does anyone even make money at poker anymore? im so close to quitting now that robinhood is a thing all those people playing has to be the next boom.poker is such a small edge now that every pro had to open training sites and coach even the goat jungles gotta cheat to make dough . it really destroyed the game and now they are left holding bags( of our money ) lol.

"To play this game you have to be willing to bust your grandmother."--Doyle Brunson

Truth. Everything could be called predatory. Instead we look up to businessman and down on a poker player. No real difference. (other than they might create something beneficial to people but you can do that in poker too.)

What a pleasure. Sleep, food deprived for three days now, yet make this hole way through the thread just to find that nobody...me only... hmmm... not really, still this - PREDATORS DO NOT HUNT THEIR KINDS. Laws of nature, please!

You aren't a predator nor a parasite. Parasites do not parasite on each other, right?

Entertaining people - is that your mission? Self-****ing deception. There was a fair point above - money comes from addicts. A mental health issue, you know, sick, ill, disabled human beings, not stupid. Chess grandmaster, honestly? Kobe Bryant plays basketball against people on wheelchairs who can't help putting the lives of their children on stakes sort of a better metaphor, isn't it?

Such fun to donate poker money. He gambled his liver to me the last night, but I was a decent man. That much generous, you know, to donate a part of the organ providing for his funeral. Ha-ha.

Good thread. Thank you very much. No judging here, no dominance, just making it clear to myself. Offline tournament poker is the only way to bet money on poker (seems obvious, OK?, yet living a room for online mtts, not quite sure, though). The only way to be the grandmaster. Can you make your living from it?

too soon

people eat meat that is predatory so don't think so highly of yourself. everyone is a predatory in one way or the other unless you are a saint or something like that

dpain doesn’t even believe his own rant, that’s made clear by his final sentence

There’s many differences between business people and pros lol surely you don’t believe that either?

Predatory:Obviously.. sheesh

Parasites:? Well.... yes but one can mitigate that by either paying tax on winnings or finding some other way to pay it forward. Very few pros actually do this however. Especially in this environment the prevailing attitude is “well I’m barely squeaking out a living in this thing so taxes are out of the question”

"I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsociable man, an unprofitable man.
Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good." -Samuel Johnson

One unfortunate result of the poker boom is the intelligent people who spend their careers and their intellects focusing on being profitable at a (useless? meaningless?) game. The economy and society in general make no advancement, and it smacks a bit of talent wasted, accomplishing nothing permanent. Winning money from people less intelligent than you is perhaps not the noblest living one can make.

Spending your time playing something else - golf? chess? bridge? bowling for dollars? stock speculation in the name of "investing"? - is somehow "nobler"? (I take it back, yes, chess would be nobler)

Here's a thought. If you yourself are a winning poker player, don't play. You won't have a good time taking money from people who aren't as good as you.

And let the weak, average, breakeven, and yes, even the winning players go have as good a time as they want, doing what they want. Get your nose out of their lives and leave them the f alone. THAT would be noble.

^ sorry, I forgot to cordially invite you, if you are NOT a winning player, to go out and have a good time spending your own time and money doing whatever you like. Even playing poker. It's none of my business, and no skin off my aging wrinkled senior-plus nose, what you enjoy doing.

But if you are winning player, leave us poor recreational misfits alone, we didn't work all our lives to earn some leisure time, only to have you prey on us AND berate us if we happen to win a hand, or a session, or a month, or a year, or a side income, now and then.

And what is a noble living? Working in mid-management where one might get to layoff staff and take away employee health care? Let's all face the facts about life: it is all a farce and in the end it's play chips for all.

All Poker Sites Owners raking and creating near unbeatable games are the REAL PREDATORS.

We are all just the players in their game

A perfect metaphor for life.

Should've played at the start of lockdown, even i could beat the game then for about 6 weeks. It's pretty much back to pre-lockdown situation now though where only top players or software cheats have an edge.

I just saw this thread, and was about to pop in and say, "Of course poker is predatory, you bloody idiot!" but then discovered that I had said just that (minus the "bloody idiot" part) as the very first response to the thread.

Epic bump there, @jdp.

I was listening to a podcast between BenCB and PadsPoker and they were going on about a Poker Union. I was dying inside listening to this. They wanted to form a union as a means to control the poker websites to a standard that suits them.

It was funny to me that the middle predators wanted to control the top predator, so the middle predators can maximize more from the bottom.

In b4 a Fish Union to restrict the pros.

I understand wanting to control the top predators but then the middle predators become the top predators. In the end the game becomes the same but the money will just go to someone else. Really though the majority of the money goes to the site and the players are fighting for the left overs.

Almost every profession is predatory these days. I'm certainly not defending bum hunting, but the continued prevalence of mining big data against customers and exploiting big data from the same customers to extract maximum value out of the same customers is hugely predatory. And when the messaging is along the lines of, "Because we value you, blah blah blah" it's even more insufferable. You value us alright.

Sports is similar but certainly not identical. Tons of people lose tons of opportunity by chasing a dream they maybe shouldn't be chasing. Same thing with musicians. Tons of musicians grind it our for years to get to the bottom of a one-off "big bill" and then find out it's practically meaningless. Meanwhile they're propping up the few people actually making money.

I could go on and on. It's a sick world.

Predatory is one of the last words I would use to describe a pro poker player. Sadly, most are hopelessly lost, degenerate gamblers. They have the cash to play because their personal lives and finances are a mess. They live in a dump, drive a crappy car, hoard casino food and comps while complaining how expensive LA is.

Fun fact. The people who you think are crushers and printing money actually don’t play that often and frequently come from a financial position that doesn’t require to rely on poker winnings to pay the bills.

people who still play poker 4 a living after 10+ years dont bored of it is impressive. Poker is kinda boring now, so many more entertaining things to do than grind poker 4 a livng. I still enjoy playing 10 hours a week but any more is boring lol

Excuse me? All work becomes monotonous and it never stays entertaining for long. Naive kids look for jobs that are “exciting” and “entertaining”. Well established, high earning professionals rate jobs based on satisfaction and salary.

Job prospects for former pros have to be some of the worst in the country. Hard to imagine a former pro getting a nice paying job with a large resume gap, little education and “professional gambler” stamped on their resume.

Funny, my job has plenty of exciting and entertaining moments. That's about right for a profession where half of my hours are spent watching sporting events. (Well, under normal conditions, anyway.)

But yeah, after 22 years in the biz, there are a few parts of the job that have become quite tedious. "Satisfaction" is definitely the better objective for an occupation.

My job is to be like Job, so my job is always entertaining. Content creating is fun and exploring new places and meeting people is more fun than isolating ur self to play poker. I guess being isolating for so long doesn't intrigue me anymore. Some people who find poker fun still, more power to them but if they have enough money and are just playing to make more money i feel that is wasting ones life. If you don't have enough money and need to grind for a living i can understand but if you have more than enough and just play for money thats pretty bad.

sry u lost bro

Just saying what I’ve seen playing nl in la for the 14 years.