If you are not a winning poker player (in other words, your long term EV at the table is negative), you're just going to lose money on average, so playing more means losing more. It only makes sense to play in that case if you actually enjoy playing the game and treat your losses as the cost of entertainment.
But if you are a winning poker player, you still won't win enough to rely on the income unless you are playing A LOT. And by a lot I mean every day, for hours a day. And even more if you play online because the level of play is so much stronger online than live.
And then, even if you are a winning player, and you play a lot, AND you have enough average cash flow to make it worth it, you are still going to have periods where variance wipes you out and you're down for months straight. It's pretty brutal.
After all this time, I decided I'd rather get a different hobby than spending so much of my time grinding away in a smoky casino. I just play (infrequent) home games now.
I've come to believe the real reason people shouldn't pursue these kinds of sports or games professionally unless they're born with a deep thirst for winning them is twofold. First, if you love it from day one, the chances that you're actually better than average are higher than they would be for a randomly selected person in the population (e.g. Nike CEO Phil Knight really was able to run a 4-minute mile in college).
But second, deeply enjoying the game makes the requisite 10 (20, 50, 100) thousand hours you need to become a true pro go much faster than for someone who's just putting in the reps, and it even gives you drive to do related things in the likely case that that doesn't pan out (e.g., Nike CEO Phil Knight did not become an Olympian after college, he instead sold Japanese shoes out of his car for half a decade or so as a side hustle to track and field meets across the country while working a day job).
First, spending 10 1-hour session produces way less pro-ness than spending 1 10-hour session. Every programmer who attempts a difficult (pro) project can probably attest to this.
Second, not all X hours/days produce the same pro-ness. People have plateaus that seem to stuck somewhere. But you need those plateau X hours/days too. I have a theory that one can avoid as much plateau as possible by always challenging oneself with an almost impossible -- yet still doable project. But it's difficult to get right, so a lot of people get a very long plateau, or burnout, and then quit.
PS: So eventually, anyone who is serious about a career must spend his hours efficiently on high quality (aligned to the career path, while challenging, but not impossible) projects.
PS2: The freedom to spend one's time is absolutely important. Marriage and children could bring havoc to this freedom so people should think carefully before treading into the water.
Fact is, a lot of top players also have deals on the side, with brands and ambassador things. I feel you need those deals to make up for the bad runs.
I love the game, but the variance can inflate egos and the grind makes other hobbies more attractive.
That's a good point, too, one I failed to mention. A lot of people are losing poker players, but they don't know it. They don't keep records, and they don't manage and analyze their bankroll over time. A losing poker player has a negative EV. If you buy in to 20 $1000 tournaments, bink one of them for $15K, you're on top of the world, but guess what, you're a losing poker player. Cash players are even worse. They donk off $500 a night but only remember that time last week when they were up $5000 and cashed out. Congratulations, but your EV is still negative.
By my own measure, I was a losing poker player for most of my years playing the game, and I have a spreadsheet to prove it.
I hear this often about investing: people get started (losing money) with grossly insufficient education and they do learn for a few years, then give up, move on and blame it on "the professionals" or "science shows". When the fact is, if you start investing and learning at the same time, most likely you will underperform everyone else for a while. It's not because you were stupid; it's not because of "the professionals"; it's that you didn't know. It's an important distinction, and the equally losing opposite of "sunk costs".
In a way you can consider poker 0 sum or positive sum depending on the utility you derive from the enjoyment of gambling. But that should also factor in the negative utility from gamblers that lose
I feel there are multiple notions of "luck" in common use and the ambiguous term leads to misunderstandings.
In my mind, the purest form of luck is, by definition, not something that can be mastered. It is 100% beyond one's control to influence. Examples might include: your genetics, flipping a fair coin, etc.
But lots of people talk about "luck" as though it's something that somehow one take advantage of in a willful way. They say "make your own luck." Or perhaps "put yourself in situations where you're more likely get lucky." Or maybe "master luck"?
That's all fine, and is a worthwhile topic, but I would call that "skill". Maximizing one's odds of something (even something involving luck) is a skill.
Perhaps by "mastering luck" they mean not allowing it to psych you out — even if you're on a long losing streak, even while doing everything right. But again, I'd say saying level-headed is a straightforward skill (difficult though it may be).
Anyway, that's my little rant on the ambiguity of the term "luck" (:
so i think there is a chance that the quoted person would agree with your comment here, as I think it is orthogonal to the quote
Luck follows (or at least positively correlates) with skill :) 30+ years ago in our company of friends in the university dormitories we had a guy who had the card deck handling skills of a major illusionist (and those skills were naturally a source of significant income for him). The guy was also tremendously lucky - well beside mere being alive and without broken bones while applying his skills for income :) - in particular once he won an amount enough to buy 1-bdrm apt in St.Petersburg back then on a scratch lottery ticket that he bought at a random place on our way while we were walking to some business meeting in a city that we just arrived that morning. If it were a skillful illusion, then it was way beyond anything i've heard or seen before :)
I'm not a professional player but I have observed in more than a trivial amount of occurences there are sharks in casinos picking the right cash table to maximize returns. They seem to know each other and don't play against each other, but always try to pick a table of fishes. I don't know if I'm thinking too much though.
Smaller tournaments and cash games have much smaller variance and are what I would recommend for anyone trying to make a living for poker - large multi-table tournaments are moonshots and should be treated as such. His points about staking are valid in terms of "diversification" for a poker pro, but TBH, the staking scene is almost uniformly full of degenerates (on the stakee side) and predators (on the staker side). The fundamental problem is that the venn diagram of a winning/good player but also needs a piece of his action bought tends to be an inherently unreliable set of people.
This includes 'soft skills' like body-language reads, speech-play, false-representation, baiting players into non-optimal play, as well as the underlying mathematical basis.
The luck element - known elsewhere as RNG Jesus - is mitigated completely over 10,000 hands by appropriately skilled players. There's a reason the composition of the final tables of the WSOP can be so static year on year, multiple bracelet winners wouldn't be a thing otherwise .
A fully optimised 'safe' player can be beaten both short-term and long-term live by a player who is skilled in reading tells, or simply bluffing. The BBV may be different, but the concept of a 'hero fold' exists for a reason - and is often more satisfying than a 'hero call' to veteran players.
What I said was 100% correct and didn’t need a bunch of extra unrelated stuff.
I’m making a fundamental point about randomness and poker which you are failing to understand. Stop and try to understand for a second instead of launching into mansplaining.
Then you should play Chess, or some other perfect information game. There are popular games that don't involve luck.
There's something called "match poker" which does exactly that.
2. Even though the element of chance is inherent to Bridge too, Duplicate Bridge is a clever attempt to nullify the role of luck in tournaments. The same hand is played in different tables (by different teams), and points are scored depending on how you fared in comparison to the other table. So, rather than playing to win, you play to do better than your counterpart in the other table. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicate_bridge
But! The variance still matters a lot for the skillful players: their chance of winning is 1/10 instead of 1/1000, and for the baseline folks the chance of winning is basically zero.
Not op, but I think you’re right… it’s probably 1000x or infinity depending on how you look at it.
The ev of the median player in a typical tournament is negative, while the pro is positive. As a measure of skill, that metric can’t really be expressed as a multiple.
As for skill level, I think a prob being 100x a rec is probably about right — most people have no idea how much better pros are than they are.
That said, poker sustains interest from recs precisely because the format leans more towards the luck side of the luck-skill continuum than complete information games like chess or go.
So a rec can play head up against a top pro like Phil Ivey and can still win, but that victory would be a function of luck rather than skill. Iterate that spot 100x or 1000x, and the rec doesn’t win very often.
i used to play tournaments 12-14 hours a day back in the glory days. most important things for me as a MTT (multi table tournament) grinder were discipline, game selection, bankroll management, good note taking, study, volume.
these days i chuckle at how some people are selling 70% of their MTT action at 1.3 markup - thus freerolling. a nice variance killer if you can get away with it / justify it.
grinding life > grinding poker, imo.
This is the central point of the article, and I don't think it's true. If it were as easy as "following a good process", then anyone could get rich investing.
There are also certainly other ways to have an edge in investing (quant firms come to mind), but I think the most realistic option for "anyone" is readily available in the form of low fee index funds and a long time horizon.
https://youtu.be/H5jPJQ5cVGU?si=KoXd4H3FOkLZ1y06 has an interesting counter-point. You need to fuel your returns with savings.
I guess it's a subtlety — in the end, since you said "for decades", and if you adjusted your wording sightly (such as "help you reach your financial goals", instead of "get rich"), the underlying message is similar. But I figured I'd share the link in case you find it interesting.
Yes, all of those things.
There are teams at the same table all working together by communicating with each other about what hands they have. The sucker at the table is the one not part of that team.
Also, it’s software, which means it can be written to favor the house.
Online gambling for real money is the equivalent of just setting your money on fire.
I'd love to see articles like this written by someone who did not win, too. It's too bad that people pay less attention to those stories, as he mentioned in the article (c.f. clickbaity title). At least this is a winner admitting the importance of luck, rather than just saying "do what I did, and you can win too!" [1]
I'm surprised there was no mention of modern machine learning "solvers" for poker, which can get very close to perfect play. The game is not truly solved in the game-theoretic sense, but so close as to make very little difference, as I understand it. Some professional players do strange things like look at the second hand of their watch, as a source of randomness as input to their decision making, since ideal play requires some true randomness in your actions.[2]
So, in addition to the "results-based vs. process-based" angles presented in the article, I'd say there's also a "mathematics-based" consideration. At least for poker, where all the rules are perfectly clear. Harder to apply that to real-life poker-esque situations like founding startups, of course.
[1] As always, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1827/
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/magazine/ai-technology-po... — NYT "How A.I. Conquered Poker" (alt link: https://archive.is/QbXXE)
Poker is a mathematical game with mathematically fixed odds. Real life is different in that there is a considerable amount of room to tilt the odds in one's favor.
For an obvious way to tilt odds in your favor, stay in school and learn what you're being taught.
Agreed with you there (:
And generally, doing what you (ethically) can to give yourself a leg up is great. But I find that approach/attitude can get dicey when it is then used to cast judgement on other people (I'm not saying you were, just going on a tangent here). Acknowledging the sometimes-overwhelming effects of luck on a person's life, despite their best efforts, has helped me be more empathetic, I think.
If someone is down-and-out, maybe they were lazy or wasted their opportunities, but maybe they didn't, and they just got waylaid by misfortune. Keeping that in mind helps me hold back from shouting at them to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps!" or such. That may be helpful in the former case, but can be hurtful in the latter.
