I am just curious if any of you 20/40 players play for a living and if so how much can one expect to make a year on this limit assuming they treat it like a full time job? Would 100k be out of the question per year?

I've played like 5 hours of live 20/40 but 100k in 'income' is probably out of the question.

Even assuming a best case scenario, if you were a $35/hr winner. it would take you almost 3k live hours a year to see 100k in profit.

Also you'd have to discount some of your profits for the lost opportunity cost on your poker roll, which is probably not insignificant given the variance you're willing to accept by playing poker. Which means not ever dollar earned is "income."

Basically if you're bright and disciplined enough to beat 20/40 for $30+/hr you likely can find a better job than playing live for a living. Most of the live 'pros' I know are too incompetent to do anything else or are just unemployed and call themselves poker pros because they don't do anything else.

For sure not possible if you only call when you have the nuts multiway because "they would have called anyway".

Prove yourself a winner for over a thousand hours at 8+ before considering this question.

Spoiler alert!: the answer is NO.

Anyone who can make a living wage playing 20-40 can make a living wage playing 40-80, and is going to move up if they can.

LOL I am not asking for me. I am just curious.

Ok so saying that 20/40 would be tough to do for a living for 100k what limit would be? I know most pros play in tournaments. But I am sure a good portion who play poker for a living play cash games instead of tournaments. So what limit or no limit would one need to play to make 100k a year realisticly? And lets assume the person will put in 40 hours a week playing live. And at 40 hours a week live how much can one expect to make a year at 20/40?

Just trying to get a feel on what a person who plays cash games for a living is playing

My playing experience is Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

Vegas is way cheaper to live in and the rake is much less(I believe Bellagio takes $5 per half hour at $20-40). But thats it...Bellagio is the only game in town. And the games aren't as good as they were 3-4 years ago. The older bad regulars will adjust to your playing style...they aren't the same as the horrible Commerce players. The better Bellagio players...will probably beat you.

For Los Angeles, the $20-40 remains an absolute gold mine. If you limited play to M-F 7pm to 3am, you basically will always find a very profitable table. Even at the slowest evenings, I've never seen fewer than 3 tables running. But LA is more expensive. In Las Vegas, a $1500 monthly nut is pretty standard, factoring in rent, car, insurance, and food. In LA, I pay over $1500 in rent alone.

The thing is...I don't know ANYONE who has the $20-40 at Commerce as their sole form of income. There are winning players in the game, but someone else is paying all or part of their rent, or they have money elsewhere, or they play the $40-80 more often than $20-40.

So I guess the thing is really this....are you asking if you can beat the games for a few years(which is possible if you are a good player), or are you asking if you can play for a living...ie, beat the games for $100K a year over several years(which is very unlikely).

Also, you can't make $100K a year at $20-40. Maybe one year you will run hot and be able to do so, but its not a sustainably number IMO. $30-60K with a LOT of hours is a lot more realistic ...If you really are a good player, I'd count on $25-30/hr, not $40. The games beatable for $40, but theres that whole variance thing and not playing optimally all the time and so forth.

Anyway, like everyone else said, if you are beating the $20-40 for that much, theres no reason not to cherry pick tables at the $40-80 as well once you have the BR. Many of the bad $20-40 players go play the $40-80 often enough to make those games very good at times.

That is a very general statement that is very location dependent.

I guess what I am looking for is this...

Going off the premise of playing 40 hours a week and doing it as your sole income. Can someone break down how much a player can hope to make per year based on limit? For example like this (And these number are wrong just showing you what I am looking for). Cause I am sure there are many players who play poker for a living (Sole income) using cash games. I know a handful alone in AC who play 2.5 NL just by talking to the dealers.

Based on 40 hours

10/20- $30k a year
20/40- $60k per year
40/80- 80 k per year
100/200- 100k per year

2/5 NL- 45 k per year

etc..

How would you fill out that chart?

I am using the numbers most scene in AC games as I live in Jersey.

What does this mean? It reads like you put some words into a blender.

It means that you shouldn't include as income the money you would have made by passively investing your poker bankroll at an equivalent level of risk were you not playing poker. e.g. If that return is 5% on 100k and you made 1k playing poker keeping 100k liquid you didn't make 1k you lost 4.

This is way too simplistic.

Yes the games are beatable for those amounts.

No, there's not "many" players in So Cal soley making a living from cash games. Theres some. The number who do it for 10 or more years successfully is very small.

The reasons vary, but mostly its to do with variance, bankroll, changing game conditions, personal burnout, etc.

This really isn't a good argument(I don't think).

$100K bankroll is...well, huge. I'm guessing thats for $60-120 or $100-200 LHE, which if you can beat for any decent amount, is gonna get you more like a $50-100K return annually. So a 3 or 5% return as an opportunity cost is pretty much irrelevant.

So everyone is losing money when they do all but the one thing that earned the highest return?

That is not a counterargument. That's just a statement that the opportunity cost will be low relative to a market investment, but that's obvious. If it weren't poker would be the stupidest thing in the world. Spend all your time for a return that barely beats a passive investment??

My statement is just that when you're essentially actively managing your money, you can't count every cent of profit you make as 'income' as you would in a traditional job. This is a pretty basic idea; I'm not saying anything groundbreaking.

what would prevent a winning 20 player from holding most of this 100k in a passive investment? it's not like a poker player buys in for his whole roll everytime he sits down.

Thanks for the heads up. Next time I'm figuring out my poker Sharpe Ratio I'll make sure to see if I beat a comparable benchmark index and also check to see if it makes sense to leverage my investment.

I guess in the GAAP accounting of life one one should be careful to delineate income from revenue.

Then how do you explain that so many people claim to make a sole living paying poker. There are hundreds of books written by people who solely play cash games for a living. Either a lot of people are full of **** or they all can pay all their bills, mortgage, etc on 40 k per year?

I see no reason someone can not play 20/40 - 40 hours a week and earn 1500 a week

1500 a week times 52 weeks totals 78k per year.

And I am talking 78k on top of there bankroll. Sole income.

Also those were not my numbers just was giving you an example so maybe you could give me your guesstimates.

I mean this seems almost tautologically true because that return is going to be the discount rate...

because sometimes you lose

sometimes you cant play 40 hours a week

sometimes you dont play 52 weeks per year

How many casual visitors to Vegas claim they always make money?

Well your right factor in a few weeks for vacation, a few weeks like hollidays you work less, etcc.. But still should go over 60k

Well if it doesn't make sense just tell yourself that you play better when your investments goto **** so it makes sense to diversify. Or you can just admit what's really going on here and say you love spewing chips and sucking out on people and that compensates for any difference in return.

It's more than an accounting technicality, the opportunity cost is real. It doesn't make much difference for a rec player but for an aspiring pro it does.

Not everything is that liquid. And regulations like the tax code make them less liquid, in practice.

The opportunity cost argument is ******ed. If you think you need a 20k roll to play 20/40 and can make 40k per year, you just made a 200% return on your investment. If you invested some of those winnings along the way, you would expect to make more than 200%. Had you simply invested it and not played, you might have expected to make 2k in a much riskier way. You're not "losing" 2k by not investing the money instead. You are making 40k by choosing to play with it and not investing it.

If you're a winning player who plays full time then, over the course of a year, the choice to take your roll and play poker with it rather than invest it in the market, is by far the better risk adjusted return. Once your roll gets too big for your stakes and if you're not moving up then, yeah, there'd be an opportunity cost to leaving that money on the sidelines.

Most pros don't turn pro because its profit maximizing. They do it because it's "work" minimizing. While this is clearly an illusion on their part it would help you a lot in trying to convince aspiring pros of things if you understood that.

Edit: That plus I'd love for you to find me a better investment of 25k over 1 year than buying 100% of the action of a full time playing pro who wins 1 bb/hr.