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How teenage poker prodigy Steven Silverman won, and lost, millions

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Re: How teenage poker prodigy Steven Silverman won, and lost, millions

#41

Post by mattmaroon »

edanm wrote: post #2

Interesting article, although it kinda reinforces a false dichotomy - just because this player had an unhealthy lifestyle playing poker, doesn't mean you can't play poker professionally while living a perfectly healthy and otherwise normal life. In fact, the article keeps mentioning the "lavish" lifestyle of the poker players as a given, when that is also just a choice they make. I've always enjoyed playing poker. I'…

I thought the same thing going in (I played for a living for almost 6 years) but discovered that you can't lead a perfectly healthy and otherwise normal life. And I'm pretty sure it isn't just that I couldn't, because once you get to know them you realize not one of the hundreds of successful professional poker players (much less the thousands of unsuccessful ones) have managed it. Some have gotten part of the way there, some have become sad junkies, but nobody's ever anything that even remotely resembles normal.

My theories as to why would be too long for this forum, but the two big ones are the losing streaks and lack of respect for money.

Losing streaks are like nothing you can understand until you've been a professional poker player. Imagine if you went to work, performed flawlessly, far better than all of your coworkers, and instead of getting paid your bank account got debited and your boss told you "you really sucked today". Then that happens every day for a month.

Humans (and especially poker players, who study probabilistic decision making as a hobby) are conditioned through life to believe outcomes are a direct result of actions. Do a good job at something and work hard at it, you succeed. Do a bad job at something and slack off, you fail.

While this is true in poker in the long run, the long run can be a long time. I broke even for a year at one point, and that's at cash games. Meanwhile donkeys without the slightest clue what they were doing were lucking ass backward into multimillion-dollar tournament prizes.

You can't even fathom what this does to you emotionally until you've lived through it. It engenders self-doubt, which gets you off your game, which probably makes you play worse, which you know you're doing but aren't sure exactly how, or what to do about it, which in turn prolongs the losing streak. There is no end to it.

The lack of respect for money is universal in a world where thousands of dollars change hands in minutes. It's impossible to think "I shouldn't buy that Lexus I've had my eye on" when you just made enough to do it in the last 4 hours. Everytime I played a pot I was risking far more than I was playing credit card roulette for dinner for 4 at Craftsteak. (BTW, my luck at credit card roulette is legendary. If my luck at poker had been half that good I'd have won the WSOP.)

Re: How teenage poker prodigy Steven Silverman won, and lost, millions

#42

Post by mattmaroon »

nostrademons wrote: post #40
jdietrich wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing for a living is nothing like playing for fun. The psychological pressure to stay on form, the fatigue of playing hour after hour of poker, the uncertainty of chasing fish, the knowledge that your only career prospects are to play for higher stakes - it can be absolutely crushing. The great paradox of poker is that the more you care about the money, the less you are able to think rationally and impartially. Th…

Sounds a lot like starting a company...

Starting a company is a walk in the park in comparison. My stress level has gone down enormously.

Re: How teenage poker prodigy Steven Silverman won, and lost, millions

#43

Post by mattmaroon »

This article does a pretty good job. Much of what you read about poker misses the mark. Also the credit card roulette caused me a large bit of nostalgia.

I got a lot of the busto rumors when I quit too. In fairness, it's a lot more frequently the case than someone successful walking away, but I'm always glad to hear of other people doing it. A really young kid named Jason Strasser became one of the best tournament players around and then gave it up to go back to school.

It's a seductive lifestyle, but often not a healthy one, and rare is the poker player who realizes there's much more to life than money while they still have some of it left. Unfortunately in my case it took my mom dying to put it in perspective for me. I hope for him it was something less traumatic.

Re: How teenage poker prodigy Steven Silverman won, and lost, millions

#44

Post by brisance »

jrockway wrote: post #38
mkramlich wrote: post #32

Wall Street reminds me of poker done on a much larger scale.

Not really. Sure, people make money on their market bets... but the real money is made by sitting in the middle of other people's transactions. That way, you get money when they open their bet, and you get money when they close out their bet. It doesn't matter whether they won or lost, because they have to go through you.

And that's why high-frequency trading should be deemed illegal because it is technically insider-trading; the intermediary makes a commission and masks the true positions of buyers and sellers, profiting at the expense of both.

Re: How teenage poker prodigy Steven Silverman won, and lost, millions

#45

Post by [deleted] »

brisance wrote: post #44
jrockway wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Sure, people make money on their market bets... but the real money is made by sitting in the middle of other people's transactions. That way, you get money when they open their bet, and you get money when they close out their bet. It doesn't matter whether they won or lost, because they have to go through you.

And that's why high-frequency trading should be deemed illegal because it is technically insider-trading; the intermediary makes a commission and masks the true positions of buyers and sellers, profiting at the expense of both.

[deleted]

Re: How teenage poker prodigy Steven Silverman won, and lost, millions

#46

Post by jrockway »

brisance wrote: post #44
jrockway wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Sure, people make money on their market bets... but the real money is made by sitting in the middle of other people's transactions. That way, you get money when they open their bet, and you get money when they close out their bet. It doesn't matter whether they won or lost, because they have to go through you.

And that's why high-frequency trading should be deemed illegal because it is technically insider-trading; the intermediary makes a commission and masks the true positions of buyers and sellers, profiting at the expense of both.

I'm talking about exchanges. Matching buyers to sellers is actually something that adds value.

Market makers are also similar.

(Also, the rest of your comment makes no sense. "High frequency trading" is just trading at high frequencies; it's not any different from any other trading strategy. Your program quotes the other guy a price, he either accepts or doesn't.)

Re: How teenage poker prodigy Steven Silverman won, and lost, millions

#47

Post by bullseye »

jrockway wrote: post #38
mkramlich wrote: post #32

Wall Street reminds me of poker done on a much larger scale.

Not really. Sure, people make money on their market bets... but the real money is made by sitting in the middle of other people's transactions. That way, you get money when they open their bet, and you get money when they close out their bet. It doesn't matter whether they won or lost, because they have to go through you.

You just described a poker room's rake perfectly.

Re: How teenage poker prodigy Steven Silverman won, and lost, millions

#48

Post by basugasubaku »

bl4k wrote: post #37
bapadna wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.pokertableratings.com/fulltilt-player-search/zugw... http://www.pokertableratings.com/stars-player-search/Zugwat http://www.pokertableratings.com/absolute-player-search/ZUGW...

So typical - you see this all the time. Moving up too soon thinking they are the best in the world, only to lose it all. (For non players, this means that you are a winner at lower stakes, say $5/10 - but a common trait is that you become bored with that level because the most you can win each day is ~$1000-3000. As you move up levels the play is a lot harder (exponentially so). Players like this guy crush the small…

He also could have been staked for the high stakes and so didn't necessarily lose his own money. From what I hear this is not uncommon for winning players taking a shot at the higher stakes or even a high stakes regular who found what he feels is a good but risky spot.

Actually the article headline seems inconsistent with the text, which suggests he decided to quit to pursue other things and is not in fact "busto" as rumored.

Not saying you're wrong but it's another possibility.

Re: How teenage poker prodigy Steven Silverman won, and lost, millions

#49

Post by steve19 »

Ganthor wrote: post #16

Can anyone point me towards some good online resources about getting started in online poker?

What are some good (cross platform, decent clients, low cheating, good for n00bs) online poker websites?

EDIT: I mean poker playing websites.

Re: How teenage poker prodigy Steven Silverman won, and lost, millions

#50

Post by aquateen »

bl4k wrote: post #37
bapadna wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.pokertableratings.com/fulltilt-player-search/zugw... http://www.pokertableratings.com/stars-player-search/Zugwat http://www.pokertableratings.com/absolute-player-search/ZUGW...

So typical - you see this all the time. Moving up too soon thinking they are the best in the world, only to lose it all. (For non players, this means that you are a winner at lower stakes, say $5/10 - but a common trait is that you become bored with that level because the most you can win each day is ~$1000-3000. As you move up levels the play is a lot harder (exponentially so). Players like this guy crush the small…

His PTR pages clearly show most of his hands at 5k/10k/20k NL. That's not medium stakes.

I'd guess his losses at 40k/60k/100k NL /are/ due to luck; doubt he's a -20BB/100 loser at those games.

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