Well if you look at benefits packages of a decent job and that profitability of poker going down then you want more then 2x your areas middle class wage at the very least. Just 2x is probably ok if you have something else to fall back on if/when poker dies down in profitablility but at the same time a downswing can mess you up so maybe 4x the middle class wage..... A good bennies package is worth quite a bit and if you don't have them then it could be a huge bill for someone self employed.


I'm basically just relaying what other pros have discussed. They make a sick case for the benefits package and just financial security where you want a nice cushion... also taxes can be a kick in the nuts so you need a deep bankroll.


Honestly all of that sounds like a pita.

That depends on where you are and what site. Nowadays, in some jurisdictions that regulate online gambling it may be illegal.

You could also look at it like, "counting cards isn't illegal... they'll just blacklist ya and ban you from every casino."

What you're saying is, poker pros are doomed, because their job can easily be automated by bots. Therefore it doesn't matter how much they earn, because they won't be in their jobs for much longer.

What about live poker? Online is clearly doomed in the near future, but surely live poker is still worth it?

50k would be like poverty level to me unless I was single, no kids and lived extremely frugile

Fun players might have got too used to the traditional cash games, but I believe that adding new, relatively botproof, twists to the games will reignite their interest Humans value consistency, but they also crave variety sometimes.

For the same reason, fun players will crave human opponents even if an attempt is made to outsource the latter's job to bots, as long as the humans keep behaving spontaneously and showing emotions at the tables like true humans. The rule twists will facilitate this, as regs' strategies are less alike in less studied games.

I'm not aware of any bot for PokerStars Power Up yet It's not classical poker, but I'm not a 52-card conservative - I'm ready to play any kind of a game as long as it's +EV for its dedicated students.

You are totally off the mark on (1) "what I am saying", (2) What conclusions may flow from the discussion, and (3) whether online poker, as entertainment, or as a way to earn, is "clearly doomed".

1. What I said is found above in this thread, "poker pros" are not doomed, they need to differentiate themselves from the competitive skill set that bots may deploy at a lower cost.

2. Your conclusion is ridiculous on its face .... some poker pros have built nice life-rolls , which they invest in other endeavors .... going back to Dan Harrington plowing winnings into real estate through more recent successful pros branching out from poker into other fields.

3. Online poker is not "clearly doomed", as entertainment ...unless you rigidly think "online poker" is defined by 24 - tabling grinding stuck in a static world.

The future is way more complex than you seem to realize perhaps.

+1

terrible example.
counting cards isn't illegal.
using a computer to count cards will get you arrested.

1. Bots play in the same games that humans do, so what are you trying to say exactly? That humans will be driven out said games by bots and have to find other endeavors? Yes I agree with that.

2. "Some poker pros have built nice life-rolls" I believe the normal word is "savings". Yes, many pros who started during the boom have. But many haven't, particularly if you went pro recently. You cannot build savings without earning enough, obviously.

3. Entertainment, no obviously not. There's still tournaments, spin and gos and other fun variants. That was not my point though. I was talking about playing for a living. There is no pressure to make money if it's just for entertainment.

Perhaps someone else could explain what you're on about. I have nfi the point you're trying to make and I'm not sure you do either.

I was asking a question, the point of which is that "online poker" is not doomed if people will still find it entertaining ..... regardless of whether or not today's or last week's pros can thrive without adapting to a social, entertaining mode of activity.

You talk about "playing for a living" as if in some static environment, I am saying that playing for a living will require some different skills than before, i.e somewhat more human interaction and entertainment than in the past.

You're making an unwarranted assumption or two here. I'm not sure what makes you think I'm pro-HUD or that your opinion should be ignored. My point is that incorrectly using charged words like "cheating" is counter-productive. I think people who would like to see HUD use curtailed have plenty of good points on their side already, and don't need to create their own definition of cheat to attempt to make others look bad in an effort to strengthen their case.

No, they don't. Rather than reward sites that don't allow HUDs, you're not playing on any online site. So sites that go out of their way to disallow HUDs, thus losing customers who want to use a HUD, also lose your business - incentivizing them to allow HUDs.

While I think calling HUD use cheating on sites that allow it is silly, so is this. Yes, there is a clear line between a disallowed bot and a permitted HUD, but there is also one between books, training sites, etc., and using HUDs.

Neither is using banned software in online poker except in some jurisdictions. A card counting computer has nothing to do with what I'm saying, you brought that up.

The things I'm talking about are just frowned upon by the casinos/poker rooms.

Anyone remember casino bonuses? Quite a few people were clearing 50K and dedicated guys were clearing 100K+/year. 2+2 even used to have a dedicated section for this pursuit. Casino bonuses still exist today and some people are still making some extra money. But the era of making a decent living from casino bonuses is over. A similar fate is approaching online poker.

Variations to the game are, at best, a band-aid because there are only 2 outcomes:

- Online casinos are interested in rake. They want gambling games where people splash around back and fourth until no one has any money. They're not going to introduce game variations where skilled players have bigger edges over unskilled players. The result: even if you're good, your expected EV will be lower and will come at a cost of higher variance playing these new game variations.

- If the online casino does make a mistake introducing a game where skilled players find a substantial edge, that game will be "fixed" to get rid of your edge. Online casinos spend a lot of money to recruit signups and they simply can't afford to have their depositors bleed money to skilled players too quickly. They will either get rid of you, or they will change the rules to make sure you can't win as much. Lots of sites have already done this with regular poker with things like segregated player pools/cashout limits/etc.

Ultimately poker is a fun game and people will always play. The other day I downloaded one of the smartphone poker apps and it was strangely addicting (even to me, as a cash game player.) Zynga poker/etc are still drawing crowds. These are fun games that translates pretty well to online environment. Popularity of games ebbs and flows from decade to decade, but certain games like poker/chess/tetris/monopoly/etc have generational resilience.

So what is the difference? You seem hung up on huds being allowed by the sites and bots not. But wouldn't collusion be cheating? Even if it was allowed by the sites?

Where I would draw the line is:

Having acces to information other players have not, and can not have even in theory without extra ordinary meassures:

To get rid of super users, collusion and marked cards, where that apply

Not playing their own hand
Bots and getting help from a friend/coach in a hand.

When it comes to cheating, all that matters is what is allowed. If that's being "hung up" on something, guilty as charged, I guess?

No, of course not. It would be a rather strange site, but if someone wants to create a team play poker site, all the power to them.

Sounds fine. Others would draw the line elsewhere. Some sites accommodate your line, some accommodate theirs.

So if a site gave their friends the ability to see the hole cards of all other players, without telling anyone else, this would be ok? Or would it be cheating?

I'm not sure what the point of these silly examples are, and we seem to be getting further and further from the topic of this thread.

Obviously a site doing something like that is fraudulent. Is there a point here?

The point with it is just to show that only because something is allowed by a site doesen't make it right or wrong. So we can not only use that to determine if an action is cheating or not.

So sites allowing huds and not bots can not be the only reason for using bots being cheating and using huds not being so. We at least need to answer how these things differ from a site enabling other players to be superusers.

But it is drifting away from the main point of the thread so let's just leave it at that

Why would a degen play for a few blinds when he can 400x his bet on a nice looking slot machine that gives better rake-back then stars?
+ They keep on seeing the % and that they keep on getting owned left and right.
Power up was a poor attempt of creating the newest form of mmo, and seems like dead content right now.
(same like the clock thing and those 10x sn'gs)

If a site gave friends the ability to play together as a team, see the hole cards of all other players on their team, this would be entertaining af.

fyp

Actually you can. "Cheating is the receiving of a reward for ability or finding an easy way out of an unpleasant situation by dishonest means. It is generally used for the breaking of rules to gain unfair advantage in a competitive situation."

But that isn't even the important point. Whether a lot of players consider HUDs to be cheating is the more important question in this discussion, as well as whether allowing/disallowing them is effective or futile.

Actually I never thought of this before, very good point.

Since Pokerstars put the percentages next to all-ins, bad players must see they're getting it in poorly almost all the time. This would cause at least some bad players to want to improve.

But they don't put the percentages next to blackjack or roulette, I wonder why? Perhaps because when edges are smaller between good and bad players, Pokerstars takes more rake.

Very clever from Pokerstars.

I agree that the current Stars chests aren't giving fun players as much value as they deserve; I hope this changes in Stars Rewards 2.0 (which are in development, according to TSG's Q4 2017 earnings call), by means of taking the 4% rakeback away from regs, which makes little difference to them anyway.

Spin & Gos and kilofield hyper MTTs are close enough to slots in terms of the potential for 'winning moments'.

The reasons for the initial failure of Power Up were bugs and poor marketing. After a marketing campaign was launched in the UK (I mean the video where Charlotte Nagy wins the championship), $15 PU regs reported a substantial influx of newbies into their games

Some people are ecstatic to get a pay bump from their $10/hour job to $12/hour job. (Which basically describes a very big part of Middle America.) Depending on where people are in life, the number is obviously all over the place for everyone.

I used to play 1KNL-2KNL. I took a lot of notes on players, used a HUD, and reviewed my HM regularly. When I tried playing live, I always felt lost because a lot of situations are player dependent and I didn't have much of a sample size on the revolving player pool.

Does this matter? Well... I'm not sure... When I got into poker during the poker boom, my friends and I used to have a home game. Stacks would be thrown around back and fourth all night, no one really knew what they were doing. Over the years, some people got really serious and studied hard and the result is that almost everyone else stopped coming to our home games. It's no fun almost always losing. You feel like you're coming in a huge underdog and getting outplayed and the result is almost always the same. Even our rich friends mostly lost interest - it's not very fun to mostly lose. It's like going to a casual running meetup where people got serious and everyone is running 6:30 pace and you end up being alone, on a different level.

So all these issues really come down to the poker economy as a whole. Even live 1/2NL games are reg infested and skill gap is huge. What makes poker fun is that an amateur can face a pro and have a chance but it doesn't feel like it anymore for any amateur that plays any sort of substantial session.

As long as there is a substantial financial component to the game, there will be people who study and crush the poker economy. Even if the rewards are no longer worth it for you, they will be worth it for someone else.

There are two broad solutions:

- More gamble/narrow edges. This is why tournaments are still fairly strong. You can't get crushed playing 30BB stacks, you know everyone has to get lucky, you know you have a shot, seats assigned randomly, etc. With ridiculous live rake I'm seeing, I wonder if anyone really wins long term here, but it's still drawing lots of casual players who know they will get obliterated if they play cash.

- Fun. There are little things that casinos could do to make things more fun. Banning constant ipad use/similar would be one. It's not very fun when half the table is watching movies and no one even says a word to new players. There is one really funny/social player at my local casino and even though he's not that good he is printing money because people want to sit at his table and I've heard countless of times people say something along the lines: "I don't mind getting stacked by you, it was worth it! Best table ever! I want to play at his table!" Fun promotions and games, food, and social things that draw people in are what sustain the poker economy. You will still get crushed, but at least it will be fun and social.