Wait until you're 40.

That is exactly what I'm not going to do. Wait. I'm going to be active. Health care isn't white magic. A regimen of pills to treat symptoms is an inferior solution to treating the cause of the problems. Stopping problems before I even have them.

I'd still recommend some health insurance just in case. Your total bankroll for bodies is 1, and it is a significant asset. Probably makes sense to insure it, even if you have to take the slight negative side. And you can get some smaller benefits from the insurance even in the absence of a near total loss, probably including some benefits aimed toward prevention.

Good advice, thank you. I'm totally going to ignore it though because I'm arrogant.

Rich those benefits go way up in value once you have a family. Without it you're paying a ton out of pocket, then there's the retirement angle as well.

Youngsters have other intesrests. Like Twitch, professional gaming etc. Much more attractive than playing poker for living, which will be solved in few years.

I think this is real concern. People don't see poker as way to get rich anymore. It was like that 10 years ago, but not anymore. Now poker is something you do just when you're very bored and got nothing else to do.

This. I have played professionally for 7 years now and I have to admit it's getting to point where the game just gets boring. We need an upgrade to make it more interesting. It just gets boring.

The US. It's over 3x mininum wage fwiw. I don't expect any benefits from any jobs in this day and age. I'm talking about normal jobs someone can expect to get without college degrees or specialized training.

No, it's more complete than that. Poker just isn't something people want to do at ALL anymore. People aren't interested any more. It was neat for a while but it's boring now.

Most people just think it's illegal. I live in a state with casinos and regulated online poker. Plenty of people go and gamble at the casinos and it seems like no one even knows there is online gaming in my state. The small casinos have poker tourneys and cash games all the time but no one knows about any online poker. It doesn't help that there is absolutely no advertising meanwhile right over the state line NJ has endless ads in my state.


Hell I was deep into online poker until 2011 and I didn't realize we could still play until like 2 years ago, I didn't play for 4 years cuz of that. Most people don't see it as an option cuz they just don't know any better.


I didn't even know any better and I've been on 2+2 pretty hardcore since '05, lost my main account in the 2+2 hacking. To expect any recreational/non 2+2ers to know about it is asking a lot these days.

Except everyone who read it understood it probably instantly. I basically never abbreviate like that, really no clue why I did in that post, too much wine.

Poker isn't boring. NLHE is. There are still lots of rich guys wanting to **** around playing cards. You just won't find them at a NLHE table. They've all moved on to PLO, BigO, mixed games, and other poker variants.


Rich if you actually believe half the **** you say... I feel bad for you man.

You need a college degree and or specialized training in order to make a decent living in the USA. This isn't the 1950s anymore when education and training didn't mean ****.

Another problem is the fact that all the big cash game action moved to Asia off the grid to the rest of the world.

Having high stakes action televised brought a lot of attention and appeal to the game in the early days. In those days you got to see all the top level pros going at it. Now, you just hear about massive action in distant countries.

Imagine if you were only able to hear about the top the players going at it in any other sport. That will kill any sport and take much attention away from the game. The coverage of the top echelons of the game has devolved into tidbits of information here and there about high stakes action in Asian casinos and private games.

You hear Hellmuth talk about how Dwan was throwing around $1-5 million like it was water over in Asia. If those $10 million pots were on television poker would be popular again.

You make a good point. It would be like if porn had a govt crackdown and only had a few tiny operators that no one knew about and all the big sites like pornhub were blocked from major markets. You'd have dudes going back to the XXX stores jacking it while watching some back room sex show like it was the 70s again.



Sticky floors anyone?

i won $250 on slots last night

I like your two cents.

These points contribute to my point above that the top players from the online heydays are more likely to remain at the top. Even if you didn't have the various barriers to entry, it would still be tougher for a young upstart to ascend past all of the 25-year-old geezers to the poker throne.

Now THERE'S a field where there is no shortage of new 18-21-year-old stars coming up every month, let alone every year.

its just not true what OP said, plenty of youngsters are rising up, can close thread now

Not everybody wants to be a full time poker player even if they could. Not sure why it’s so hard to accept. You have to be a bit crazy to want to play this game for a living long term.

AmayaStars took away all rakeback. When you use to get 30% rakeback and then get ZERO, the cost to play has gone up 42%. Plus, they raised the rake, so it's 50% more to play on piece of **** PokerStars. No supernova program, you will never get anywhere playing low stakes on stars.

Alright. We all have to make our own decisions in different enterprises about what ruins we are willing to risk in such enterprises, although in this particular enterprise the ruin that is being risked is especially ruinous.

One thing to consider is there is only so much room at the top. Sort of like the top of a pyramid. This is not a big problem in sports because most of the top players come and go on a relatively regular basis because of things like age, injuries, team chemistry, etc.. But with poker, great players can have a 50 year lifespan or more (e.g. Doyle who went deep at the wsop at 79yrs. or maybe it was 80}. The fact that great players seem to play forever causes a big bunch up at the top making it harder for the people at the bottom to break through to the crowded top tier.

Everybody is tougher to beat esp players like serious recs, poor regs. Everybody studies something from the ocean of NLHE training out there.
On Stars everybody got huds.
Smaller edges everywhere.
Rakeback sucks.
Government interference sucks.

You wanna win...you gotta study the cr@p out of it, play with rock-solid mental discipline, get good at various maths-related skill sets. All of these are tradeable assets, that will get you a decent job in a shedload of industries.

Still a fun hobby tho...still fish in the micros, low buyin MTT and live.

Still possible to make a living online for the chosen few, but why the **** bother...many easier and more fun ways to make a crust in 2018.

Just the opinion of a long time rec, who has followed many a failed PGC.

u cn udstrenad tihs pobrblay ilntsntay 2 bt it dnt mn itz a gd wy 2 witre