Sounds like you have some frustrations that go beyond poker here. I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I'd look into getting a therapist.

Ran QQ into AA and 99 into AA pre to lose two buy-ins (N.B. I think 99 hand was reasonable given button vs BB and super aggressive stats for villain.) Got KK in pre once, but villain also had KK. One spew tilt for another buy-in. One lost flip. One bad calldown with two pair vs a flop raise and triple barrel. That equals down five buy-ins lol. I've actually played a lot worse and been down less. Worst poker day ever for me. But I keep going back and playing, I can't leave it alone.

I dunno, found them useless in the past.

Then accept your fate. The sooner you come to grips with WHY you play, the sooner you can get off the fence and
(1) quit
(2) get better
(3) find value in the fun of the game.

Unless you have wealth, playing and losing can be awful stressful. Why voluntarily put yourself through this?

Well I know why I'm playing. Because I want to make money in a way that doesn't have me beholden to some company, and avoids me going through the arduous and brutal process of securing any kind of decent graduate job, a process not suited to someone with my interpersonal skills. Unfortunately, the process of trying to play winning poker seems likely to be just as arduous and brutal, albeit in different ways. I try to get better, but perhaps I'm just going about it in the wrong way. Not active enough, not studious enough. It isn't enough to just read and watch a bunch of crap and play with Flopzilla a bit, clearly. I'm up money since I started wanting to take this seriously, rather than straight up losing, but after today it's pretty negligible.

Going back to the beginning, you've been playing for 3 years. You enjoy the game ...when you are winning. DOH, who doesn't? And more importantly, who wouldn't want to play cards for a living...sounds like real fun. "The lazy man's way to get through life".

3 years.... you should clearly know by now IF you can be a winning at a rate that will allow you to live off the game. 3 years and you are still churning the micros would be a HUGE red flag. That would CLEARLY put the thought of pro poker out of my head...but I had bigger goals than you when I was 22.

Both of my sons are older than you... and here's the fun fact for you..... both are heading back to school this year. Both have undergraduate degrees in fields that they thought they liked. But with age, maturity, responsibilities, etc etc etc, they both KNEW they wanted something different. But more importantly, they BOTH now have a direction that interests them. Going from high school directly to college....kinda seems like an extension of HS these days.

The point I am trying to make (from experience) is you are too young to quit on a "regular" career...you may simply not have found your calling yet. But CLEARLY to me and others in this thread, a career as a poker player is very unlikely for ANYONE .....including you. You have shown that you probably have a good work ethic (having earned a masters). Use it. Take several jobs over the next few years, something related to your masters, something not. Find out what you truly want to do; by this I mean something productive with a future increase in earnings potential (something that poker is definitely NOT).

I will go out on a limb and suggest that if you are just spinning your wheels (sleeping, eating, playing poker, watch TV, generally logged out of the real world) you are in the perfect place to get ahead. Stop the poker, stop the TV and all the other "entertainments".... and go get TWO jobs. Work a retail counter at Kinkos during the day and bus tables at night. BANK as much as you can so that by the time you are 27/28, you can decide to go back to school for a different degree in something that interests you...and begin your REAL career then. (my wife went back to medical school at age 29)

I've started two main businesses over my "career"; each required 100-120 hours per week for the first several years. Work hard while you are young and your body can recover from the grind.

I could go on and on and on............... but essentially: wake up, you are now an adult. Rationally, you can't POSSIBLY think you can make a career of poker, do you?


You are delusional if you think they are a lot of the "solid winning online players"....and even more telling.... how many of them last more than a year or two? Why do you think this career path would be any different for you?

5 buy-ins is your worst poker day?

If only I could have your poker life.

I've had 2 days in the past month where I was down 30 buy-ins playing 18-mans.

Tilting at NL2 is a horrible sign because that’s a point where serious money isn’t even at stake yet. Unfortunately there’s a good chance things get even worse when the money you lose actually hurts.

That happens for example when you’re taking shots. And without taking shots and being willing to be aggressive with BRM, your chances of “making it” significantly decrease. You won’t find many high stakes players who grinded their way up without taking significant risks. There are also very little successful players who had to withdraw money from their microstakes bankroll to pay bills. Conservative BRM and withdrawing money at the smallest stakes are recipes for getting stuck.

You should try to invest some time into the mental aspects of the game. That might help. If it doesn’t, your chances of making serious money from cash games get even slimmer.

It's all about fit. Depending on if the person is a good fit for you, they could be either totally useless or extremely helpful (or anywhere in between).

Absent that though, I'd take some time to change...something before continuing to spew off multiple buy ins every session. Maybe it's meditation, maybe it's therapy, maybe it's something else entirely, but you shouldn't keep trying the same thing and expecting something to change.

Dear Math43,

I posted this up in another thread where the question was how do people make it big in poker.

My ability to self assess is fantastic. I can tell exactly when my game is slipping. If it goes beyond a certain point - thats it I am done. The deck is already stacked against you, if you have tilt issues you have almost no chance at being a profitable player imo.

Honestly, my man, most people would be significantly better off if they never found poker. I strongly believe you are a member of that group. When I started gamboolin the ceiling on earn was effectively unlimited. The gambling landscape has significantly changed and that ceiling is a whole lot lower and harder to ascend to.

I think you will be far better served treating it like a hobby, or better yet find something that you are passionate about and pursue that and say screw poker as I believe it is an incredible time sink for 95+% of the population.

Math42...you haven't been on 2+2 long enough to know....squid face really is The Man. Been pokering and gambling as a profession for well over a decade and a half...maybe two? Any strat advice he shares here on 2+2 is almost always spot on...at the very least it makes one pause a minute to try and figure out why squid would say X strat is better than Y strat.

I was disappointed with this sentence until further in his post, he says:

95% at a minimum ......let that sink in.

Damn, lots of people responding/being helpful in this thread. Thanks for the advice everyone.

Ended up being 8 tbh. I definitely get too fixated on short term results though. Realistically, I played pretty normally/reasonably for a lot of today. But if I'd controlled my emotions, it would have been half as bad a downswing.

To the couple of you basically saying give up and go work, yeah, pretty much gonna have to do that I think. Start looking around properly and being open to things and just actually making money. Don't think I'll quit poker for good at any point; I just find it too interesting. But it's hard enough to be successful in the game when your mind is in a great place, and it's hard to put your mind in a great place when you don't have a life lol. I'd probably be a lot more likely, even with the lesser free time, to get genuinely good at poker if I was actually working and socializing and feeling good about myself.

WehrmatsWormhat; incidentally I tried one of those focus meditations before my morning session today...apparently it didn't focus me. But yeah, I see your point. I know that when things go wrong, I tilt. Can't just will that away by telling myself not to tilt before a session or whatever. Gotta take active steps.

To madlex, I think to an extent not caring about the money can actually be a downside. I'm usually playing 5nl, and when you only have $5 on the table at any given time it never feels like that much to lose. This is all subjective and to do with the individual and where they are in their life of course. But because I'm not losing much in any given hand, I can spew off a bunch of buy-ins; the net result might be bad, but it's an incremental thing so it kind of creeps up on you. Contrast that with 10nl; I have gone up a couple of times and played a bit of that, and I can only think of one significant tilt hand. Otherwise I've played pretty normally because I really don't want to lose $10 in one hand to some dumb mistake; it's only twice as much, but half as many buy-ins is a pretty significant difference. Now, that could make me play a bit scared, I guess, but I don't think it does; I still stack off in favourable spots with far less than the nuts. Obviously there are some mindset issues going on here; I should treat every game the same. But I don't think, in theory, moving up should hurt me, aside from the fact that players will improve.

For most people it's easier and less stressful and more profitable to get a real job than play poker for a living.

Good on you for trying the meditation before playing! Even though it didn't work this time, it's smart to keep trying stuff. It also just takes time for this stuff to really have a big impact. Hang in there!

Asking this kind of question on 2p2 is like asking an alcoholic how to quit booze. This forum is extremely negative and bitter.

I mean, it's just a forum of people who aren't here to placate people by telling them what they want to hear. The truth is that it's extremely difficult to make serious money playing poker online.

I am not bitter at all my man. In fact gamboolin has provided me with a nice little life. I raised a kid, sent her to college and she graduated debt free. But the fact is very very few who set out to make it as a pro gambler actually succeed. I honestly can not tell you how many wannabees I have seen fail. The amount of effort and dedication it takes is a lot more than most are willing to put forth. And if they do have that dedication and commitment to excellence, the way the current landscape is they will be far better served pursuing something else. These are very simple facts.

I have always been a straight shooter. I have actually lived the life for the better part of 27 years now. These are things I have seen and done. This is not pie in the sky or conjecture. And its not just my take. Being in the industry for so long I know a large number of pros.

That is true. It's the manner and tone in which it's done. No-one ever leaves it at "It's extremely tough. Set realistic goals, work hard, employ BRM and see what happens."

It's always a long, depressing essay.

I respect your opinion and experience. And yes, in the USA poker is pretty dead, but elsewhere, it's business as usual.

You have no idea what you’re talking about if you think the “elsewhere” poker environment hasn’t dramatically changed over the years.

People paid me a decent amount of money to teach them stuff that probably wouldn’t even beat NL5 these days. And that was already years after you could make $500-1000/month just from clearing deposit bonuses. To break-even while doing that, you could reg a bunch of STTs and sit out most of the time or play cash game and fold everything except for PPs.

Online poker changed from a game where the only skill you needed was to hit the “fold” button >90% of the time to a game where the vast majority of players with the potential to be good could make (significantly) more money in a different field.

Even when poker already started to get significantly more difficult around 10 years ago, I remember one of my fellow NL100 FR massgrinding regs on Stars had a VPIP of <7%. He was a winning player at the table on top of the $100k+ a year he made in rakeback. VPIP below 7%. That’s all you need to know about the games back then and also answers the question why it was so easy to 24-table.

Sorry to ALSO rain on your parade 23, but what you listed is still not a guarantee of success in the poker world today.

The long, depressing essay should serve as a wake up call to the naive (new to poker crowd) who have heard stories of the glory days. The glory days/ easy money days are over and really don't have a chance of returning until the segregated markets cease to exist...and the USA gets added back into the mix.

The short story you want broadcast is "if you are smart enough to succeed in poker, you are smart enough to see the future and realize that poker is a terrible career path" (a nice fun hobby though if you have some disposable income)

Point taken from both of you and I don't disagree broadly.

But what everyone says about forging a career path in other areas is dependent on several variables:

1) Having the requisite college degree (in most cases)
2) Having relevant experience.

Neither of which is a given.

If someone has a choice between grinding out live games vs working in McDonalds then it's a no-brainer.

The lifestyle of a 9-5 isn't necessarily for everyone. The same is true for poker however.

if your only 2 choices are mcdonalds or poker you have exactly zero shot at making it in poker.

jus sayin

This thread is about online poker though. Live poker is a totally different thing where the ability to get into the right games is by far the biggest “skill” these days.

For 99% of people, they're better off taking the McDonalds job. It's a guaranteed paycheck, and they can budget accordingly.

squid said it, if your only choices are poker or McDs, you aren’t going to make it in poker. And BTW it’s way easier to grind out a minimum wage at live poker than online. A weak player with good tilt control and living rent free in mom’s basement can still live the glamorous life of a live 1/2 poker pro. That same player won’t make 25c an hour online.