Looking good man. Keep it up, identify/plug any leaks, and continue studying.

Thanks a lot! Definitely have to work on a lot! I probably should study more as well! I don’t put a lot of time into studying at all maybe like an hour a week reading the forums

After tracking 533 hours at 1/2 over many years (don't play too much), here are my stats. These were played in 3 different rooms. Rake was $5 for the majority of sessions, but recently it was increased to $7 cap.

Overall
Total Profit: $16,835
Profit / Hr: $31.56
Winning Sessions: 64.6 %
Average Session Length: 4.72 hours



Just for fun, I split the stats into sessions that were less than 5 hours and those that were 5 or more as I always felt that I play optimally with shorter sessions.

Less than 5 hours
Total Profit: $15,227
Profit / Hr: $76.90
Winning Sessions: 74.2 %

Greater than or equal to 5 hours
Total Profit: $1,608
Profit / Hr: $4.79
Winning Sessions: 51.0 %

Any comments on thengraph?

wp Richard, keep on grinding

Nice results Richard!

Ggogogo!,imoG

Good job. One possible reason for the difference in session length results is you occasionally got stuck early on in the longer sessions and played longer to get unstuck. Happens to all of us.

Agreed, and on the other side of this which compounds the disparity my shortest two sessions where I wasn't just waiting for another stake were 1:04, and 1:05. Both times I posted insane hourly rates of 661 and 1504 respectively. While it's only one hour, it still pulls the average up for us low volume rec players.

In the last three months or so I've been testing my abilities at 1/1 and some 1/2 live poker in London, putting myself in the mind frame as if it was my job, trying to figure out if I could do it profitably as a job. I'm doing it mainly out of curiosity. (I realise 1/1 won't be enough, would like to move up if I'd actually go for it).

I have documented 20 sessions (not a whole lot but let's have a discussion) accumulating to 160-170 hours, which would be close to a month's worth of work if it was my job.

My overall profit is 1720 bbs - my hourly rate 10,4. 13 winning sessions and 7 losing ones, however I usually keep my losses small.

I'm not playing unusually well or bad, haven't run especially great either.

What do you think?

Let's say you average 1720 bbs a month. That would equate to an annual gross salary of ~ $41,000 (do you plan to pay taxes?). What is your plan for the months where you happen to run cold? Will you be able to cover the cost of health insurance? I can tell you that I certainly would not be comfortable with this as my only source of income.

Bout 3.5

Poker is a crazy game and I wouldn’t recommend anyone play it.

You’re going to get a ton of people coming in here with “lol sample size” and they have a point.

My guess is that converting one single winning session into a modest losing session of about -150bb will likely lead to a double digit % drop in your win rate.

Playing poker profitably is a totally attainable reality.

I’m curious, what is the rake in your room? Also, what is the highest game that is running regularly?

What I would advise is to keep playing and studying, build up a massive bankroll, something overkill. Then I would build up some more bankroll. This is all assuming we have about 6-12 months worth of living expenses saved up OR some alternative form of income.

In short, I would not plan to play full time for a few more years

This is also assuming a lot of things:

1) OP would be playing primarily 1/2 (Right now that's $1.31/$2.62 in USD, so half of what a $2/$5 game is).

2) OP has run around average, making his WR sustainable

3) OP will sustain the same win rate at exclusively 1/2 as he would 1/1 (seems unlikely as worse players gravitate to lower games when available).

But let's assume these are mostly true and OP can beat 1/2 for 15 an hour. Really with taxes, that'll be around 11 an hour in the UK. Then you'd have to subtract from that WR (monthly expenses + monthly rainy day saving) / (# of hours played). This will indicate how much per hour you'd be putting towards things that aren't bankroll building.

Let's say OP is dirt cheap and can live off 1280 pounds a month of spending. At 160 hours, that's another $8 an hour to take out.

So OP's actual net worth is moving up at 3 pounds/hour or 1.5 bb. We can call that a 5 bb / 100 win rate. If we use this variance calculator, and call a year 60000 hands, and his standard dev at 80 bb / 100 hands, some conclusions we draw:

- 6.29% chance of being down actual money at the end of year even living dirt cheap
- a 3.77% chance of experienced a 3000 bb downswing or more (30 buy ins), and it's not out of the realm of possibility to experience a 50 BI downer.

So really, OP would need to have like 60 buy ins minimum to facilitate playing full time. And I don't think 160 hours is enough to truly determine if this is a "good idea".

Since you didn't start by describing your poker bankroll and your expense budget, I'm going to go out on a limb and call your chances Slim and None. Slim's not here at the moment, so we'll have to go with None.

Slim is here he just don’t care

Yeah this exactly. Like I wouldn't advice playing a 1/2 game fulltime without 12k + 6 months living expenses. 2/5 it's probably closer to 30k + 6 months living expenses. And a long documented history of winning.

Here's another issue: The games you play now are usually nights and weekends. These games are softer. When you're playing in a game with 2-3 other guys trying to grind it out, plus a few old guys who don't like risking a lot of money, you'll see that your seat time isn't just worth $X/hr

How many of your 160-170 hours were played during peak times like Fri/Saturday night? If you were to ever "go pro" a lot more of your hours would be at non peak times where the players are much less bad.

Edit....jdr0317 beat me to it

A big problem with playing 1/2 full time is that the win rates are very small. So, what happens is a lot of the time you don’t have a whole lot of extra scratch to throw in the kitty to enable you to move up stakes while supporting yourself. Getting out of the 1/2 trap is really hard and takes a very long time. I found this out the hard way.

Lots of great info here guys, thanks. Selfishly don't want to get more into my finances, but I have the info I need.

10bb is crushing the game and yet you're making mostly 10 GBP per hour which is peanuts in London.

Your winrate may be (much) lower in reality, will probably drop as you move to 1/2 and almost certainly will go down if you start playing games higher than 1/2 which is what you have to aim for otherwise you might as well start a career collecting shopping trolleys because it's a better decision.

Get a real job, study and play poker on the side and switch to poker when it's financially better than your day job. If you don't have the drive to do that, you won't 'make it' in poker anyway. It's very difficult to play poker well enough to consistently out earn a proper job in a place like London, which is a compelling argument for not doing it as a living IMO.

EDIT

Average salary in London is 35K GBP, so basically 18 GBP an hour. Let's break that down, on that salary, you do pay tax (bad) but you get paid if you phone it in now and again, you are guaranteed to get paid, you get benefits like sick days and pension plans, you get paid holidays and I'll say it again, you are guaranteed to get paid.

This is what an Executive Assistant gets paid, which is a glorified secretary. Someone who is capable of playing poker for a living can out-earn a secretary if they apply themselves.

Just wondering what are yalls thought on short buying. I play in an uncapped 1/2 with multiple stacks of 300-1000bb on the table at a time. The mimimum buy in is 100$ and i have been buying in for 100-150$ at a time. Right now i have 1500 dedicated to poker. What do you suggest i buy in for?

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Depends on your skill set and if the bigger stacks adjust. I will say that your chances of busting are high, whether you buy in short or not, given your roll and especially what sounds like a probably rather wild game.

Buy max unless losing the 1500 has serious results, in which case you don't really have enough money anyway.

I'd go 500 at least. In these kinds of games a huge chunk of your winrate comes from playing deep vs guys who don't adjust strategy for stack size.

You can try 100 dollar BI but my guess is a good player will make less than half what he would buying max.

this is such horrible advice.

Obviously they are underolled, hence why they're asking what to do.

The suggestions should be either
A) buy in for $100, set a stoploss
B) Don't play

Obviously somebody who buys in deeper will have a higher hourly, but you can't do that when you're busto. Need to account for RoR

+1
I've been slightly worried about my hourly but then i think about what my hourly would be if i lost my entire roll.

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