If the majority of poker players weren't losers, it wouldn't be easy to beat low stakes games.

a majority of poker players not being winners is not a result of low stakes being hard to beat. it's actually the opposite: low stakes is easy to beat because a majority of poker players don't actively try to become winners

Fair.

Too much talk about rake affecting winrates IMO.

Rake IS there. It will ALWAYS be there. Accept it. Talk about theoretical winrate without rake is nonsense.

It's like a competitive hot dog eating professional saying "My eating rate would be way higher if I didn't have to chew and swallow". "I could make it as a pro except for that"

In the competitive hot dog eating competition that is life, women are the bun.

Why do you think they start dipping the hotdog in liquid and do the shake?

Considering that not all of us play in the same rake structure, it makes sense to add rake structure when sharing WR. Nothing theoretical about it.

$1 rake difference is literally 1 to 2bb in WR depending on whether you play 1/2 or 1/3.

An interesting side note: Dipping food in liquid for competitive advantage originated long ago in the south in an attempt to gain advantage and improve swallow rate. It was nicknamed "Mississippi Strudel" in dessert eating competition and soon caught on with all foods and competitors.....

Seriously, in evaluating BB win rate to compare results with other players, 1BB/hr stats difference isn't significant IMO. I wouldn't consider Player A at 7.5BB/hr a better player than Player B at 6.5BB/hr. There's just too much variance in results/next years results could easily be reversed between the 2 players. Neither players is "better", they're both good players.

In deciding "should I go pro" no one is going to change their decision either way over ~1BB winrate....

Rake differences are important in choosing what casinos to frequent, but aren't that significant in comparing players results with other players.

. . . until you figure out what your share of the rake is in bb/100.

I would disagree and say that 1 bb/hr is very important. For a 7 bb/hr winner, a 1 bb/hr drop in win rate due to rake increase is a 15% cut in their expected hourly. At 1/3 this is 4-5k in a year. After expenses and depending on how this player runs it could potentially be the difference between going broke, hanging on or having a big enough bankroll to take a shot at exiting the basement stakes.

ok but no one playing LLSNL has a large enough sample size to tell a 6.5bb/hr winner from a 7.5bb/hr winner, so in that sense it is meaningless

There seems to be a notion that if you don't care, no one else should.

On a more serious note, if someone is deciding whether to go pro, 1bb difference could have a huge impact.

1bb for a pro could easily be 1200 to 1500bb a year. Depending on the stake, that could be a significant amount of money in both absolute and relative sense.

1bb would matter a lot less to a rec player for obvious reasons.

Which makes it even more important that the evaluation should be on numbers that we can ACTUALLY estimate, such as rake and tip.

Serious pro would find other variables such as average BI, max BI, traffic in different time of day and week, and many others to be very important as well.

In addition, if you don't think rake matters, you are less likely to notice when it changes.

$1 in additional rake is somewhere between $2 to $4 in hourly cost. For a pro with volume of 1300 to 1800 hours, that would be in the range of $3,000 to $7,000 a year possibly even more.

It is a significant amount of money for those who are grinding 3/5 or below. It could actually determine whether someone should relocate or reconsider his current arrangement, and therefore rake should be very important to consider, perhaps more so than anything else on a poker table.

Im still stuck on the fact that someone who can do all this rake analysis and puts so much thought into poker thinks low stakes games are tough to beat consistently.

Well, stop being stuck on it. This is a winrates thread, not a poker e-peen thread.

First time poster - overall 600 live hrs played since 2016. Playing exclusively in 200bb 2/5 games. My wins/losses ratio is 63%/37%. Had a ~12k downswing in late 2017 due to bad run/tilt and came back with a couple monster +5k and +6k sessions in mid 2018. Graph is swingy but content with the total results at 11/bb an hr. Overall probably ran better than average player.

Fair enough but how is anyone supposed to take seriously a person's analysis of rake, bankroll requirements, win rates or anything else discussed in this thread if the person cant beat low stakes poker games? Or thinks its so hard to do?

They are the same thing to a lot of poker players. Probably most LLSNL grinders.

Thank you. No disrespect to whoever said low stakes poker is hard to beat, but if you are struggling to beat it you should not give advice.

How are you supposed to take a doctor‘s diagnosis seriously when he doesn’t know how to change his own oil?

If he cant change his own oil, he be shouldnt posting car repair advice on an auto forum and if he does post car repair advice anyway, as soon as someone realizes he cant change his own oil, someone should point that out so unsuspecting people dont take his advice. Your analogy makes no sense.

The point is that the cost of rake is the same, no matter if you are Postle-like, or Fossil-like. And it has an effect. On some players it has a huge effect. Many losing players would be winning players if it weren't for rake.

It is neither worth pretending that it doesn't matter, nor is it worthwhile to focus of a comment about it being hard for many to beat LLSNL to the exclusion of the discussion. It's not hard for you, fine. That doesn't mean that rake doesn't matter. Now please shut up about the comment.

I feel like people are just arguing over semantics.

When people say low stakes are hard to beat because of rake, I don't think they are meaning low stakes is hard to beat like in the game itself.

It just means it's harder because you have a bigger handicap to overcome which is the rake. Not that the game itself is difficult.

Like in the low stakes Cali games, when you're raking a stack off the table every hour you gotta be crushing to make a good profit.

The analysis was using basic math. It wasn't an opinion using appeal to authority.

It's as if I posted that 2 + 2 = 4 and that math is hard.

And that because I said math is hard and therefore my calculation that 2 + 2 = 4 has no merit?

Is there any value to add to the discussion other than your opinion of whether LLSNL is hard to beat?

Do you think dealers would hate someone who started tipping $1 every other hand won instead of every hand (to cut down significantly on costs)? Given how much actually goes to tips each year, I'm strongly considering it.

Any other good ideas on cost-cutting as it pertains to full-time poker? I am on a bit of a break-even stretch, so lately I have been trying to be as frugal as possible.

Of course. I'm assuming most of us are grinders and already tip less than half of what a lot of recs tip. If you're a grinder the dealer probably know what your goal is so it's understandable. However if you tip even less, that's almost like not tipping. It may also make the rec players dislike you and start playing tricky/trying to bluff you more instead of playing straightforward against you. I've had people call me out for "only" tipping $2 when I stack someone for 100 bbs.

It's up to you, but pretend you have an office job. Would you take a 5-10% raise if it meant everyone in the office hated you?

As for other cost-cutting methods, there really isn't much other than maybe eating before and after sessions at home. Or bringing water in a backpack but I tend to avoid the backpack cause it gives off grinder vibes. If you're breaking even or downswinging, consider playing in the rooms with weekly freerolls. Yes you will be playing in games where your hourly will be lower, but those games are nitty, straightforward and low variance. As much as I hate to admit it, if I'm getting crushed and near the trough of a downswing I would rather sit in a low variance nitty game than a high variance juicy game. Also if you cash even half the time in freerolls, it's almost like getting a small "steady" paycheck. The $1300 I got in Flamingo freerolls last month including the monthly I played today was more than I made playing cash cause I was having a bad break even stretch, which is what made me play there in the first place.