Most important skill for playing live tournaments.

Being able to get backing or sell pieces. In that sense JRB may be the greatest MTTer of all time.

You can also look me up on official poker rankings, where i have 1108 events played, 17% cash, and a 45% ROI. ( gunslinger3 ).

The point is that a skilled professional, who works hard, CAN make a nice living playing tournaments.

Lol sample size
Lol donkaments

edit: in case you haven't read this... http://www.nsdpoker.com/2011/02/mtt_pros_2/

I know hendom mob wasn't the only source used for the article. How can you use hendom mob stats on any player that plays in tourneys that aren't tracked by HM? For example, Phil Hellmuth has stats on about 10 tourneys a year for the past 2 years on HM. What did he do for the other 355 days/yr? How do we know Philly didn't cash (or play in) some other tourneys in the past 2 years that didn't show up on HM?

I agree that most non-casino tourneys are smaller than those of casino, but that doesn't mean we should ignore them. That is still income.

You didn't respond to my last point about how the .5% stat means nothing unless we know how many of the profiles on HM are full time tourney pros and how many are poker pros that sometimes play tourney or just rec players.

I used Hendon Mob to get an idea of the percentage of players (out of the entire poker world) who might be making $300K/year playing tournaments. Most tournaments that could get you into that range are tracked by HM. I never said all of the players tracked by HM were pros.

I'm not ignoring them. From my calculations, smaller-entry events have a better expected long-term ROI than large field events, due to the pay structures. But the scale of the payouts at the is smaller.

It means that it's likely that of the entire world of poker players, including pros and amateurs, the number of players who can make a living from tournament play alone is a very small percentage.

I pretty much stopped reading/disregarded later things after it said that online ROI is meant to be higher than live ROI. It neglects to mention the crucial detail of live obv being much easier than online. Ridiculously stupid imo, especially when it then goes on to base a bunch of other things on that.

^^I definintely agree that the ROI is quite a lot higher live compared to online, but I am not sure if paying higher rake, travel expenses, accommudation, tipping when winning, plus more expensive food and drinks leave you with a higher bottomline, afterall.

Living in Vegas and not tipping as much as the herd demands cuts those extra exspenses way down..

Don't you mean...

Problem is, I didn't say that.

he did say Durrrr will go busto in a few years

I don't think the article is WAY off... it has some flaws and makes some conclusions from incomplete or wrong set of data, but the underlying conclusion that making a decent living playing live tourney is nearly impossible, except for the very rare and extremely small group at the very top. So for the other 99.9% of us, we better stick with a day job.

By the way, he made the assumption that one would want to earn $60,000/year. I wouldn't call that even remotely reasonable income in much of the developed world, let alone if you live in a big city.

My article was addressing Bryan Devonshire's remarks about making it as a live tournament player in the US. Outside the US, you could (mostly) play online, so that's outside the purview of my article.

As I stated in the article, $60K is a little over the median US household income, i.e. it's more than most people make. At the assumed 25% ROI, it rounded out neatly to $300K/year in winnings. I just used it as a target. To make more, all you need to do is have a better ROI or have a higher volume of buyin dollars.

My conclusion is that in the USA, you should buy a caravan/trailor in Las Vegas and play 90% live, and in the ROW, you should play 90% online, and play some local big live-MTT's whenever you won't have to spent too much to travel there.

I often heard that travelling to the WSOP as a european is hardly +EV, if one isn't crushing hard combined with playing a ****load of tournaments and some soft cash-games aside, due all the travel and accumodation expenses.

How much is a caravan/trailor and a place to put it on in vegas nowadays?

OPR doesn't track live tournaments, which is the only topic I wrote about. I used OPR's stats for online tournaments as a baseline to estimate long-term ROI.

I'm guessing the author would agree with this statement, but that such a hard-working, skilled professional is still the exception rather than the rule.

Who the hell would want to be a live MTTer? The guys traveling city to city playing 560s,1ks - they're mainly guys who aren't that great at poker and rely on playing tourists/amateurs to make a mediocre income which will drop every year as games get tougher....if you want to play live poker for a living go play high stakes cash games or else move on - there's so many 20 somethings grinding out 40-80k/yr on the "live circuit" who are just prolonging reality

Anyone who thinks "lol donkaments" is the message if this article can't do basic math.
You are doomed. Now go buy those lottery tickets.

hi cheri jacobus

Is the 60k pre income tax income?

And if you're assuming you're doing this as a living would this person pay SS tax, health insurance, invest into a retirement account?

Almost no one could do it effectively and it would be a sucky life anyway, imo

Well the average family of 4 lives on $47K.

Yea living off 60k a year wouldn't be a problem, making 60k a year would be the near impossible part

Author agrees

i played 120 mtts for the two years 2012 - 2013, abi about 100, itm 25%, roi 150% & 125%, six or seven cashes bet 1k to 3k. and i suck at my best. live mtts are eminently beatable and with education, more discipline and vol. i think i could become a half assed donk and make a living off low buyin mtts.

Before I start my response I want to say that I wholeheartedly agree that it is much easier and more consistent to make a living playing live cash games than Live MTTs, but that doesn't mean making a living doing the latter is impossible.

I agree that it is extremely difficult to make a living playing primarily live MTTs. However, most of the evidence that is used in this article does not accurately fit into the author's arguments.

1)You can not realistically expect live MTT stats to mirror online MTT stats. Online events very often have worse structures and overall tougher fields than live events. The average online pro typically plays many tables at a time and thus also lowers their ROI (even if only slightly).

2)Using stats from 136 players and 7,926 tournaments to claim what a long term ROI for WSOP events is ludicrous. The average field size at the 2013 WSOP was 1,282 players. You would need a MUCH larger sample size to even begin to estimate what a decent ROI for a good player is. Truthfully due to the nature of the game and how quickly things change we will never be able to obtain a true ROI for these types of events.

3)Obviously consistency is key to surviving, but saying that just because it was only one big score that made a player most of his profit means you can't make a living playing MTTs doesn't make sense. Every MTT player knows all of the money is in the top 3 spots, whether it is a 180 man field or a 8,000 player field. Penalizing their results for achieving what a player is striving to do is counter intuitive. I always tell people my goal playing live MTTs is to break even until I get my big score. This is a legitimate way to approach your schedule.


Now I will share my numbers:

http://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/player.php?n=142216

This is playing PART-TIME over the course of 19 months. If I was playing live MTTs for my sole income I would increase my volume by at least 50% if not more.

Totals:
Buy-ins: $220k
Cashes: $480k

Totals not including MTT satellites:
Buy-ins: $205k
Cashes: $440k

Totals not including MTT satellites and only buy-ins < $2k:
Buy-ins: $140k
Cashes: $440k

Totals not including MTT satellites, only buy-ins < $2k & no WSOP events:
Buy-ins: $90k
Cashes: $418k


A few things to take away from these numbers:

1)Yes, WSOP are tough mainly because of their field size. I have played roughly 35 events for $50k in buy-ins and I have $22k in cashes. With fields this large this is a tiny sample size so no real conclusions can be drawn from it other than there is a lot of variance in these events.

2)For events with buy-ins of $2k+, I have played 14 events for roughly $65k (5 events make up $43k of this) and have zero cashes. Once again this is too small of a sample size to draw any real conclusions.

3)What is not factored into this article are live satellites. Almost all live MTT regulars will play Mega Sattys into events that they would buy into regardless. I have roughly $15k in buy-ins with $40k in cashes in these events. This is over nearly 50 events, while still not a great sample size, only one of the wins was a $10k seat. The next largest was $3500 with all remaining being $1600 or less. This is a much more consistent way to make money between big scores. Even if we half my ROI of 160% in case I'm running very hot in these, you are still talking about an added income of $8,400/year or 14% of your $60k goal set in the article.

4)Lastly and most importantly looking at buy-ins under $2k which don't include WSOP action (AKA the bread and butter of any live MTT regular). I have an ROI of 364% in these events. If you take away my biggest cash I have an ROI of 208%. If you take away my 2 biggest cashes I STILL have an ROI of 59% or more than double the ROI you used to base most of your article on.

I am not claiming that any of these numbers are definitive because they most certainly are not, but using these figures gets us the following.

$90k in MTTs buy-ins * 59% ROI = $53k
$15k in MTT Satty buy-ins * 80% ROI = $12k

Total of $65k * 150% to compensate for part-time status / 19 months = $5,131/month

$5,131 * 12 months = $61,579 per year

Looks like we hit our $60k/year goal!! And this is all based on my ROI without my two biggest cashes and a already reduced ROI for MTT sattys.



In conclusion; do I agree with this article? Not as it currently sits, if you change it to "Why it is extremely difficult to make a living playing Live Poker tournaments" then that would be something I could get behind.

Making a living playing primarily Live MTTs is very difficult, but at the same time definitely possible.