I'm a recreational player, not a pro. I enjoy my work. Even before taking into account Certainty Equivalence, an engineering job is worth considerably more than what I'd make playing poker without moving on up to high stakes. Poker is a fun hobby, sometimes you make a little money. At no point did I grind 8 hours/day, because that wouldn't be any fun for me.

a) is impossible these days b) is out of your control and c) is probably a requirement to even play near the top of the small stakes -- you're not playing mid/high without some chunk of c.

You're a beginner. Do you have any idea how amazingly good poker players there are? I know a good number of DeucesCracked coaches through various friends. These guys are amazing players. I've been at times a serious winning midstakes player, and I'm bad compared to every one of them. You've never heard of them, and you likely never will. Let's say 5% of people win. Let's say that 1/20 of those people make a decent living playing cards -- not better than they could do with a good software job, but good enough to make a "career" out of it. Let's say 1/1000 of that group becomes semi-famous. Among those people there is stiff competition for the few sponsorship deals, and those aren't anywhere the money they used to be. You're just as well off planning to win the lottery. Become super successful, then worry about this stuff. You've been to the football pitch a couple times, now you wonder what ManU will sign you for.

If getting skilled and making a little money isn't enough incentive, how will a FTP sponsorship deal get you motivated. You're just miles away from real.

Ray Zee posts around here from time. He's a super-respected former pro who made enough money to retire from poker. Do you have any idea how hard that is to do? I mean I wonder if there are more people like him or more people who've been to space. Anyone want to set a line?

Go back to basics find the love for the game and enjoy playing, even some abc poker.
ignore the I want to become rich dream .
I recommend poker mind set and the mental game of poker also, both very good books for getting your head right to deal with the ups and downs of poker/life. Your not on your own everyone has to deal with variance, it's how you cope with it that matters .
Atb

smokybacon, you've gotten tons of good advice in this thread. It is amazing how little grief you've gotten, despite the fact that you're being really unrealistic. Honestly, you need to stop posting in threads like this. Get yourself into strategy threads. Find things that people (especially good players) post that you disagree with, and explain why you do. Reading threads is almost worthless, in my experience. You have to go, argue, and get shown how you're wrong. Trust me, if you put the effort in as a strat poster, it will pay off many times over. Skip the NC/LC threads, the weight loss prop bets, and the "Brad Booth is Busto" parts of the forum.

Strategy posting is what you need, now.

It won't give you discipline. So far, admittedly I have only skimmed, nothing you've said will give you discipline. You really want to know what will give you discipline?

Make your ONLY goal in poker to make the correct decisions. If you do that, then the rest takes care of itself, including making good money at the game.

My advice to you ... Play Mtt playing the way you do eventually you will cash nice, cash games cause much more stress cause u can downswing ect resulting in tilting your mind when your playing and losing more, then start winning back bits. But my advice to you is Mtt and even 5nl if you can win at that level it covers your buy ins. Get ranking some points up for sats for mtts. Take regular meal breaks, *** breaks away from screen. Don't be a poker addict and not sleep nobody can play as good when they are tried.

The Full Tilt sponsorship gets you 100% rakeback and a $10,000 bonus. You need to grind enough hands and produce enough rake over a 4 month period to be at the top of the leaderboard in a certain game.

Your post puts it into perspective how tough the game is and how extremely unlikely it is I or anyone else will make good money from the game in the current online climate. I think I do need to quit the game. At least quit online poker. Looking at it realistically, the games are too tough and there are better, easier, less stressful ways of making money in the world. I should put my pride aside and quit. I wish I had put my pride aside a number of months ago and quit, because I was having these exact same thoughts back then too.

I think if I give it a few months, make money on some other endeavour, my confidence will return and I will forget I ever played poker. For what it's worth, I've never done anything like bet on roulette, blackjack, other casino games, only made like 2 or 3 small sports bets in my entire life. I've never even been tempted to put money on these things, because I know it will always be -EV. The problem with poker is it's a skill game and I tell myself that with skill, the better player will win over time. That's why it's such a dangerous game in my opinion.

How is live poker by the way? If I played a £1/£2 game at a casino, could I stand to do very well there given how bad people say live players are? I have heard the lowest live games play as bad as 2NL online, possibly worse than 2NL.

OP what happened to our HU4ROLLZ? We know this is a +EV match for you... you confirmed you knew the rules.

I said I only played Omaha Hi, not Hi Lo. I've barely ever played a hand of Omaha Hi Lo.

Saying that, Hi Lo does look like an extremely low variance game and everyone says it's a game that people don't know how to play that well. If you put in immense volume (possibly difficult because many sites barely have Omaha Hi Lo games running), you can probably make a lot of low variance profit just from rakeback? Is that what you're doing?

No rakeback for me. Im a longtime winner crushing MTT's and holding my own in cash games. You don't wanna play me OP. Actually you don't want to play anyone ITT. You need to drop that ego and practice. A lot.

Good luck.

No all I said was in a 6max game, you would find it difficult to win money off me. Heads up, sure, I'm not going to play anyone here.

You must get some rakeback? Just from the rewards system on any site it gives you some rakeback.

All I asked was surely Omaha Hi Lo is extremely low variance and if you put in a ton of volume, you can make good low risk amounts from rakeback alone?

I don't play 6max and consider myself "meh" at best at poker, and I'm almost certain this isn't true for me.

I'm sorry to say it OP but

You're a lemon. Like a bad car. There is something... there is something inherently defective in you, and you, and you, and me, and all of us. We're all lemons. We look like everyone else, but what makes us different is our defect. See, most gamblers, when they go to gamble, they go to win. When we go to gamble, we go to lose. Subconsciously. Me, I never feel better than when they're raking the chips away; not bringing them in. And everyone here knows what I'm talking about. Hell, even when we win it's just a matter of time before we give it all back. But when we lose, that's another story. When we lose, and I'm talking about the kind of loss that makes your ******* pucker to the size of a decimal point - you know what I mean - You've just recreated the worst possible nightmare this side of malignant cancer, for the twentieth goddamn time; and you're standing there and you suddenly realize, Hey, I'm still... here. I'm still breathing. I'm still alive. Us lemons, we **** **** up all the time on purpose. Because we constantly need to remind ourselves we're alive. Gambling's not your problem. It's this ****** up need to feel something. To convince yourself you exist. That's the problem.

Impressive amount of vitriol in that post.

Nice one.

Thanks, Al Pacino plays the part pretty convincingly in my opinion.

Think of poker as a hobby. You can learn about the game and put yourself in a position to play as well as you possibly can, but this still doesn't mean you will be a winning player. I think the online games have gradually tightened up over the last 5 years and it's tough to stay ahead of the rake playing live unless you play 5/10 or higher.

Look at Phil Ivey, who most people consider to be among the best if not the best poker player on the planet. Take a look at his online graph for 2013 (FTP and Stars). He lost around $3,000,000 over 80,000 hands.

Actually I think there is truth in what he posts.

This part of your post is just wrong.

A live 1/2 winrate of somewhere around 20-30bb/100 (7-10bb/hr) is not uncommon at all.

It comes down to reasonable goals. Two guys make $15/hr or even a little more at 1/2live. One says his fun hobby makes a little money. One says it proves that the rake is too high and you can't make real money. The second guy's expectations make him miserable. If we were unkind, we'd say that he has entitlement issues. I see our OP in this boat. He wants a guarantee of great results.

Poker is not a get rich scheme.

OP

You are not a good poker player.

You think you are because of all the good moves you make and the stats you fake.

You don't see the holes in your game.

Almost everyone thinks they are great at poker. A poker player could lose hundreds of thousands over a lifetime and STILL go to his deathbed thinking he was one of the best players out there.

He wasn't.

The cards have a way of making you feel that way.

That's their secret.

What you need to realize is that you aren't static; you aren't a fixed object whose properties will never change. You can grow and improve.

You should feel grateful for that.

If you truly believe that you seek losses in order to feel alive, you need to reassess your expectation on winning. You obviously don't win nearly as often as you would have to for winning to make you feel numb.

It's nice that you have a deep inner confidence and that you believe you possess greatness.

It's naïve to believe that you are the only one.

...

More than anything else: It is your greatest defect that you do not appreciate and understand how smart the people in this world are. I guarantee to you that they are much much smarter than you give them credit for. This is why you lose.

Please don't debate that; think it over, instead.

Well, way to at least let him down easy.

It was actually a really good post.

It was an ok post.

Decent

OP, if you are still reading this thread,
know that I've been in a somewhat similar situation, and actually still am, asking myself - is it really worth it ?

Best advice I can give you is to not listen to anyone telling you what to do (especially not the troll losers which can be unfortunately quite common here. Actually I'm impressed how do you stay calm and try to answer and please everyone).

Get a job, any job, that will cover your life expenses, and which will help you to not think about poker exclusively as a job.
Once you can play more relaxed and not think so much about winning/losing (but still caring to win of course), you will know for sure do you actually like the game; and then one day if/when you get so good at it for a longer period of time, that you are perfectly certain that you can live happier life playing poker than having some other job, only then take it as seriously as you are taking it now.

Because, let's all be honest here, game nowadays is much different game than the one 90% of today's "pros" and "legends" played in their time and took some very serious money in the process - they already knew all the moves everyone else was just learning.

Other question you could ask yourself is - would you still play any poker, if you had so much money that you actually don't have to play it in order to live a rich lifestyle ? If the answer is yes, then don't quit it.

It is interesting, because I see a thread full of some really good advice with very little negativity and the OP fending off any advice that doesn't tell him exactly what he wanted to hear. Maybe I just skipped past all the troll losers.

He didn't please anyone b/c at no point did he agree to move down closer to stakes he actually beats and then work on his game step by step from there.

I think you're underestimating the amount of runhot and marketing involved in creating a poker superstar. For the most part, it wasn't the merit of geniuses being recognized. Undoubtedly some of the people who are famous are very very good players. However, poor BRM and a willingness to go busto plays a role in getting famous.

Having so much money that they don't have to play anymore isn't a common problem for poker pros. It is much less common than needing to get out of makeup with their backer while still eating. If you start out playing poker thinking about riches, you're better off buying lotto tickets.