Whether the time spent "outweighs" the benefit is debatable. I will concede though that even if you are wrong, it would take less of your time if you concentrated on learning the specific beneficial traits (skill at probability for instance) than learning a game that involves some of those skills. Sort of like the difference between playing tennis and going to the gym.

I've learned more from my years playing poker that is applicable to life/business than I've ever learned in 4 years of college and I actually made money while learning. The biggest waste of time is college - not only are tuitions insanely expensive, the time suck of 4 years along with making no money is a terrible return.

I agree with the comparison of poker to college/school. 90% of the things I was taught at school were either ridiculously obvious or naturally learnable without going to school.

But I don't agree that poker is somewhere where you could learn more in say 8 years compared to working in a range of jobs for 8 years or some jobs and then running your own business.

Poker is clearly good for learning about risk, money management, exponential money growth, applying systems, discipline, having a work ethic, setting goals, and about people, a certain type of people, mostly bad people, plus a few other bits and pieces things, but I think it is very insular, plus has a very limited number of things that can be learned within it or from it.

I have an example of how limited it is IMO, which is when William Kassouf was putting on a really obvious act when using incessant table talk in the WSOP ME, that a huge percentage of poker players, probably ~90% could not work out that it was an act, and thought that it was how he naturally was as a person and that he was being nasty. When what he was doing was using one area of the rules to his advantage.

Some of it was a lack of cultural understanding by North Americans and some Europeans, because there are a lot of British people like Kassouf that use a similar shtick in various walks of life, but had players had some more real life experience, i.e. working regular jobs, they would have more likely met Kassouf like characters in non poker settings and had they spent less time in front of a computer playing poker, they might have travelled to more places for leisure or work, or consumed more non poker media that had characters like him in it.

So what we see a lot IMO, among quite a lot of dedicated poker players, are a lot of blind spots where they simply don't understand something, and often misunderstand it, because they have had little or no exposure to it or experience of it, and they are only capable of analysing something from a purely logical and data point of view, which is often not enough, you often need wide ranging experience and knowledge too.

on average college educated people earn far more than those without it. The return is actually great for most people. You can look up the data on this.

Been a pro for 4 years;

Poker teaches you emotional control
Poker can open up the entire world as a place to visit instead of living in the demonic west where everything is ruined
Poker gives you time and money
Poker teaches you money management
Poker teaches you to invest in yourself

Poker completely changed my life, but ofc I had to go live in eastern europe for that, but yeah the west was a hopeless place with insane cost of living, poker saved my life.

The problem is people don't want to invest in learning the game, I can ltierally tell you if you take Raise Your Edge and Doug Polk's heads up course you should be able to comfortably crush MTTs and make decent money for the west and amazing money for non western countries if you should so desire, but people don't want to invest $2.5k. So yeah I guess poker isn't good for them because they prefer being a whiny loser, but it doesn't have to be as such, they just make that choice.

They should - for most they're investing 4-5 years of their lives and anywhere from 50k-250k financially.

It's fun.

/thread

I learned to play poker at college in Chicago and supported my living expenses that way during those years. What made you think you could not make money during college, more specifically learn and make money from poker ?

I played in private games both at the University and around the Southside. If you think that experience was not educational in and of itself, you would be mistaken. My opponents ranged from UC Business School and college students to neighborhood dealers and assorted pool hall denizens.

(Much of the university play was on a credit basis and there was a secondary market in player markers. A central ledger was maintained and formed the basis for secondary market trading. The experience seemed useful later for both understanding valuation of options /futures and blockchain concepts. As Yogi Berra noted, you can observe a lot just by watching.)

If you don't understand why that argument is flawed , you wasted your time at college

Poker is a sedentary life-style with high stress which can lead to all sorts of health problems
Poker is one way, there is a clear winner and clear loser. For the rest of the economy both parties benefit from the transaction. In poker there is just one winner and one loser
Poker takes a lot of time and a lot of money
Poker doesn't teach you anything about the real world. It is what it is, just a game

nothing good or bad it's just a fun game, it entertains and interests a lot of people but it does have a price to society

imo there is nothing wrong with making a living at it but anyone who does it should consider other hobbies and stay active physically and always remember that some of the guys you win from are addicts and should not be at the table, there is a little bit of blood money associated with it because for every win you have someone loses

Great post.

And to add to what you said.....

Poker is the only game/sport, where a competitor arrives at it and says to him(her)self/to his(her) friends, "look at the value in this field (tourneys), or this line up (cash games)", obviously meaning that there are other competitors who you can inflict a negative on, to realise your positive.

No competitor ever says this when they arrive to compete in a cycling race, a javelin competition, a golf tournament, etc., the reason being that there is either no prize money, if there is prize money it is funded by sponsors, gate money, TV money, a governing body, or by the state, and even when competitors are funding the prize money themselves and/or have other costs associated with competing, you are not hurting them when you win, everyone is winning, you are just winning more than them, because they have won/gained by enjoying the experience, getting fit, having a healthy lifestyle and improving their performance and ability.

Some of the "winning" areas mentioned above can be applied to some losing poker players, e.g. enjoying the experience and improving performance and ability, but the key difference is that the losses are uncapped in poker, whereas in basketball, judo, chess, hockey etc, one's costs are capped, are pretty much known in advance and therefore are a manageable and happy to do, exchange of "losses" for enjoyment and other benefits.

If all net winners in poker (medium to long term net winning players) were winning solely as a trickle up effect from the base of the pyramid, meaning that all losses were pretty much capped for all players, no players would be being badly hurt and all players' benefits from the game outweigh their monetary costs, then poker would be functioning in the same way (losses versus benefits) to other sports. But it clearly mostly isn't that way.

Live tournament poker is the most similar to other sports in respect of all of the above, if you don't play any live cash games before or after the tournament, because you have a known fixed cost in exchange for your enjoyment/the benefits of the experience, and there is usually only one event you play in one time span, just like playing soccer, or running an athletics (track) race, but cash games and most online poker is not the same, the losses often outweigh the benefits for a significant percentage of competitors and are made even bigger by the additional cost of the rake or juice.

Name some players who died premature deaths that were attributed to poker.

Dusty Schmidt ("Leatherass") wrote on his blog in 2013 that mass-multitabling poker had "fried his brain" and that doctors had warned him to stop poker else he'd risk dying before the age of 50. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20130222...brain-on-poker



Sadly, he passed away in 2021, aged 40. The cause of death was not published publicly I don't think. He was known to have a heart condition so maybe that was a contributing factor.

Regardless of cause of death - RIP to Dusty. No disrespect meant by posting this. Nobody knows including me if it was from poker or not. Out of respect for his family, let's not debate the cause of his death.


I play poker myself. I'm not posting this to say poker is bad. Just that I do believe specifically mass multi-tabling of poker for long sessions over many years cannot be good for you. Take care of your health, everyone.

People have committed suicide after substantial losses, they are forgotten to history. also don't give me this BS about it teaching you how to balance a check-book

for me, it has helped me overcome social anxiety, has sharpened a lot of my people reading skills, which can translate to skills later on but I'm a winning player and a lot of the people I'm making money off of are college kids who should be in school or degens, about half the guys don't mind losing, the rest could get hurt by it

the high stakes games are college age kids who think they're learning something or middle age men who can afford it, or just straight up degens who show up at the beginning of the month, what they usually learn is that there's a few people who can take their whole roll and then what?

just saying, be humble

good poker is an extension of moral poker. which we define as where the good players have a positive expectation.

traditionally you weren't allowed to say this on this forum.

I meant you don't get paid to go to college - you get paid to play poker (if you're a winner).

How is his death attributed to poker when you wrote "he was known to have a heart condition"? Keep in mind most poker players live very poor lifestyles - processed food/drinks, out of shape, no balance, etc. Can't blame poker for living like this.

You're way off on the sports comparison - every positive in sports has a negative reaction. In the NFL when someone scores a touchdown that requires a defender to lose, in golf when someone makes a cut that means someone else didn't, and it continues on and on. For the elite athletes this doesn't matter as they're making a lot of money, but there's millions of athletes that are teetering between being successful and broke that either make it or have to quit and move to something else. Nothing is more cutthroat as the competition is the best in the world. In business it's the same thing - the goal of every business is to make the most amount of money which can inflict damage on those who struggle to afford it. This is the result of capitalism - when you have winners you'll always have losers.

You are applying your comparison purely to professional sport at the top level. Even then, there are a lot of professional competitors that carve out a living without making it big
or who are playing at the top level but are not the biggest wage earners. E.g. a second choice/backup place kicker/punter in the NFL, or a top 200 ranked tennis player in singles who
supplements their income by playing all of the doubles tournaments too. Many golf players who play on the second tier professional golf circuit are also golf pros at their local golf club/course and a lot of them have sponsors/patrons who help them with travel and accommodation expenses. In athletics (track), and other Olympic sports, here in the UK where I am, many competitors receive National Lottery funding (in effect government funding), so that they can train full time and give full devotion to their sport. In the USA there are many, many sports scholarships where the young person's school fees are heavily subsidised and the top performers can win big professional contracts or sponsorship while still studying, or shortly afterwards. Do you really want me to name 101 other sports where things are actually pretty good for the competitors, at least in wealthy or relatively wealthy countries, and where the sport and its competitors are supported both financially and through infrastructure from the grass roots level (the bottom of the pyramid) upwards.

Your "negative reaction" is nothing like in poker where a net losing player is being routinely crushed. They don't go sideways or a little backwards, or reach a low ceiling and then give up like a losing or not very successful sportsperson does, the poker player who regularly gets crushed in the games, often loses everything, their money, their relationships, sometimes their job, and even their life.

All of the above said, the vast majority of people who play sports play it as amateurs, they play for pride, enjoyment, awards and trophies. Some become pro and take a shot, but it rarely destroys their life or badly damages it when they fail.

Those of us who play poker professionally (I used to but currently don't) should accept that we are in the game to hurt people, we are ruthless, we seek out and feast on the weak, that is our job.

If there is a sport where we could draw a close comparison with professional poker, it is professional boxing, because in boxing you definitely want to badly hurt your opponent, you need to be ruthless, and when you do beat an opponent you send them down the rankings, thus lowering their earning potential and damaging their confidence and pride too. Beat them badly and you may cause them severe physical damage and possible mental damage in later years.

So in both poker and boxing you have to want to hurt your opponents very badly and not be bothered about the negative consequences to them. In nearly all other sports this is simply not the case.

Your capitalism argument/comparison is correct when there is zero regulation and a totally free market where individuals and companies can buy or take over anything at a price if they have the money to do so, and I touched on this earlier ITT.

But those companies aside, they are small in number but huge in capitalisation, 99% of businesses happily co-exist, because there are enough consumers to go around and enough types of goods and services that exist in the economy, that there is always room and scope for a new business to open and to be successful and you don't have to directly hurt your competitor (opponent) to be successful.

Sometimes competition puts other similar businesses out of business or damages their profits, but often new competition forces the existing businesses in that sector to up their game, adapt, expand, or sometimes diversify, so that they remain profitable.

The exception is where a giant concern hoovers up a whole sector or disrupts a whole sector, which as I alluded to needs to be regulated against, otherwise, yes, business and capitalism could/will become like professional poker, totally ruthless and doing damage to others left, right and centre. (American English: left and right)

The bottom line is there's always winners and losers - every positive win in sports/business has a negative impact to someone else at some level. You mentioned National Lottery Funding - so someone receives funding while a competitor slightly worse doesn't receive the funding. There's always people feeling pain - it's part of competition where there's limited winners.

I could not disagree more, everything you managed to put into those 20 words is absolutely wrong.

I think that the question of whether there is value to becoming a serious poker player might be easier to answer if you approached it from the opposite side. In other words, if someone you cared about asked you whether it was a good idea for them, your answer would be "yes" if they had what attributes? (For instance, one attribute you might mention is an IQ between 120 and 140 because below that you probably can't get good enough and above that there are other things that will probably make you much richer [unless you are uneducated]). I can think of at least four or five others.

I think for NLHE having a fairly high IQ is not always necessary as it is not a maths learning, maths based game, it is a systems learning game, so attributes such as dedication, determination, concentration, working hard, paying attention, listening to others and learning from them, are more important than raw IQ. It is more about getting the knack of playing NLHE, so *acquiring* the skill, rather than converting an innate ability of being good at maths or logic into being a good NLHE player. The latter is of course possible and does happen in NLHE, but there are also a lot of very good NLHE players who don't have a particularly high IQ.

In games that are far more maths based, e.g. PLO and stud games, I think it is much harder to have an average IQ and excel at them. They are the opposite in many ways to learning to become good at NLHE, in the sense that it is a fairly natural and swift conversion from innate maths and aptitude skills into playing those variants well.

Regarding whether I would answer someone "yes" who I cared about and who asked me about if it was a good idea for them to get into poker, I would only ever answer yes if I was certain that the person has the discipline to always exercise good BRM, with no exceptions, and if I thought they did have the discipline, I would drum into them that it is the most important factor above all else.

If the person has such discipline, it will usually follow that they have the discipline to also exercise a proper work (poker play) to life balance and have the discipline to stay in good physical shape, eat sensibly and generally to not fall into some of the negative traps that often go hand in hand with playing poker seriously.

Obviously, once happy that they fit the criterion above, I would evaluate if they could learn to play well too, before giving them the absolute green light, but without the above I would
try my hardest to put them off from ever playing.