're-not-properly-bankrolled-for style, and he's almost universally revered for being one of the best at it. Go ask him if he goes through swings. If all of his posts where he very openly admits, "I'm going through a huge downswing" are any indication, I'm willing to guess he experiences some variance.

Also, sometimes your "player profiling" is imperfect and you run into that very rare type of quiet, sober, weekday MAWG player who calls off 350bbs at 5/T with T8 on a QJT8 board. I'm, um, speaking for a friend.

Yeah, I don't blame anyone whatsoever for being skeptical when someone says, "I make money playing poker." I either don't tell people, or I tell them with zero interest in disproving their inevitable skepticism.

Luckily, I grinded online in the PokerTableRatings days, so it was totally publically verifiable that I was a winning poker player over a 500k hand sample.

While my wife was long-convinced that I was a winning player and had a generally pleasant demeanor about me playing poker, the money felt a bit more real to her when I cashed out some of my bankroll to pay off some loans she was stressed about. It's hard to be enthusiastic or overly supportive of your silly little hobby until the money stops being some theoretical thing that sits in a pile to be used exclusively for advancing your hobby, and starts being used to help you get to where you're trying to go in life.

I'll agree there is variance and nobody can be perfect when "picking their spots".

I guess I meant that it is so +EV that it's like printing money. Either the bluff works and you scoop up the pot, but even on the occasion that it doesn't, it creates so much more action for you that getting caught on the bluff gets you paid more when you make a big hand.

Some of these don't have to be huge all in river bluffs either. It could be a raise on the flop and then shutting down if called. Or it could be cbetting a flop with an A in a 3bet pot and then giving up. Its amazing how face up the table starts to play as the stacks get deeper and pot sizes start getting larger. Just making Smaller to medium sized stabs will show the table you have some gamble and aren't playing abc works wonders for your win rate.

I happen to be in a pretty cush situation where we both have income independent of poker. When we ran our budget, our expenses exceeded our income by some number that is hilariously easily covered by me playing poker (I had us covered for the entire year after the first couple of months).

That hilariously small amount is non-discretionary and comes out of my BR every month. I try to match that every month and put that much toward savings as well. Everything else goes toward the BR so I can keep moving up the stakes.

I can't speak or judge too much what pros who rely entirely on their winnings do, but having a household of 2+ relying entirely on poker earnings should be a pretty rare situation led by someone who's a proven crusher who already has a bankroll large enough that you can start skimming off the top right away.

Having significant winnings come out of your roll before you're comfortably rolled for 2/5 seems bad, and having the amount that shows up in your joint account be tied to your short-term winnings sounds impractical at best. But again, who am I to judge.

LOL - I don't think you understand variance.

You must never lose then, how could you? Zero variance, deep games, $$$.

Wait a second, what do you mean have to show down a bluff? What happened to all that zero variance talk?

Except when you bluff.

LOL what?

Let me start off with two concessions:

1) Playing deeper games is more profitable for legitimately good players.

2) Bluffing is g00t. In fact, it's crucial to the game of NLHE.

We agree on those two points. My argument rests in how much you think you're printing money.

So you're playing players who are such sitting ducks that you can steamroll the entire table with a bunch of small-to-medium bluffs but who also adjust to really bluffy players and spew off huge stacks with marginal holdings?

I'm sure you're going to tell me, "Yeah, they adjust, but it's only certain types of players who adjust and they do it at such predictable times," and so forth. But frankly, I'm skeptical of this ostensible poker wizardry. Based on what I've observed, the #1 Law of Live Poker is that everyone thinks they are far more omniscient than they actually are and they think everyone else is much more of an easily exploitable drooler than they actually are.

It takes more than just one or two small-to-medium sized bluffs for the act to be comparable to printing money, so what do you do after the first two bluffs you pull off? What if instead of being dealt Crap then Crap then Nuts, you're dealt Crap then Crap then Crap then more Crap? What about Crap then TPTK then Crap then TPGK then Crap then Marginal Holding and villain's "playing back" at you? At what point are the other players going to adjust, and how exactly are they going to adjust (by re-raising a polarized range, by re-raising some weird mergy range, by flatting the nuts and letting you hang yourself, by flatting the flop with a wide range then folding the turn, by flatting a wide range and calling off light, by calling wider pre to gun for you, by tightening up pre because that young gun's just gonna bluff you postflop anyway)?

You don't get to decide in what order you are dealt badugi versus when you are dealt the nuts, and as much as you'd like to think, when and how other players adjust is just a big game of RPS and I'm willing to bet with 99% of 2p2 posters that they're worse at RPS than they think they are.

Again, I agree that bluffing is great for your bottom line for all of the reasons you mentioned and playing deeper is a bigger advantage for those who are good at playing with deep stacks. But if everyone crushed these games even half as hard as they claim, then poker would be a higher grossing sector of the American economy than healthcare. But as with all matters of live poker, the fish stop their heater and have a bunch of losing sessions, the pros go on a long crippling breakeven streak and get bored and either stop showing up to the casino or blow their BR at the pits, the nits stop getting smashed by the deck and start stiffing the dealers and waitstaff in order to keep their winnings afloat, etc.

What roid body builder was trying to say was that if you can't win the hand, bluff, and if you get caught, it's good, because bluffs add EV to your value hands.

So when you have good hands, you get max value.

Kind of like if you only count your winning sessions, there is literally zero variance.

RPS???

Rock Paper Scissors? Only thing I could think of.

That's what he meant.

Ok keep asking random internet people about attainable win rates in a 1/2 game instead of ... you know ... just playing in the game yourself and forming your own conclusions. I can tell you are going places.

I firmly believe that the 1/2 games in Alberta are the softest in the world.