Can You Make A Living Online Poker
What’s more, with a lot of practice and if you become skillful enough, you can easily make a living playing poker online. One of the most common misconceptions about poker is that it’s all about luck, but players thinking that couldn’t be more wrong. Poker is all about skill and probability. Do you want an example?
(After you read this post, you might want to check out my follow-up to it here.)
If you want to learn how to make money playing poker online, you need to start playing small stakes, gather data, and gain experience. If you are honest with yourself and work hard on your game, the money will follow soon enough, and who knows - one day, you might even find yourself playing online poker for a living. Yes, You Can Make a Living Online. People are constantly telling me they don’t believe anyone can make a living online, but I know plenty of people who prove it’s possible. You just have to remember that, with all things, you have to start somewhere. If you want to start a website, learn how. Can you make a living playing poker online? Yesterday on Fulltilt poker i played in a 10,000 player tourney and finished 212th place earning me (100.00) dollars.I could play in live tourneys but the traveling and the hassell with casinos) Im pretty good so i think i could do this for a living if im able to win big tourneys. Here’s my definition of what a pro is (at anything). If you make over 60% of your income doing something, you can consider yourself a professional at something. If you make 60% of your income from playing poker, you can consider yourself a professional. To be honest, it really doesn’t matter. It’s just a label that doesn’t mean anything.
I tell a lot of people not to play large-field online MTTs for a living. I’ve always thought that the variance is just way too high for most professionals to trust their livelihood (and sanity) to large-field MTTs instead of cash, smaller-field MTTs, or STTs. But, admittedly, I’ve given this advice without any direct evidence to back it up. I’ve been meaning for a while to see what the numbers say, and this post will be a tentative first step.
Ideally, what I’d like to do is do a nice controlled study where I pick a few representative players based on past results and use their results over the next few months as my data. (Alternatively, I could take the results of one of the large backing groups. If anyone who backs 20+ people would be down to share some information, let me know.) But, that requires more motivation than I’ve been able to muster, so I decided to do a much rougher study: I grabbed Shaun “SFD” Deeb’s tourney results from OPR (with Shaun’s permission) and played around for a few hours. Here’s what I found:
I used Shaun’s results from January 2009 to present on Stars and FTP. I filtered for buy-ins between $55 and $216 and included only NLHE tourneys with at least 181 entrants. OPR doesn’t record rebuys, so I removed rebuy tourneys. This left 3,049 tourneys with an average buy-in of $119.72 in which Deeb earned $294,027 with an awesome ROI of 81% and an ITM of 11.5%. Obviously, not many people can play or run as well as Shaun Deeb, but these results provide a starting point.
Say you are Shaun Deeb, you really do have an ROI of 81%, and you’re going to play 1,000 of these tourneys. What are the odds you make money? What are the odds you make at least $50k? Etc etc. Here are the results of one thousand Shaun Deebs each playing one thousand tourneys:
In particular, Shaun loses over a 1,000 tournaments sample about 13% of the time, and he makes less than $50k about 35% of the time (with an EV of about $100k). Of course, the upside is pretty good too–He makes over $200k about 14% of the time and over $300k almost 4% of the time.
Here’s the same data for a larger sample of 3,000 tournaments:
Over 3,000 tourneys, Shaun wins about 98.6% of the time, and he wins over $150k over 82% of the time. He made over $900k once in my 1,000 trials ($915,134) and over $600k about 6% of the time.
But, say you’re not Shaun Deeb. I can make a lower ROI player by simply taking Shaun’s distribution and lowering the payouts. (For an ROI of x, multiply the prizes by (1+x)*0.554 .) This isn’t very accurate, but it’s good enough for my purposes (especially since Shaun has a low ITM%). Here’s the 1,000 tourney histogram for a 20% ROI player:
As you can see, the situation is way worse. This player loses about 45% of the time and loses over $50,000 about 7% of the time. That’s pretty terrible, but maybe things get better with a larger sample? Here’s the data for 3000 Tourneys:
Can You Make A Living Online Poker Card Game
A 20% ROI player will be a loser over a 3,000 tourney sample almost 26% of the time. That’s much higher than I’d expected, and it’s the sort of number that should scare the shit out of prospective and current MTT professionals–If you want to play MTTs for a living, you better either put in a ton of volume, play really well, or be prepared to be a slave to variance (and nobody’s actually prepared for that).
Here’s lots of data for lots of situations (sorry for the ugly formatting):
Can You Make A Living Playing Online Poker
| ROI | Tourneys Played | Expected Earn | Chance of Loss | Chance of Earning < .5x EV | Chance of Earning > 1.5x EV | Chance of Earning > 2x EV |
| 20% | 100 | $2,394.53 | 65% | 67% | 30% | 28% |
| 20% | 500 | $11,972.65 | 53% | 60% | 30% | 25% |
| 20% | 1000 | $23,945.30 | 42% | 50% | 36% | 31% |
| 20% | 2000 | $47,890.60 | 33% | 44% | 35% | 25% |
| 20% | 5000 | $119,726.50 | 20% | 38% | 30% | 17% |
| 40% | 100 | $4,789.06 | 61% | 65% | 27% | 23% |
| 40% | 500 | $23,945.30 | 37% | 51% | 31% | 26% |
| 40% | 1000 | $47,890.60 | 29% | 44% | 32% | 23% |
| 40% | 2000 | $95,781.20 | 14% | 33% | 28% | 17% |
| 40% | 5000 | $239,453.00 | 6% | 26% | 21% | 8% |
| 60% | 100 | $7,183.59 | 56% | 63% | 29% | 24% |
| 60% | 500 | $35,917.95 | 29% | 49% | 31% | 25% |
| 60% | 1000 | $71,835.90 | 20% | 41% | 27% | 18% |
| 60% | 2000 | $143,671.80 | 9% | 33% | 26% | 13% |
| 60% | 5000 | $359,179.50 | 1% | 16% | 17% | 4% |
| 80% | 100 | $9,578.12 | 51% | 62% | 25% | 21% |
| 80% | 500 | $47,890.60 | 24% | 46% | 28% | 22% |
| 80% | 1000 | $95,781.20 | 12% | 36% | 28% | 16% |
| 80% | 2000 | $191,562.40 | 5% | 27% | 23% | 9% |
| 80% | 5000 | $478,906.00 | 0% | 13% | 12% | 2% |
| 100% | 100 | $11,972.65 | 47% | 61% | 24% | 18% |
| 100% | 500 | $59,863.25 | 18% | 44% | 25% | 20% |
| 100% | 1000 | $119,726.50 | 9% | 35% | 25% | 11% |
| 100% | 2000 | $239,453.00 | 1% | 24% | 18% | 5% |
| 100% | 5000 | $598,632.50 | 0% | 8% | 10% | 1% |
There’s obviously a lot of information there, but some things jump out. In particular, life totally sucks if you’re a 20% ROI player. Even if you play 5k tourneys (which would be a decent sample for an entire year), you still have a 20% chance of losing money and a 38% chance of making less than ~60k. That totally sucks. Anyone except a true tourney god is more likely to lose over 100 tourneys than to win, which also sucks, and even a great tourney player has a decent chance of losing over 1k+ tournaments or to make only half her expected earn over 5k tournaments. Of course, the upside is good too, but the risk of losing money should be pretty scary to professional MTT players.
I should mention that this data lines up pretty well with my experience. I know a lot of professional MTT players. Losing months are incredibly common for them, and losing years happen fairly often. Years where they way underperform their expectations are typical. So, I hope people consider this before deciding to play (or continue playing) these for a living. People who are really good at MTTs, willing to put in tons of volume, and have huge bankrolls and strong stomachs might be better off playing large field MTTs professionally, but there aren’t many of those people. I think for the vast majority of people, it’s not a good idea (even for those who play very well).
You can find more data and some discussion about the distribution here and here. In future posts (probably coming soon, but I’m not making any promises), I’ll compare this data to cash games (both NLHE and PLO), STTs, and small field MTTs (i.e. 45s and 180s). I’ll also look into how stuff like this affects backing. So, if that stuff interests you, stay tuned or whatever. You can follow me on twitter if you want to know when my posts go up, or just subscribe to my RSS feed.
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How would you like to make money while gambling in a casino? Believe it or not, people do it all the time. They are known as professional gamblers, advantage gamblers or advantage players. Whatever you want to call them, these gamblers play different kinds of games, and one of the most popular is video poker.
Can You Earn A Living Playing Online Poker
Video poker was invented by a man named Si Redd in 1975. Its design was taken from slot machines but the game itself is derived from five-card draw poker.
Video poker is an ideal game to play for the professional gambler for several reasons, including:
- It can be won with skill and strategy (like blackjack) - It is straightforward to play (unlike traditional poker) - It can have very big jackpot prizes (like slots)
In this site we have gathered basic information you need to get started with video poker as a profession. We cover basic rules, bankroll, payback, advantages and disadvantages of play and other issues. We assume you are at least familiar with the basic poker hand rankings and slot machines (which video poker looks a lot like). We recommend playing full-pay Deuces Wild since this is the most profitable of all video poker games.
Can You Make A Living Online Poker Real Money
Don't forget that you can play full - pay Deuces Wild and other video poker games like Jacks or Better, Double Bonus, Pickem Poker, Jokers Wild and a host of other games online. Online video poker has better odds in general over their land-based cousins. However you need to look closely at the pay tables and payback percentages before playing.
Video poker games are one of those few games in casinos you can win. It is not a quick way to get rich, but with perseverance, discipline and knowledge, you can succeed just like the video poker experts. We hope these articles will help you along the way. Good luck!
Making a Living Playing Video Poker Articles:
Can You Make Money Off Online Poker
1. Video Poker vs. Slots and Poker 2. How to Play Video Poker 3. Video Poker Expected Return and Payback Percentage 4. Basic Video Poker - Jacks or Better 5. Make Money with Deuces Wild 6. Complete Deuces Wild Tips and Strategy 7. Thoughts on Bankroll Management 8. Tips for Playing Video Poker for a Living 9. Challenges of Playing Video Poker Full-Time 10. Essential Video Poker Tips 11. Losing Days in Video Poker 12. Choosing the Best Casinos to Play Video Poker 13. Are the Good Days of Video Poker Numbered?
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