Thanks for reading.

I've been a poker 'rec' for a long time. Played for 7 years now, and have played all sorts. Lots of HUSNGS, lots of live cash, lots of online 6 max NL, lots of 6 handed PLO, lots of MTTs.

I'm a decent player, and on the Sky Poker site where I go through phases of grinding, the regs don't sit me and tbh I think their regs are pretty poor. I genuinely do believe if I game selected I'd be plus EV in quite a few games, but I have never really taken much of a serious approach to poker. Always deposited small amounts and looked to spin it up. Which is obviously a very -EV strategy haha.

But now, as a graduate, and someone who has worked for a few years, I have a bit of money saved up. About $9k to be exact.

Do you think this amount of money is enough to attempt to establish a poker career? I think my best game is probably 6 max PLO, is it possible to secure a decent win rate at 25PLOz? Or is the rake just too bad at Stars these days?

Jake

jake as a general rule of thumb for a cashy take your bankroll 9K and divide it by 3000 and that's the bb stake you wanna be playing at. I have no idea what that is but i know 1k bankroll would be a .33c bb game. 7 years experience is good enough to give it a crack.

The rake is quite insane in PLO. I'm all for it, but you will have to play a lot of tables with a decent winrate to make the amount of money that worth doing it in the UK.

I presume the rake is more reasonable as you go up in stakes? Or at least that's what Joe Ingram's podcasts make me believe.

Are there many people making a living from 25PLOz?

I would just deposit a few and do the whole grinding way. You need more than just be a decent player, for example you need to test your bankroll management hability.

The ratio that the rake "takes" out from your winnings decrease as you move to higher and higher stakes, but in paralell, it is harder to achieve the same winrate as you move higher.
Making a living depends on how much money you need to make a living .)
I live in Hungary, I can make a living by earning 3$ an hour.

The reason I wrote the above thing is while you can make a living in a lesser developed country by playing poker, it is way more difficult to maintain in real first world countries. I'm talking about online poker here.

Very fair point. I'm making £18GBP an hour in my current job. Sounds like that would go a long way in Hungary :P

Nice to make money that is tax free though. Decisions decisions...

i think its better if u go on a small deposit and try to grind that, gonna be really tough to deposit 9k and start playing coz ur gonna feel like ur overrolled and gonna want to take bigger shots, depsoit some money and grind it while u get used to the real grind.

then when u feel ready u can deposit the rest and go for bigger stakes

just my opinion im not a pro or anytbhing like that

That's about $25USD, right. Honestly, I don't think you or anyone else would ever be able to make that amount of money hourly in PLO25 zoom. I'm not really familiar with higher stakes but as a guess I would say you need to be very good and play at least 4 tables at PLO200 to earn 25 bucks an hour.

I would be shocked if you couldn't make $25/hr at 100 PLO, not sure if it's possible at 50

Well, it depends on the number of tables you play, but as I hear the rake is not that much better at higher stakes. If you manage to play 500 hands an hour with a steady 5bb/100 winrate, you make ~$25/h. But that sounds a bit insane.

Per the h/hr count in the client I estimated you'd be getting 700-800 h/hr. Even at 600 you'd need 4/100 instead of 5. Not sure exactly what the rake situation is like at 100z though.

I'm not totally sure but I think there is table cap at zoom. You can only play up to 4 tables. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

I play only NLHE tournaments just so you have the context.

I did some serious bankroll grinding in 2017. I had been playing on Americas Cardroom, but I decided that I needed more options for when and where I could play. I had $40 that had been sitting on Juicy Stakes Poker for two years and decided to start with that.

In 2017, without putting any more money on JSP, I did some serious bankroll grinding and got that up to about $470. They had almost no SNGs running, so I had to do it playing MTTs.

I don't play a level unless I have at least 100 buy-ins, so I played nothing but $1.10 MTTs until I got my balance up to $250. Then I added in some $2, then $3 tournaments and got it up to $470.

One of the great things about it was that I got a much better understanding for for what "long term" really means in poker. I understood the concept, but it's different when you're living it. Over 450 tournaments I got a different perspective on what variance is like--I had three losing months in 2017. I never could have learned all of those lessons playing live. I also could work on my leaks and see the results of my improvement in real time. Again, I couldn't have done that playing a few live tournaments every month.