I don't even do it as part time anymore. The game is so tough and the cushion required to support a downswing can be invested in Large-Cap equities.

i dont tell people i play poker because i dont play poker anymore. All of the winnings i have from poker i lost to the casino plus tens of thousands more. Not to mention countless hours of my life. I havent been to the casino in almost 2 months and already saved close to $4k. I have been investing my time at work and getting good at my job. Once i get $10k saved I am going to learn to invest. MTT_9797 is right. Unless you are the .5% who are big winners(not just grinding for rent every month, but you can ball out from poker winnings and still have enough saved for 10-20 years down the road for your future as well), poker is not worth it.

You didn't have a poker problem, you had a bankroll management problem, in poker and more generally in life.

I don't make much money playing poker right now, partly because I am a live-in caregiver for an elderly relative part of the week. But I have don't have much interest in casinos because poker would be my only reason to be inside one. I can play poker at the nearest poker room (1.8 miles from my home) or at the nearest casino that deal NLHE tournaments (103 miles.) The rake is the same.

I don't gamble, I just play poker. I don't get lottery tickets, play bingo, buy Super Bowl squares, or do anything else where the house has an edge, or where I don't think I have an edge. I don't sell pieces or get backed. My win rate might be less than a lot of other people, but when I win it, it's all mine.

I've been on a terrible downswing the last six months. I played a tournament yesterday where my best hand for the first half hour was T3, and it didn't get much better after that. I finally wound up all in with 12 outs and i lost to two overcards. I was short enough to shove, the play was right, the math was right (you're almost always getting the right odds with that many outs) but it was just another tough loss. It seems to happen over and over an over-- that's not observer bias, I have everything on a spreadsheet.

I'm discouraged, but I know if I keep making the right plays variance will even out at some point, and since I started at my current level with a bankroll of over 100 buy-ins (now under 80) it's not a crisis. If it doesn't turn around soon I'll just drop down to a lower level where I would have about 100 buy-ins and work my way back up.

As to barely making the rent money, that's not a crisis if you have some savings, in fact, what I've made would this year would be about enough to pay the rent but nothing else. But with my wife's income we're OK, we have money in a savings account and in retirement funds and I'm saving my family thousands of dollars by helping to keep my relative at home instead of at a nursing home.

My wife and I have made some pretty good decisions from the start, and poker is a part of that. My wife knew that I made some money playing part-time (she got most of it) and we discussed bankroll requirements, variance, and all the other implications before we agreed that I should give it a shot.

In poker, half the battle is making good decisions, at the table and in life.

If you've lost almost 30 buy ins at live small stakes games then sorry, but thats not variance.

Innit. How can you lose 30BI at a stake and not be worried you can't beat it.

I lose ten and know I am not doing sometime right.

Yes, you should just try harder to stop the runbad.

I don't play poker for a living but take it some what serious at the moment
now that my dads friend know that I play online every time I see him even before he says hey.
its how's the poker going pretty tilting

I don't understand how his wife is okay with it. I guess she must not know? Me and my gf both play live 1/2 and if I ever went on a 5-6 grand downswing she would slice my dick off.

Im pretty much in the same boat as u in this aspect

Like I might play with money I can afford to lose when I'm @ a casino with friends and dont wanna ditch them for hours on end while I get my poker on, but otherwise I have no interest in playing them -EVass table games

I personally never understood when people playing in low stakes games look over at the high roller sections and wish they had the money to play in those games.... lol bro I can think of a million better things to do with that kind of money if I had it

Omg this X lots

"at least i have a real job"

I have a "real job" and the stress level takes more from me mentally than poker ever did back in the days. I wish poker was still soft.

Why? He's just being friendly/taking an interest.

^ my guess is that the poker isnt going so well

1. At the beginning of the year I was spending more time as a caregiver, and for a while I was only playing two live tournaments a month. We're talking about a very small sample size, which can be one of the reasons for variance. Now I'm playing one or two times a week, still a pretty small sample size.

2. I've made final tables several times without cashing. If I took one down that would be 20 buy-ins right there.

3. I final-tabled a 300-player online tournament a couple weeks ago. I will take down a live charity room tournament with 50-60 players sooner or later.

4. This year I have been knocked out all-in with the best hand a very high percentage of the time. That is, by definition, negative variance.

All of that said, I know that I have a lot of work to do. Even if I was the best player in my local charity room, that wouldn't exactly put me in the pantheon of US poker players. My goals are bigger than being a charity room shark.

I always have a list of leaks, and I work on them one by one. Most recently, I overhauled my range to play more speculative hands when effective stacks are high. The next thing that I look at will probably be my bluffing frequency (it's way too low) and after that, probably tells.

If I do the work, the results will at some point take care of themselves--and that's the point of this thread, at least to me. It about doing the work and making good decisions, in poker and in life. I'm doing that, and it will pay off.

Is this real life?

"Are you gambling?" (when playing an MTT at a cafe)

"I am playing Poker"

"Oh is that like when you have to try not to go over twenty-one?"

*facepalm* "No man that's blackjack. I'm playing a Texas Hold'em tournament"

"Oh. Well I think they're similar"

Nope your wrong about poker. It's possible to statistically run way under EV and be a losing player for long periods, esp MTT variance.

So poker is not gambol these days?

I don't disagree with anything you said. It is indeed possible to run bad, for whatever reason, for a very long time.

That said, notice that I said it would turn around for me "at some point." I didn't say that it would happen in a few weeks or months.

His first season on the World Poker Tour, Jonathan Little was down 50K. That might be enough to get some players to "get a real job," but he came back the next season and was up over a million.

For almost all skilled MTT players that put in the volume, variance will even out at some point. It might take a hundred tournaments or a thousand, but at some point it will happen.

In his book, Dusty Schmidt claimed to have never had a losing month and that he had the graph to prove it. He attributed that partly to the fact that when you're playing over 100K hands a month short-term variance isn't relevant.

People always think you can't make money playing because they think it's gambling or always lost

Leatherass plays cash, though, so that isnt relevant to mtts. He also said he thinks playing that much volume of poker just sitting in front of his comp gave him brain damage


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he also said you shouldn't play mtts at all since you shouldn't rely on luck for your one man company.

never learned cash

Still to this day, when someone whos never seen me play watches me load up 6-7 tables, I get "So is that actually REAL money???"