If you average 25 hands per hour, that's 34k hands for the year. Back in the day, that many hands wasn't even a busy week for an online grinder.

It's not even about the fact that you are down a couple bucks for the year. If you were a very good player, you should be able to make at least $20/hour on average in a 1/2 game. That's were the disconnect is.

The odds for a very good player (one that expects to win $20+/hour) to be down money after more than 30k hands are probably below 0.001%.

lex hit the main point....and it's a good one. Winners shouldn't have a problem making hay at live casino $1/$2.

This...is really tilting for me.

Being up a half BI during a session is not a criteria for determining a future as a pro.

Try winning.

(Short term area to concentrate on would be to study your two phases of play: Pre-Up$100 v Post-Up$100. If you are like MOST.... you grind pretty tight until you are using OPM [other-people's-money]...then you loosen up. The loosening up phase is almost always the killer.)

Your sample size is relatively meaningless. Like most long-term winning online players, I've had stretches of 30,000 hands where I made no money at all. In my latest 20,000 hands, I'm 10 buyins below EV. (The gap between my all in EV and net$ won is bigger than most regs' winrates!)
Luck is a massive factor in poker. It's a game with very small edges, and thus very high variance. You can't draw many conclusions from results over a few thousand hands.
That said, if the games you are playing in are very soft, you should still be in profit after 30,000 hands unless you're literally the unluckiest player in the world, because EV winrates for good players are presumably over 10bb/100.

40,000-50,000ish hand sample

What I keep hearing is 'If I ignore the parts of my game where I lose, I am a winning player'

If you are asking about luck, if you are not treating it as one long session '80% of my sessions, I am up at some point', and if you are only recalling the times your ran below EV, and not the times you ran above it, you are nowhere near ready to be a pro. A pro has to crush the game so that when varaiance turns against him, he has a strong enough bankroll to survive.

YOu are likely on the right path (hard to say, because we really haven't probed your grasp of strategy). But let me warn you, believing in luck, and dismissing your losses as bad luck while believing that your wins are skill is a great way to develop some serious mental game leaks.

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Over 40k hands (bout 30/hour) and a standard deviation as high as 200 bb/100 you need to have a low-ish winrate to have a decent chance of losing by sheer bad luck. At that point, even if you happen to be unlucky your expected hourly wouldn't be worth it in the first place.

In other words, OP there is a very high probability you do not crush these games. You might have been unlucky to some extent but it might be better to focus on getting better than things you can't control.

the edges in soft live NLHE games are so huge that expert players can win almost every month and usually absorb a few extreme bad beats while still booking winning sessions. Instead of blaming bad luck for your lack of success try to expand your skill set.

Many people forget how much 'luck' builds up from winning the hands were they get it in ahead. If you win when you are a 83% to 17% favorite you have been lucky, play a few like this and these 17% lucky spots builds up and yet you don't notice. However, it is likely you will hit an unlucky bad spot, lose one when 83% to 17%, and then you notice it. People tend to completely ignore all these small amounts of luck they pick up but just complain when a bad one hits.

Although if the bet really matters to you you do notice it both ways, take this extreme example: If I was playing russian roulette and I spun a 6 chambered gun, pointed it at my head and pulled the trigger, even if I won I would think jeezus that was lucky. Yet if I was playing in a free online tournament and won a AA vs 54o allin pre (about the same odds) I wouldn't notice at all just how lucky I had just been.

We humans just aren't good at tracking luck and as a poker player it's a complete waste of time trying to.

Why do you think this is meaningful?

Ofc they are, however, you generally don't hear the best in the world whine about luck.

They understand if you are skilled enough at your game that luck will effectively become meaningless.

There isn't really a problem with whining about luck, but ultimately what follows is:

Have you exhausted all resources to to make it so that luck doesn't matter?

The answer is always no, so while luck matters, if you're a 10+bb/100 crusher or 6+ at the highest stakes, it really doesn't because you have such a general edge.

You are confusing variance and luck. We all endure positive and negative variance. There is no such thing as 'luck' as a predictive quality.

Obviously some people are luckier than others. Lifetimes are not infinity, in fact they can seem almost infinitesimally short, so clearly some people will die having been very lucky in life.

Unfortunately, the universe doesn't really care what you think Don't mean that to sound harsh.

Both those statements are far away from the truth.

You hear high stakes players complain about bad beats and downswings the same way you hear low stakes grinders complain. Some people are whiny, others aren’t, doesn’t matter what stakes you play.

Also, “luck” will never become meaningless, no matter how good you are. How often did Phil Ivey win the WSOP main event? Jamie Gold won it for $12mil, making him the winningest player of all time back then. Was he the best poker player ever at that time? If you are an online grinder, it makes a huge difference if you have that one god-like rungood in a $11 tournament or an anniversary $215 Sunday Million that nets you $500k+. If you are a 2/5 regular cash game player, maybe you run hotter than the sun at your one shot at 10/20 and can move up to 5/10. Or that shot goes horribly wrong and you have to move down to 1/2.

Not only having the variance on your side, but having it on your side when it matters most, might be the most important thing in your poker career.

No-one is more naturally lucky than anyone else.

Many people HAVE BEEN more lucky/unlucky than others in the past.

Almost no-one is good enough to be a pro. You may be good enough to win, but that's very different to being a pro.

Why would you want to be a pro? It's a challenging lifestyle with little-to-no financial reward, no job security, no health insurance, no pension, terrible hours. You risk being marginalized from society/your family etc.

This is where we always get wrapped around the axle talking about luck. The OP is asking if some people are naturally lucky, meaning are they more likely to have positive outcomes than is statistically justified. You are saying, retrospectively, that some people are lucky, in that they had more than their share of positive outcomes. These two positions are discussing two completely different things

Random chance does not distribute things equally. Of course some people will get more than their share of positive variance. That does not mean, however, that the same person is more likely to win the next 50\50. Luck can only be used to describe what happened in the past, it cannot be used to predict what will happen in the future.

The OP's question is 'are some people naturally lucky?'. The answer is, of course not, and this is a silly question. The question you are answering is 'Have some people been lucky?' and the answer is 'yes, yes they have'. Two completely different questions.

Not the best, you can look at the biggest crushers and on average they are far less whiny and far more accepting of "bad run." The whole "mindset" thing in poker is an extension of this, so many high stakes players wouldn't follow it if it was completely useless.

Gold actually proves my point, didn't he end up losing all the money and is now back playing 2/5 and 5/10? So his "luck" was excellent, but skill overcame this eventually. Having a massive skill edge is what matters most, unless you have a longterm example of someone that was beating the game at 10+bb/100 and his luck rendered this entirely useless.

Freedom. Freedom to walk away from the table at any time. You can walk along the beach during the day if you want and play at night. No financial reward? It would depend on how good you are, I suppose. Health insurance (Well I live in Canada with socialized medicine and can buy private insurance which isn't too expensive) Being marganalized, for me, would be the worst thing. People would ask why I would leave the financial services industry to play poker.

OP perhaps for you it wouldn't be the greatest idea to go pro.

If your financial life depends on it, you often don't have this freedom. Look into threads made by pros in the blog or poker goals forums, it's not relaxing all the time and playing poker when you feel like it unless you're playing fairly high stakes, and even those guys are pretty much forced to play when there's action and not just when they feel like it.

You are right..and other people have pointed it out. I have a serious leak in that I tend to play more loose as time goes on. I calculated that if left the poker table after 4 hours of play (whether up or down) I would be a winner in the past 9 out of 10 sessions - for a net profit of approx $1400. That means 1400 in 40 hours $35 an hour. Enough to be a pro. Of course 40 hours is a small sample size but I would bet dollars to donuts if I extrapolated this to my entire year's worth of play, it would be something in the ballpark of $35 per hour on average, in the first 4 hours of play.

Nobody wins 9 out of 10 sessions. You're delusional.

Fortunately, I have enough in savings from my conventional job, that I have some flexibility here. But I could see myself getting bored after a while.

I said 9 out of 10 in my first 4 hours of play Not 9 out of 10 overall.

And nope, not delusional.