I'm 28 and have a receding hair line to the point I shaved it down to a grade 2 and have grey bits in my beard but I still get ID'd in M&S when buying the meal for 2 for £10

I'll make sure I have my driving licence with me.

I have a quick question for the low-stakes pros out there. This month, I have qualified for The Empire cash-race MTT "freeroll" by playing a lot of poker. (Both at The Empire and Hippo.) I'd say I'm probably at just over 100 hours of play for the month. I think I play fairly solidly overall and later this year (when I pack in my job) I'll be playing it for a couple of months straight to see if it's possible to make a living out of the game.

For the month of May, I have made a note of the bad beats and they read as follows:


Bad Beat #1: KK < AK. All-in preflop. Ace hits the board. (Loss of ~£250.)

Bad Beat #2: A8 on an 8 8 x flop < 4 4. All-in on the flop. 4 hits the river. (Loss of ~£300.)

Bad Beat #3: AA < KK preflop. All-in preflop. King hits the board. (Loss of ~£250.)

Bad Beat #4: 77 < Q 10 and 6 3 on a 4 6 7 flop, two spades. All-in on flop. Spade hits, blank river. (Loss of £300.)

*The first two hit me during an early Sunday morning session with the second being against the table drunk.*
*The third one was against Mr Chew.*
*The fourth was a 3-way all-in pot where I stood to win £600 if no spade came.*

----------

Despite these setbacks. I am doing ok results-wise but confess to finding the grind being incredibly frustrating when I've played solidly for 7+ hours, get the money in good yet still sometimes lose the big ones.

My question is:

Is this rate of bad beats normal for a semi-pro cash game player playing around 100 hours per week? I mean is this the type of thing I'll have to expect (and then some) over a typical month of grinding?

I know it's only a small sample size but any advice would be great.

pffft i have that amount of bad beats on an average night.

You know it's a £2 fee to tell someone a bad beat story right? How many viewers are there on this thread?

1) no bad beat stories
2) only one of those is even really a bad beat
3) expect variance like that on a regular basis

If it helps, I once lost 7 buyins in 10 hands online. Although the last 2 were definitely tilt. When I started playing online, I used to do situps every time I found myself annoyed with getting bad beat. After six months I could do a couple hundred situps and my body had learnt not to get annoyed at poker. Now I don't get upset at bad beats and I'm fat.

One hundred hours of poker in a week?????

If you're moaning about bad beats you almost certainly lack the mental discipline to make it your job.

100hours = 3.5k ~ 4.5k hands.

Sample size says it all.

Seriously, go buy Mental Game of Poker, work through it (and actually do the work, there's exercises there) and then think about going pro. You're a massive mental game fish.

Thanks for the clarification. Just the sort of harsh answers I expected and needed. Apologies for the bad beat stories folks. I'll email yer £2s :-)

No, just for the month baby.

Your doin it wrong then. Need to be cramming at least 35hrs into a week.

I know this but I'm not doing this for a living at present. I guess you may have missed that part of my post as well.

ah okay, sorry fella. Thought u was full timing.

If you're still stuck on the bb next month, note down count all of the suckouts you get and then compare the two. Might be good for a bit of perspective.

Vic
Increasing take now 8 a half hour 2/5 and 10 an half hour 5/10. Guess they want to kill the games.

So we pay around an average days' wage (~£80) for an average 5 hour session? It doesn't look good.

New Promotion at The Empire:

Sunday and Monday (all day) capped rake at £5 max per pot!

makes me even less likely to play at the Vic

it's still quite a bit less than 5% capped at £10, no?

Erm I wouldn't have thought so but am willing to be proven wrong if you show your working

When looking around about the hippo they have a promotion where they draw a 'golden jersey' where the winner plays rake free. Not sure how it works exactly though

Fwiw I've previously heard dealers say that 1/3 in Vic rakes more than 5/10. I don't know how official that is though.

9 handed 2/5 game with £8/half hour: £144/hour

raked game 5% capped at £10: You can obviously only estimate, tell me if you think I'm way off. If the game is decent, I think well over 50% of the pots are going to be max rake. Basically any hand that goes past a flop c-bet taking it down is going to be close to a £200 pot. And even a £25 raise pre, 2 callers, and an uncalled bet on flop, with the blinds it's already almost £5 rake.

So £8 per hand sounds like a reasonable estimate. Hands won preflop will take that average down, but they also tend to take much less time, so you can almost discount them altogether.

20 hands per hour (not counting hands won pre) sounds about right. A bit more with a competent dealer. So were are at £160 per hour.

Moreover, even if the £/hour numbers are close:
-raked games mathematically favour nits
-timed games benefit more from a faster game
-you're heavily penalized in a raked game when the it gets shorthanded

You get some really dead 1/2 and 1/3 games that aren't raking much at all. In 2/5 these awful games (of which there have been many lately) are taking the max. Although timed games benefit from a faster game, the 2/5 is slower than the raked games.

The thing is the 2/5 has been dying of late and I can't see this encouraging people to play it more. The vic just assumes that the games will be there and take advantage of their customers with zero promotions and little effort at filling the seats when people leave. I've been in the main game and it's taken 20 minutes for 2 or 3 players to leave the feeder, simply because the feeder is a good game and the players don't want to leave it. The floor removed the lists from the main screens so that people couldn't see where they were on the lists which is beyond belief.

Furthermore I think the loyalty has run it's course and there are now too many people coming in for their points when they could have a promotion that encouraged play rather than that encouraged people to turn up.