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Quitting the full-time poker scene

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Re: Quitting the full-time poker scene

#181

Post by ryandrake »

waprin wrote: post #82
ryandrake wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, live poker is still pretty soft, and since the players are worse, your winrate and edge should be better. But then again, I'm not sure you can get enough hands/hour to be as profitable as an online player--everything is just so much slower. You could have a year long downswing live where, if that happened online you are probably just a losing player. So you need to spend all your time at the casinos. You can't m…

Well, there's obvious problems with online, starting with that it's technically illegal and unregulated in most US states, which is a pretty big one. Secondly, the rise of solvers and other AI have greatly increased the risk of your opponents using them to beat you (RTA aka real-time assistance). Besides that, many other forms of software assistance such as HUDs and database datamining were pretty much always accepte…

Thank you for this long response! I agree with basically everything you said, but still push back about the downswings. Think longer time horizons. I think anyone who's played 20+ years, even very profitable players, has almost certainly had at least one net-negative year. That's just poker. I don't really socialize with any live pros though. If you know live players who have never had a single down year, please let me know so I can stay far away from their tables.

It's incredible how tough online play has gotten, so quickly. Back in 2000-2004 you could literally not know how to play poker and still make money online. Now, I know I'd get absolutely smoked joining a mid-stakes online $1/$2 game. I'm not sure how much of this is assistance and HUDs. There seems to be just a different breed of players online.

Re: Quitting the full-time poker scene

#182

Post by Decabytes »

97s wrote: post #15

I played back during the glory days of 2000-2004 and through the net-teller shutdown for America. Back then the money was absolutely absurd, because the game was very new online and very few people understood basics. This combined with the massive amount of marketing that was going on for television, tons of people were addicted to the thrill of the game. Every single year the game became more difficult as more peopl…

This is basically what the streamer Lifecoach has said his life was like for a very long time. I think he is much happier now

Re: Quitting the full-time poker scene

#183

Post by jjxw »

vintermann wrote: post #144
jjxw wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of people who play poker do not play it for the "high stakes, smoky rooms, and martinis". Speaking for myself, I regularly play for very low stakes with friends in my own place of residence and we enjoy it as both as an intellectual pursuit and something to socialize over. Obviously your viewpoint is perfectly valid - there are plenty of people who have been irreparably harmed by gambling culture an…

Are you sure about that? If it was just for the intellectual pursuit and socialization, why are you playing poker and not, say, Catan? Obviously not everyone plays poker in a smoky room with gangsters, or even with real money, but I think maybe that cultural context is part of the explanation. You absolutely can divorce it from that cultural context, if you like poker but hate gambling - but is that worth holding ont…

Why does anyone choose to play any game instead of another? Catan has a chance element to it, isn't that gambling to try to win the game? Why not play something completely deterministic? For the record, we also do play Catan and other games.

We play poker because we enjoy the structure of the game and it is different to other things. Personally I'm uncomfortable with your insinuation that I, and the friends I play with, are somehow culturally brainwashed to be gamblers because we enjoy poker.

I'll end the conversation by repeating what I said above. If you look down on this type of activity then there's nothing I can do to change your mind.

Re: Quitting the full-time poker scene

#184

Post by fairity »

Whenever there's a large financial incentive to cheat and low consequence for getting caught, it's safe to assume that there will be sophisticated attempts to do so.

I think both these preconditions are met (in spades) when it comes to online poker.

As far as I can tell, there's no way to stop collusion in the following form:

- Create a large remote team of cheaters

- Have them all multi-table PLO at the same online casino

- Each participant randomly chooses tables to avoid anti-collusion tracking

- With a large enough pool of cheaters, you will inevitably have multiple colluders at the same table

- Sharing knowledge of your whole cards with other colluding table participants will give you all a huge winning edge

Since there's no way to stop the above, and there's a large incentive with low consequences if caught, I assume cheating is a huge problem in online poker. Wondering if anyone can confirm/deny this?

Re: Quitting the full-time poker scene

#185

Post by jjxw »

qkeast wrote: post #164
jjxw wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoy chess and Formula 1 too! I think poker is broadly misunderstood to be a game of luck disguised as a game of skill when in reality it is very much a game of skill in the long run. The "long run" here being hundreds of thousands of hands. There are absolutely brilliant plays in poker at its highest levels when a player finds an interesting line with a particular hand. I agree that most poker "highlights" are no…

I’m genuinely curious—what makes for an “interesting line with a particular hand?” Do you have any examples?

I found this one [1] pretty interesting - finding a raise with top pair weak kicker is not intuitive. There is some solver work in this video which is probably overly technical for a casual observer, but will give a bit of flavor on how poker is studied at a high level.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jNVRwTSN-A

Re: Quitting the full-time poker scene

#186

Post by xwdv »

__s wrote: post #135
jrs235 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just viewed their profile. They're at 999 karma. Trying to figure out if they have a bot monitoring their own karma that invokes a bot to down vote some other comments of theirs.... UPDATE: Something has to be involved... Or karma aggregation/recalculation isn't instant. I just upvoted their comment, they're still at 999. LOL.

I was hoping they try to straddle 1000, while below 1000 they try post karma gaining comments, while above 1000 they try post karma losing comments, changing their bio depending on the mode (maybe having a bot maintain the bio)

I don’t think I will ever truly reach 1000 karma.

Re: Quitting the full-time poker scene

#187

Post by tea-coffee »

jjxw wrote: post #22

As a part time live tournament grinder who has a full time job it's always sobering to hear from full time grinders who end up quitting due to how tough the grind is. A couple of observations to add: 1) There is absolutely a huge edge to be had playing live tournaments, even for buy ins in the $1k - $5k range. If you are playing outside of Vegas it is very common to end up at a table where at least half the table are…

What's the profitability of part-time tournament versus part-time cash games?

Re: Quitting the full-time poker scene

#188

Post by osti »

whoami_nr wrote: post #156
osti wrote: post #17

I used to play PLO (pot limit omaha) full time and made very low 6 figures over 2 years. I quit in 2015 and went back to school for a CS degree, doing much better now financially, and the work is actually usually more interesting than poker, but that might be due to me burning out back then.

Author here. I also played PLO for a living. BTW, I made a small tool for professionals to study PLO. Check it out here: https://rnikhil.com/2022/06/15/gtoinspector-startup.html

Are you from India and if so, how's the new tax on deposit regulation affecting you?

Re: Quitting the full-time poker scene

#189

Post by sarchertech »

monero-xmr wrote: post #141
sarchertech wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who get addicted to the news don’t tend to lose their houses as a result. Historically most societies have restricted gambling to one extent or the other because it’s clear that there is a subset of the population who can’t self moderate, and this results in a significant cost to everyone else. We’re currently in a period of loosening regulations and we’ll see how that goes. Early results aren’t great.

We let people put their houses up as collateral in order to get a small business loan to start a restaurant. Statistically speaking those restaurants will be losers 80% of the time. They would be better off playing roulette and putting their house on black https://home.binwise.com/blog/restaurant-failure-rate#:~:tex... .

1. The majority of restaurants fail for reasons that a lender will spot in the loan application process. Inexperience, location, undercapitalization, etc... The rate of failure for a restaurateur that manages to secure a loan is nowhere near 80%.

2. If a person with a gambling problem takes out a home equity loan and bets it all on black and wins, the most likely outcome is that they then keep betting until they eventually lose. So while one bet may have close to a 50% change of paying off, the real world expected value of giving someone $100k to go to a casino is much less than if you'd given that same $100k to a random person who wants to start a restaurant.

3. Opening a failed restaurant isn't something that someone is likely to do more than once. It's hard to find exact numbers, but the number of people who will ever start a failed restaurant is less than a tenth of a percent. The number of people who will experience a gambling disorder at some point in their life is 1-2%.

4. Even assuming a person does have some kind of problem and wants to keep trying and failing to open restaurants, the process of opening a restaurant takes a lot more time and effort than betting on roulette.

Re: Quitting the full-time poker scene

#190

Post by vintermann »

jjxw wrote: post #183
vintermann wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure about that? If it was just for the intellectual pursuit and socialization, why are you playing poker and not, say, Catan? Obviously not everyone plays poker in a smoky room with gangsters, or even with real money, but I think maybe that cultural context is part of the explanation. You absolutely can divorce it from that cultural context, if you like poker but hate gambling - but is that worth holding ont…

Why does anyone choose to play any game instead of another? Catan has a chance element to it, isn't that gambling to try to win the game? Why not play something completely deterministic? For the record, we also do play Catan and other games. We play poker because we enjoy the structure of the game and it is different to other things. Personally I'm uncomfortable with your insinuation that I, and the friends I play wi…

> Why does anyone choose to play any game instead of another?

Because of culture. But culture changes all the time - if we resist changing it, it gets changed for us, and then usually in ways we would least like.

> isn't that gambling to try to win the game

No, of course not. When I say gambling I'm talking about out-of-game stakes. There's obviously a difference between real-world money and in-game stakes like victory points.

You're not brainwashed more than anyone is. Catan and poker are both part of our culture. But we lose culture all the time, whether we want to or not (the point of my story), so is it really worth it to hold on to the culture that is heavily about gambling?

As I also said: even though lots of poker buffs will resist that because they are into the gambling, you can divorce it from gambling for yourself and your game buddies if you're really determined to. It's your choice. But is that really a conscious choice, or are you just trying to hold on to it without thinking critically about why, like the immigrant dad in my story?

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