maybe about a handful of times every 100,000 hands. 95% of 100nl+ online players study GTO vigorously and many seem to have top coaches. playing vs them is akin to playing vs Snowie 6 handed.. or even tougher bc they know when to exploit . crazy times

Of course micros are beatable, but why the f would anyone bother?

Not quite sure if you're citing your statistics, but ...
150,000 hands
8bb / 100
12,000 bb won

no stakes mentioned, but I'm going to call it 50NL so you won 6 grand
no timeframe mentioned, but that would have to be monthly to match $72K per year gross.

no thanks.

its definitely not 95% that is studying vigorously, not even close, people are still lazy

Poker is pretty stale atm go to any live or online game and you will see pretty much the same people. I hadn't played live cash in a while walked in and wwyk the same sad sack of reg degens. Is what it is.

Yeah, seriously. People are lazy, and poker players are lazier. I play online for a living and I only "study" a couple hours a week.

Some guys study vigorously and never get past 10nl. Some guys barely study and fly through the stakes. There is definitely some natural talent involved in being a successful poker player. There are people I know irl who I think could dedicate the next 10 years of their life to poker, and they would never be able to make enough to sustain themselves.

ok 90% then

Yes its happening online, and I would be a fool to tell you where

90% of people study vigorously? hahaha

The problem is not that 95% of people are studying vigorously, it's that 95% of seats in the game are.

Alex gets it

Yeah an elderly man at the table the other day said something like "Only 2% of poker players are winners". Clearly he wasn't in the 2% and he was implying the rest of the table wasn't as good as we thought we were. Well I looked around the table and the 2%ers were occupying 7 of 9 seats. See the thing is the 2% who are winning players play 100 times as much as the other 98%. Makes sense.

And the problem with breaking into poker for young dudes is you have to face tons of solid grinders in their late 20s early 30s who've been playing since the boom. The best players with tons of experience, the good players, no more Jamie Golds. So unless you are ridiculously talented, the learning curve for even a good player is going to be extremely steep. I think a bit of an equilibrium will be reached and eventually poker becomes slightly more beatable. Like a decade or two. And of course a change in legislation could result in another poker boom of sorts.

You have grinders and pros at every stake. Chinese grinders making a living at nickel and dime poker. Every stake is solid.

This is a great question and some really good responses ITT.

I think there are very obvious reasons that multiple people have mentioned already. 5-10 different things are big reasons why on their own and when you combine them together, it ends up being like it is now.

A couple of things that I'm not sure I've seen talked about much so far.

-RAKEBACK
-Lack of personalities playing higher stakes and lack of high stakes action in general
-People posting graphs/BBV type posts

I played with Jamie Gold here in LA last week. really nice cool guy

yep. took me 6ish months of playing relatively casually to move from 5nl w/ zero poker experience to 200nl. i'll name some people who have had similar progress that is documented in pgcs: brokenstars, you, ch@otic, runit, purple fart(??), updog, and several more. then there are far more than that who are just low-key.

there is an abundance of training material out there that can make this possible. you just have to have some level of intelligence to discern what's valuable in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. the majority of people somehow struggle with this (like OP of this thread who thinks graduate school is difficult ). it's sad, really.

The majority of people in this thread would disagree with you, but fair enough. Presumably we should see you at high stakes pretty soon if you're really that good?

Clearly everyone has access to this training material, so where are all the regs who are stuck at micros and small stakes going wrong? I'm sure many of them work on their game, watch training material, post hands for advice, use tracking software. Yet they don't rise up the stakes in the way you'd expect. Very strange if you ask me.

Even against bad competition, I don't think you guys realize how fortunate you were to get out of the rake trap. The rake is crippling at anything <200.

There will come a time when you run breakeven for months, back to back 100k breakeven or losing stretches etc etc and only then will you realize what variance is. Lots of guys itt are attributing their success to skill when variance plays a much bigger role even on a soft site like bovada. I understand it's especially hard to realize that in an anonymous pool because you can't notice how many seemingly solid regs come and go and are never seen again.

literally none of this answers the ops question.
i averaged almost 30 dollars per hour per table on freaking paradise poker in 9 handed 1/2 nl games, 3 tabling in 2005-2006ish without even being good at poker. just play tight and get paid.within 2 years of learning to play poker i was playing 5/10 and 10/20 nl on bodog pacific etc with complete donks pre ugeia.

People who weren't around back then have no idea what a joke the online games were and how easy it was to print money just by being a nit.

that's the answer.
anything else suggested in here is nonsense.

you could be the next dwan galfond etc but if you're stuck playing russian bots etc in 10nl you're likely to give up before you move up to any significant stakes

jamie gold is the best.

once again, you struggle to fully read my posts. literally what the ****? like, are you trolling? you can't actually be this stupid. here, i'll spoonfeed you:

that's where people struggle. the majority of people have an abysmal approach to the game, despite having incredible information at their fingertips. they simply go through the motions instead of focusing on what is effective and efficient. on top of that, people have serious mental leaks, lack of confidence, inability to be honest with themselves, etc.

i bolded some stuff for you this time.

and my high stakes debut is put on hold, sadly. i'm studying ~8-10 hours a day for the CPA atm on top of grad school (which still doesn't take much time at all) and the gym. bit busy. i also just swapped to PLO as my main game last week. give me one more year

With a decent amount of effort/time and a little direction, it's still very possible for almost anyone to go from 10-100nl within a year given they dont run terrible.

Beyond that the gap in ability to further move up stakes begins to widen.

Lowstakes players are not beasts, the majority of them play badly, the better ones move up and a few good ones are stuck for a bit bc they aren't playing enough volume/are running bad, but eventually make it over the hurdle.

obv american / asian app networks incredibly soft, there are plenty of ppl making more than you could possibly imagine, they just aren't known, there are guys who couldnt beat 100z making 200-300k a year. But even on row, for tons of ppl poker is still a great opportunity/option for them

yep.

People aren't working with the same base of knowledge/skills going in is i guess the point.

Like with CPAish designations - it's maybe arguable that everyone (sans the tards) could do it if they were focused on developing core relevant skills from an early age.

If you look at the people trying to get into poker though you're usually looking at gamblers who have crap professional options available to them which suggests a lack of discipline and lacking a strong quant background. Both of those things take many years to develop and it gets a lot more difficult the older you get.

This is a garbage excuse. You really don't have to be beating the game much to reliably get into the mid stakes assuming you're starting at something like $50nl. 100k hands should be something you can knock off in a couple of weeks and even a marginal winner (on any site other than stars) should very rarely have 100k break even stretches just from rakeback/benefits alone.

Competent grinders drop out because they decide it just isn't worth the time and effort, not because it isn't doable. For most people there has to be a pretty big premium over other options available to justify the kind of stress that you deal with grinding midstakes+ online.

Rakeback doesn't exist for USA players unless they want to bot it out on WPN. Besides, it not realistically possible to put in that volume (even if you did have access to ROW) long term... unless you're a stone degen imo. This isn't 2006 anymore bro.

I also don't know wtf you're talking about saying marginal winners rarely have break even stretches? What ****ing planet are you on?! Lol

Even strong winners can get crushed over 100k hands Good luck surviving that with no rb.