well mental stamina and the drive to study/grind the game and being quicker at solving problems would be the natural talent people are referring to

Yes I would and they do actually do this - this is my entire poiont. They build social media followers and do things raising their profile to leverage this to market their own business ventures. They take summer classes to finish their degree or even get an advanced one.

Before the fame and multi million dollar average salaries, it was actually typical for professional athletes to work in the offseason. You'd have hall of fame baseball players working at a used car dealership over the winter trying to sell cars. Ty Cobb, one of the greatest baseball players of all time, made his fortune not from baseball (which paid very little) but through his offseason business activities. For example, he was an early investor in companies like Coca Cola.

I actually know many semi pro hockey players. The kind who drafted in the NHL and spend their entire lives just an injury away. Many had spent time in the NHL as well. Not one of them regrets hedging their career. They see the ones who solely focused on hockey and now are broke and have utterly no skills and work as youth hockey coaches - but not out of choice, but because that's all that is there for them.

Furthermore, people love hiring ex athletes. Even the ones who never made it big time, they just love hiring that guy who was a wide receiver in college. They want to be surrounded by those people and view the sports as a positive indication of leadership (many military academies prefer choosing athletes over academics). Meanwhile, poker has a huge stigma for many others. While some will view it as a positive, most will think you're a syphilis ridden degenerate who can't be trusted with the company accounts because obviously you'll embezzle it. Even if you're a good guy now, at some point you'll go on a bender and need to recoup your gambling losses from betting the house on Sweden to win the world cup.

This is just a lie. You don't dedicate yourself to poker 24/7/365. Everyone has time, it's just a matter of prioritities.

Just be honest with yourself and say you'd rather spend that time watching Eurovision

WTF, this is exactly why you should be actively keeping those doors open.

Honestly man, I think you should try networking with more ex pros. You'd be surprised how many name brand players from just a decade ago, guys who crushed it are now no longer able to even break even and live off rakeback. That is a real possibility.

You have a doorway to success open to you right now that most of those ex pros never had, just keep it open is all I'm saying - especially if you already don't see yourself still playing poker 10 years from now.

also, the athletes that don't plan an exit strategy often end up broke

i'm actually really glad you chose that as an example because it illustrates my point perfectly

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/14/mone...ial-fouls.html

one of the current top hunl players is 18, not sure if hes cool with being outed tho

I play as a rec but one thing I noticed is that everyone plays similar ranges and their skill level is really close through 5nl to 50nl (the stakes I have played). Combined with the rake I don't see how it's possible to even make anything significant, let alone move up the stakes, unless you play high enough where the rake does not matter and you also need to run really good. I have a lot of respect for those that choose to do this for a living seriously.

Not sure how I would be if no matter how much effort one puts in.... one extended terrible streak of bad luck is all it takes and it could ruin you. What a merciless game poker is, well... when you play it for a living anyway not fun.

I live in Western Europe so when I mean significant I mean jobs that pay well in Western Europe, not eastern europe, Russia or South American countries where $750-$1000 is considered a living due to the currency differences.

who says we don’t see any gifted 18-21 year olds rising up the way we used to?

user spinmerightround

who?

Rake

I played in a random $250 at the Rio last summer with a scrawny kid who seemed to have some chops. I only played with him for a couple hours, but I marked him down in my head as someone with potential. Saw his face on some PokerNews coverage a couple weeks later during a deep-ish run in a WSOP event. Turns out he had a nice 5-figure score in another Rio daily a few days after I'd played with him. Noticed this summer that he binked one of the biggest events at the Venetian. Maybe he's just a luckbox, but probably not. Seems to be a talented player on an upward trajectory.

My point is, I think they're still out there. I don't know how they find the game because poker in 2020 is pretty far off the pop culture map, but somehow a few of them are still trickling up the river like some lost salmon.

There used to be rakeback that could support aspiring pros and "cushion" them while on a downswing. It's way harder to move up from the micros and most will give up without rakeback. It also removes incentives to just play tons of hands, something that younger people are better at (think about how long you used to be able to play for). Lots of volume is also necessary to improve quickly. So, without the incentive and cushion of rakeback fewer young people will enter the game.

Higher rake/no RB is the biggest reason. Other is lack of marketing.

plenty of 10k+ regs that are in the 18-22 age range

monkaHmm

agreed, it got really hard to grind up a decent roll from pocketmoney. the poker dream for young guns is pretty dead.

lmao it’s perfectly alive

well, maybe not dead but paralyzed from the hip down. i started playing maybe 2007 when i was that age and i dont know about MTTs but cashgames and SNGs are very different from what it used to be regarding rakeback and competition, AI and pokerrooms and regulations (look at european markets right now).
and whats maybe even more important: yes there is a lot of good study content out there but you have to invest quite a lot (for a young person) to get the modern poker theory stuff and get to a decent level, most are like a 100$+ monthly subscription nowadays. you also have to invest way more to build a roll because rewards arent that great or non-existence anymore.

i think a lot of the smart, young players dont really want to get into poker anymore because circumstances are very different now and you need to siginificantly invest to maybe maybe maybe run good and build a roll.

with 'the poker dream' i mean depositing 50$ once or twice and run it up by being just a little smarter or more dedicated than the average player. easy game.

The "see" part is a thing. Compared to, say, 2006, there is way less value in becoming well known. Some internet crusher is usually better off being mostly anonymous because notoriety with no way to monetize it is not really worth it.

That, and again, unlike 2006, being young has lost almost all of its comparative edge. In 2006 these kids were entering games where they had played more hands and analyzed them better than the existing player pool of mostly live pros. After the first wave of that, we started seeing the kids that picked up the game even younger and not unlike chess that was also a comparative edge. Given that the boom was in 2003-4, we are years into kids that were at a young age exposed to the game as a game of strategy.

So it levels off a bit.

They are all busy dropshipping these days.

Why struggle and grind to make millions off poker when you can make a lot of money streaming video games like Fortnite AND you don't have to go through rough downswings?

Poker was the hot thing 15 years ago, now it is about becoming a social media celeb via tiktok, youtube, twitch or instagram. For the gamblers, poker is competing with DFS, sports betting and day trading.

I don't think poker is worth it anymore. The amount of time it takes to be good at poker in 2020 is enormous and the reward is not that great. Look at the time and effort it takes to make 100k+ a year playing poker. Solvers make it easier to win right now, but I doubt that is the case 2-3 years from now when it will be a requirement to beat 100nl plus. Games are only going to get tougher.

Landon Tice is the young guy that fits the profile of the OP. Young crusher who looks to be the next big thing. He spent a year learning PIO and he is part of a staking group. You can look at his old blog and he had a 20k month in April at 1/2 and 2/5 playing 203 hours. Add in study time and reduce the profits for the stake and you are talking about a 60+ hour a week job to make 10k in a month that you ran like a god (he ran almost 2x above EV for 40k hands). He will probably continue to advance and continue to crush but for every one Landon there are ten people who burn out and realize there are easier ways to make money.

For sure still possible. The high rake with low rake back at micros/low stakes will make it harder but for sure kids will still come through.

I remember Ilimitless on Joe Ingrams podcast using the analogy of how difficult it is to become a world class lawyer, how much you have to study, do things perfectly by the book and work flat out. Poker is different you have so many recreational and semi-pro people playing. You wouldn’t come up against a recreational lawyer.

i think he gets a little too much hype, maybe just because they want to produce a young crusher like him for the community, but i dont think a lot of people can relate to him, when he got 1on1 coaching from a high stakes pro and staked right away. youre talking about PIO which is like 1k (?) to grind micro stakes. thats excactly why people think the poker dream for young guns is not that shiny anymore

Most people especially on 2+2 and the likes would stop playing if they have access to internal data of the few poker companies that try to do solid security.
Add to this that most of the sites don't care about poker and you have a situation right now that 70%+ of the market are unregulated fake play money Poker Apps (yes thats the size if you combine the Chinese facing apps along with PPPoker/PokerBros and the likes).
They are just heaven for cheating.

There is at least one case of super famous Poker Pro from Eastern Europe being known to be behind one of the biggest botting ring .
Same story goes for some of the biggest names behind stables in games that are solvable/solvable to some degree (Spins/ shallow stacks in Mtts).

Add to this complexity required for building security that is way more complex than any of you can imagine. (just the database constrains to work on massive amounts of data in almost real time).

People think about second boom during COVID but this is a graveyeard instead. Live Poker was the one thing that kept poker live. Now it is mostly gone.

anyone who thought we were having a second boom at best is completely ignorant to what went on during the first boom.

and basically no site actually cares about poker. they care about making money.

I'm curious how many people under the age of 25 even have the attention span to grind poker. With the way multi media works with endless streaming, tons of awesome video games and having smart phones I can see poker being as boring to kids as chess was to me as a kid.


Back when poker first started getting big I used to inhale books, now I can't read a book to save my life. I inhale podcasts and videos by people with Phds, MDs and so on instead of reading their books cuz it's just lightyears faster in being able to consume their content. Poker feels as slow as my 90 year old grandmother at this point lol and I'm 37.

If I was under 25 years old, playing poker would be like watching paint dry.