40-45k then you have rent...

If you make less than 100k in aforementioned cities you are really scraping by if you want a life.

Game's over guys

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...96/index2.html

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...story-1777298/


This guy was dumb and doing it at nosebleeds and got caught. What's to stop 2 people in a 3rd world country (a poor country with lots of smart people) just grinding 2 tables of NL100z for $50 per hour? Nothing. And if they do it, their friends will hear about it.

This should be a turning point. If you haven't made it past NL200 yet, don't start trying now.

There seems to be quite a lot of resources needed to get anywhere where you would end up +ev using sims while trying to play low table count. (running the sims / 2 pcs etc first off, then learning how to use them properly etc etc)
I would bet most micro/low stakes players even if handed all the sims in world would stil manage to mess it up and lose at high stakes while trying to cheat.

Also keeping in mind the fact if they are caught or too blatant they get all their money taken and accounts perma banned

Pio is $250 or so for a 1 year licence? 2 pcs are not hard to come by...

Learning to read a color coded matrix is not that hard, and I suspect it would take at most a week to set up all the sims in well organised folders. Obv you memorise pre-flop.

Yeah according to nvg it's game over for a decade at this point.

Yet somehow the games are still good. Sure, you need to know something, but it's nowhere near "over"

The games aren't "good". I made ~75$ an hour playing 100nl full ring for 3 years. Those games were good. Clearing 4k bonuses every month and a half. Barely losing any session...

"Knowing someone" as an online poker player is pretty much the broadest barrier to entry there is.

that's not a reasonable expectation. It can't be.
The expectations from poker were way out of equilibrium and it was not sustainable.
Any gold rush ends.

It's a strategic game that is fun to play and affords certain freedoms, equilibrium earnings are supposed to be significantly lower than earnings in more boring professions.

I'd guess that right now the market is a lot closer to the equilibrium. You can make decent money, but significant human capital investment is required and there are trade offs involved. Strategic games are not supposed to make billionaires, or millionaires who barely invested in their skillset.

Plenty of people made it big in the last few years, starting from close to nothing. I think that makes my claim that the games are good a reasonable one.

Stuff like AI is a threat to most professions, not exclusively poker.

All the naysers are likely right, but yolo

There are also a lot of nonfinancial benefits to being an online pro

Also many (almost all?) regs burnout, lose interest, or fall behind, and eventually tap out. While games get tougher, there's also a limit. Fish are eternal

Close thread

"Fish are eternal". What makes you think this? They've been drying up for 15 years, and are at all time lows. Seas are overfished dude.

People seem to have this view that there was the gold rush, and after that was over things have/will settled into a steady state.

But in hindsight, since the beginning of online poker, every 5 years, the last 5 years looked like a relative gold rush. The solver/AI stuff is going to accelerate the decline.

And saying AI is coming for all jobs is pretty weird. Most jobs have some soft skills required, and obviously these are harder to automate. But I can't think of a single job easier to automate than a closed strategic game that requires no human interaction, and just the calculation of probabilities and optimal game theory!

Maybe not necessarily in this game if cheating becomes too rampant, but if there is a way to stop it, then they are right. Casino games where fish know they are far beyond having any kind of win rate will always exist and people will play forever even knowing they can't win. Poker is just another gambling game, assuming everything is fair and rake is beatable it will exist in some fashion with people trying to scoop up whatever money they can.

Some fish play 6 max and even admit in chat they think everyone is a bot or even a house player and they still play and come back later. An issue now though is they just lose way too fast as the skill gap has become even bigger, leading them to just be put off entirely and stop playing all together, but that doesn't mean that new players won't discover/want to play the game like any other casino game.

Going in the future though, it'll potentially be difficult to play any game online for money, unless sites figure out a way to combat ever increasing computing/storage. NL/PLO will most likely eventually go the way that fixed limit NL did and be essentially 100 percent removed but probably not in the next few years, but other games might pop up. New games will be able to be solved relatively quickly, but if people still play roulette/slot machines they will most likely still play a game against players who function as the house basically, they just have shittier odds

solvers/ai has just made regs a lot stronger and the gap between regs smaller, what killed the fish pool is mostly the bans of online poker in a lot of countries, making it very hard to deposit etc.

If every 2 years the entire poker world would switch games..Go from NL to PLO to 7 stud H/L to California lowball to BIG O to Limit hold em to ect ect ..the games would still be poorly played overall..Most of you arnt really that good at poker, you’ve just figured out after years and years , a boring way to barely beat the most simple of games ..small blind NL hold em..

It almost seems like people who scream the sky is falling poker is dead and that cheating is clearly rampant etc etc non stop for 10 years without proof besides themselves not beating online anymore are prob more harmful than the most likely actual small amount of people cheating and taking significant amounts of money out of the community not being caught.


Look how many live players or recs freak out about huds still because of everyone talking about how huge the advantage is of having one when in reality everyone who plays online consistently will have one and a good chunk of sites have their own or don't allow them nowadays

I know you're referencing online poker for the most part, but live poker is completely fine.

Yes it's been affected by covid, but so have most other industries.

Even if winrates are far lower than they were in the past, if you're the best or second best player at every table you sit at, you're likely doing extremely well for yourself.

5bb/hr (reasonable) x 1500 hours (reasonable) @ 5/10 = $75,000. Also keep in mind that the rake is fairly low or timed (as a % of the pot) as you move up so more people are winning.

Then there's also home games.

Good luck automating that

The tipping point though comes when this is publically available in a very accessible way to people. Once that happens it is game over.

A quick search shows up results on AI bot forums and posts like this that make me think this is already massively preleveant in the games and not just a handful of people like you suggest.

Example - https://law.stackexchange.com/questi...by-poker-sites

So as long as you're the single best player at the highest stake game in your casino you should have no issue. Sounds right.

Right, I'M the one saying that 100k isn't necessarily a lot of money. At least not for someone with 6-8 years of post secondary who works in a big city. If you had full scholarships you're not representative.

the apples to apples comparison here would be a person with similar aptitudes who spent the same amount of time working towards success in each domain. and in that respect i doubt the average $500zoom reg has put even close to the equivalent number of hours of an average MBA grad, much less people who're at the peak of their career and near the top of their field.

5k-10k hours is way too low of an estimate for time commitment. just showing up for lectures through undergrad would be in that ballpark.

Or maybe you're overestimating their exceptionality because you know a lot of dullards.

What's your metric for judging their exceptionality? People get into elite programs with very unexceptional standardized test scores. 90th percentile (roughly the median at the top schools) is not really all that exceptional when so many taking the test are non-native english speakers or people who have no quant background whatsoever, and the range is massive - there're grads in those elite programs who scored close to the 50th percentile.

https://www.businessbecause.com/news...-programs-2019

Mediocre aptitude just isn't a limiting factor in the business world as it is for, say, elite engineering programs.

This isn't some kind of an ego trip, I'm trying to illustrate what a comparable amount of effort is worth. Unrealistic expectations is why there're so many people graduating from these types of programs buried in debt who'll be working well into their 40s before their net worth will be > 0.

Poker turns you into a ****in weirdo is probably the biggest factor in why it's always smart to not play.

it may not be automated away, but 5bb/hr being 'reasonable' can change pretty fast even if it hasn't already.
consumer preferences shift. it's not as if poker can't decline further in popularity.

also entirely possible that casino execs wake up one day and realize that raising rake dramatically won't actually kill the games, it'll just push out the for-profit players leaving the recs bottom line mostly unaffected while allowing the casino to make way more per table per hour.

that would sure suck.

but this is true of almost everything in life. aside from trades people for things like electrical, plumbing, etc, there's always a non-trivial chance that a persons skills will become obsolete (or that their bargaining power will be so heavily diluted by excess supply relative to demand for those skills that it's barely worth doing).

Nice post, well said

Fair enough. I think I misread your agenda on the previous post

I dont think live games got significantly worse during last ~7 years (it changed though, I think more travel is required nowadays).

Even a little bit of studying should increase your expectation year to year.

Online is still surprisingly soft. Honestly I expected it to be dead by now. Its not.

Solvers require a lot of ****ing work. A lot. Its a true meritocratic tool much more than games killer.

Writing a bot is also really hard. Solving ring games impossible. But yeah online poker is in danger, unless sites step up.
Live poker is automation proof.

Most jobs dont require any soft skills once they are automated. Accountants, doctors (to a degree), lawyers etc, pretty much every profession slowly shaves off required manhours.

Not to mention the "damage" about to be done by Elon once self driving cars become widespread

I think it's roughly 1800 hours of lecture at colleges that treat undergrad as school and require attendance. Mine didn't.

Other than that I agree with your points. Even if you study poker for 5+ years, that's still less time than getting degrees and work experience.