I played pro from 2004-2014 mid-high stakes bumhunting fish on every site I could find. It was a piss in the park to make 100k-200k/year. I didnt have a losing year. I never proclaimed to be even near the best regs, I was likely awful in lots of respects, but I bet I made vastly more $ than them because of how I approached it. I played on every site. The games got infintely harder when training sites began, I have always had a dislike for people like Galfond for this reason (even though hes a nice guy), it was so selfish and closed the gap so that people knew basically what to do after a few videos. BF happened, EU countries started messing around pulling out and ringfencing their players. The solvers, no rakeback (I used to get thousands back a month across all the sites I played which basically paid my bills) the list became endless and now RTA.

I play quite frequently still (mainly out of boredom), if I dedciated my efforts I could win a decent wage playing live midstakes, but I am staggered at how good basically every online reg is, and the lack of fish (except on GG but that site is another story altogether), this is the real killer, there just arent the sorts of people punting off like there used to be and the the ratio of pros:fish is too skewed. The fact people are using solvers, RTA, the lack of fish and no rewards, make playing online cash games for a living one of the worst things you can do with your time if your semi intelligent, I'd guess the amount of study someone winnign at a dceent clip would have to do is basically a waste of time if you fast forward your life in 3-4yrs time. You have no idea whats going to happen in the not so distant future wrt sites/laws/bots/rta/rewards and you are not playing a fair game.

I now own eCommerce stores and I live a pretty similar life to when I was a poker player but with more fulfilment and the opportunity to make real money. My advice to anyone out there playing for a living at midstakes is to get out, not neccesarily to get a job, but start a business. Even if its freelance.Easier said than done, but its never been easier to start one and you dont need huge money. You will still be your own boss, have freedom and have no ceiling on what you can earn. You are also well equipped to ride out long periods of breakeven/losses because you have become accustomed to this as a poker player. you can likely ride variance better than a 'normal' person. Poker has helped me tremendously in life not just financially but the skills I had and discipline has carried itself over to business, there are many similarities and parallels. I 'd advise anyone to do the same. You can still punt away on a Sunday night trying to bink a 5-6fig score (and fail repeatedly).

It really depends. For myself and many in my same situation that I know, it's really not close at all. In my view there are a ton more benefits than the avg 6 figure poker slave gets.

If you can beat today’s online poker for enough to live, you should definitely become a momentum trader..Same freedoms but with zero rake..And if you have money management skills and already have a medium size bankroll, you’ll be set for life within a decade.

It’s so damn easy ..that’s if you have 1/2 a brain like me mixed with superior common sense

I just wish I knew at 25 what I knew at 45 ...I’d own the world!! Instead I wasted 12 years on live poker and 8 years grinding online..

Care to elaborate. I know many who transitioned from poker (smart, winners) who liquidated themselves. I know a couple who have done very well but went in hedge funds.

There're a lot of threads about this.
The outlook is not good.

Unlike poker it requires huge time commitment and the payoff will be zero for many years, where you won't know when you even have a positive expectation because the time horizon (sample size) it takes to reach even minimal statistical significance is way bigger than in poker. At least in poker you can get an honest, reliable signal after 6 months of play (at least for cash). In trading, much like live poker tournaments, people can go years marinating in their own delusions fueled by an early heater. Also not encouraging that very few hedge funds reliably outperform the s&p over several years.

for any given year:



over a decade:



https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/acti...-indexing.html

the magic question is - do hedge funds routinely underperform the s&p index because 'the best' traders are lone wolves? or do the lone wolves just have an easier time hiding their spotty records, where the public gets to gock at the massive outliers?

probably a combination of the two.

but hey - there's always the possibility that the guy posting on a gambling forum who tells you it's super easy is actually that good, and not just being fooled by the randomness.

Ecommerce has a lot of similar pitfalls of poker in that a niche that's highly profitable for long enough will eventually find fierce competition, but the great thing is that if you're selling to american customers (as an american) at least you're not subject to competition from low income countries in that shipping will price them out. This is a big reason why poker sucks on international servers. Huge numbers of people to whom even $20/h is good money.

I think a good starting point for people looking for ideas is just browsing stuff like alibaba. There're tons of things you can charge huge markups on, and the biggest obstacle is getting shipping costs down (and getting bulk discounts... where everything is negotiable). Local retail can be even better if you can find a niche not being serviced. Margins are very healthy for things that can't be shipped via mail cost effectively in small numbers, and per unit shipping costs go down dramatically in bulk.

AFAIK trading has a similar proportion of winners/losers as poker, ie: something like 90% lose money. Its certainly not easy.

I do think there is a discussion about stimulus checks and the kind of fish boom that brought for a few months, but even then, being able to capitalize on all that dumb money isn't very straightforward.

Are you talking about the apps? They seem so shady and you can get kicked off them for winning too much.

it's way lower than that if you're counting everyone whose ever played a single session at a casino / bought a financial instrument. but it begs the question of what you mean by 'losing'. in terms of actual outcomes, people play so little poker and take so few trading positions that there's a high probability of them "beating" their respective game just by chance.

my definition of winner would be that if they were to continue doing over an infinite time horizon, what percent would be up money at poker / beating the market?

and i think you need to qualify it further to reflect people who've put some minimal effort in trying to be profitable.

so let's say the standard is: read at least 1 poker strategy book from to cover and spent 100 or more hours reading about poker online vs someone who read at least 1 book about trading front to cover and spent 100 or more hours reading about trading...

the number of poker players who would have a positive expectation after having done those things is not low. it could actually be more than 50% - mostly because they play primarily in home games and small stakes at casinos, but that counts. the bar just isn't that high to be making money in low profit potential environments.

for trading the bar is way higher. how many of people who've taken a shot at trading are even taking positions large enough where the fees wouldn't aggressively bleed them dry? you'd have to add another qualifier to make it close - people who have at least $100,000 in their trading accounts. Then 10% sounds realistic. Probably way less though.

I'm in the UK not US. If you are selling crap you've found on Alibaba on Amazon then I'd tend to agree and tell anyone to steer clear of that - if youre building a brand I would say it has no similar pitfalls at all. The only thing I'll say is you are a lot fo the time at the mercy of Facebook/Instagram ads etc are they're getting more expensive and that is entirley out of ones control so similar to a poker site controlling so thats a pitfall getting cheap enough good quality traffic. However if you only rely on 3rd party ads to get traffic to your store you're doing it wrong it needs to be interesting enough to get organic traffic + paid social and then you're in a good spot. If you build an email list, customer base and brand it properly it will pay dividends long run. Competition is rife in anything, do it 1st, be the best at it (within your niche) and keep innovating/changin/adding and I think you'll find competitors cannot get the same traction, especially organically. Anyone can buy garbage off Alibaba and run some Facebook ads, it has no longevity in it at all. I dont do that.

I mean you are right but that's never going to happen in a million years. Fish were attracted to NL hold em in a way that they never were for any other game and probably never will for any other game. Simple tends to be attractive to the masses in whatever industry in reality.

I am not saying this in a bad way at all, as I admire the enthusiasm and professionalism of their vids, but I have been struck by how knackered Andrew Neeme and Johnny Vibes look in their recent vids, as year after year struggling to make a living at poker is maybe getting to the stage where they are asking themselves is this sheer bloody grind all really worth it.

There are few fish online these days, it doesn't really look as though there are that many live fish either.

The only real hope is for poker to get legalised in the US, then the Golden Days would be back, and there would be another massive poker boom, and more than enough fish to go round. Until then it is an incredibly hard way to make an easy living.

I really liked dappadan777's post just now, and agree that if one has poker skills use them in business areas, for a more reliable life.

i was there for the rush, made a killing and thought it would never end. i went through several years where i lost money afterwards and just wasn't keeping up with the current level of players. eventuallly i admitted i was the fish and got back to studying. i have since had better luck. call it a danny negreanu comeback story, if you insist. this game will always be beatable because of the emotional volatility. take that out and we're done.

vloggers have the (huge) disadvantage of other people knowing how they play, to varying extents.

They get none of that information in return..

Lots of people crush live poker, just to a lesser extent than the variance free income the house generates.

When you say "lots of people crush live poker", do you actually have evidence of that? Proper hard evidence, not just something you heard from a friend of a friend or something you heard a few people say on a forum.

You want to become a live poker pro yourself, it's very easy to get wrapped up in wishful thinking that there are loads of crushers out there. Instead of stepping back and looking at things objectively.

How can you ever have hard evidence for something like that?

And what is “lots” and “loads” of players?

Every casino that spreads 5/T+ regularly has anything from a few to “loads” of players who make a lot. If you count in top 2/5 regs, numbers quickly go up.

That’s holdem only. For PLO/5c PLO it’s at least double in terms of BB/hour but the players pool is usually smaller.


It is still small in terms of % of total players if that’s what you meant(I guess 5-10% do really well and another 10-15think they’re just running bad and stick around struggling), but it’s definitely not 0

you SpinMe- the ultimate realist. You’re smart enough to know that nobody has evidence of that.

Should have specified, but I was referring to all stakes including 1/2. And all games. Most vloggers don’t play professionally (i.e. as their main source of income). I know this because most are fairly transparent about that haha. Like Brad Owen.

Completely agree that looking at things objectively is important man. That take had nothing to do with me, it’s just common knowledge for anyone who’s boring enough to associate themselves with even a handful of serious live poker players. Yes, anecdotal information. Whatever. .

And yeah, even 1% “crushing” over a few thousand hour+ sample (8bb/hour?) would be a lot btw. Think about how many people play in LV, CA, TX, FL etc. let alone everywhere.

The closest to a sound estimate for online winners is 5% win online, as I believe this figure has been released by sites. This is online, where there are few expenses bar rake. Live play has significantly higher expenses for most - travel, accommodation, refreshments, but if the percentage of live winning players is the same one, and there is no particular significant reason to think they differ, then one in twenty live players are profitable, as well as online.

robyoung posted figures of players at nl25 that played more than 1000 hands and 37% were winners and that didnt account for the rakeback, so im guessing more than 5% are winners online

started playing 2008. Played 14/5/2 Stats at NL25 6max at that time and was crushing lol. Can only imagine how soft the games in 2004 were.

The biggest problem in todays games is that there are no really completly new fish. Evryone knows the game already + there are not that many people anymore who are willing to loose thousands of dollars playing cards.

cost to aquire new fish for Pokersites is insane. Most poker only sites are already dead. Sites with bigger casinos behind are allways softer then Poker standalone rooms. More players who won some money on Sportsbook/slots/casino games punting it away on poker.

When i startet playing in 2008 i was 18 and played beside my apprenticeship.
I played 16-24 tables 6max with no problems.
Harder Spots in todays games and my brain is like wtf 4tabling only

sorry for bad englisch. Always love storys of good old days

10% Rake, 20€ cap + tip here in Germany. Pretty insane und u need insane whales at the tables to beat that longterm

I doubted that figure, as nearly 4/10 players winning consistently just does not seem realistic, and seen his twitter answer was, "As promised - after your vote - I said I would disclose the % of winners in Cash Games $10c-25c NLH $25 @partypoker

Aug 1st- 31st 2020
Players 8494
Winners 2,349 - 27.33%"

But as you say, he repeatedly says >1k in August hands is 36% in profit before rake, so more than one in three players are profitable, and less than two out of three are losers. Hmm!

ye according to 2+2: everyone goes broke, even the very best like Phil Ivey, and nobody starts from the bottom and retires a millionaire through purely just playing in 2020.

lmao

+1 to Xeno and tgiggity who aren’t this way.

Up to* 10%. Averages out to roughly 5.8% from what I remember.

Still insane ofcourse.

What do you sell?

fwiw, yes anyone can buy off alibaba, but the same can be said of branding/marketing (or play poker). some will do a better/worse job of negotiating price, of getting shipping costs down, of picking products that are in higher demand / have higher margins just as some will do a better job branding and marketing.

i think you're underestimating how much people are making from sourcing products overseas. probably not worth it if you're selling $20 trinkets but there's a lot of high value stuff where selling a couple of units a week is serious money (provided that isn't your only product).

ridiculous way of framing it.

the probability of a -2bb/100 loser being up after 1,000 hands is nearly 50/50. even a -10bb/100 loser will be up money after 1k hands about 1/3rd of the time.

you will never get an answer to this based on data because only a tiny, tiny minority of players will play anything that comes close to statistical significance.

same is true of trading. but it's even more ridiculous because unlike poker, you can pretty much go your entire life without getting honest feedback. in poker you have to play at least 30 hands an hour. a "semi pro" trader may only take one or two positions a week such that even if you have precisely zero edge, you'd still be awfully close to 50/50 to be "beating the market" after a year.

define making a lot / crushing. except isolated sessions on weekends i don't find hold em games to be anything close to "crushable". 10bb/100 at nlhe is about $25/h. it's like beating a 20/40 limit game for 1BB/h. and in both those cases, beyond a certain skill level (one that is commonly found in games this size) you're mostly just at the mercy of how soft the games are. it's very different from online games where slight differences in edge have a huge impact on your hourly.

My own branded product in a specific niche. But I also sell maybe 1000-1.5k skus of other products (mainly well known brands or innovative things as upsells/addons). I am a distributor of a few products too.

Btw im not underestimating anything, I import maybe 30 products myself from China direct from manufacturers, I know how it works. Ive done the import/sell on amazon thing as a side hustle and it sucks. Nothing like building a brand where even if you have bad weeks/months your implied earnings/ev is earned and youll get the payoff hoepfully some time later one. There is a tonne of variance in ads and stuff like that so in that respect you are at the mercy of something utterly out of your control Fb/IG algorithms/new tax laws/ad cost rises/3pl price hikes/carrier price increases etc and you have downswings/upswings hence why I say poker helped me mentally and prepared me, same goes for any business/trading etc.