[97s]

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 people studied and I continued to move up into higher and higher stakes. At one point I looked at how much money I had made/compared to how much I hated what I was doing and decided that I was done. People around me never understood why I quit because they knew me and the amount of income I had made, but the thing is no one can understand what it is to live on a grinders schedule like that.

I would get up at 10-11AM study the hands from the previous day to make sure I was playing correctly mentally, read over new material, review a partners hands as we both did each others to confirm playstyle and decisions were correct, around 3PM I would start scouting tables across various levels looking for soft players that I had datamined information about. Around 4-5PM I would start playing and continue to add tables with soft players and immediately leave any tables that didn't contain any soft players or they had busted. This table hopping and monitoring is absolutely exhausting, but critical to being as profitable as possible.

Repeat this until about 11PM. Then go to sleep until 4AM, get up and play against the players on the other side of the world as they were starting to play loose. Play against them until about 7AM, then go to sleep and get up around 11. Repeat. Do this for 4 years and almost anyone will decide enough is enough even with the amount of income I was making back then. The only rest I took was on weekends, just to remove myself mentally from the exhaustion.

Of course poker is much tougher now then it was then. I wouldn't even dream of trying to play now. I was maybe upper 85-90% player, now I would be in the lower 50%.

[waprin]

Live poker is still quite soft. While you do have to be better compared to years past, it's also far easier to get better because you can study solvers. I used to be a "good but not great" online player, but the extent to which you could truly understand hands was limited due to the limitations of the software at the time (mostly equity calculators that could not truly calculate EV). That changed with the release of Piosolver in 2015 that lets you calculate the EV of various strategies and give you the "correct" answer assuming various assumptions. Those assumptions are always wrong but it's still informative in the "all models are wrong, some are useful". I used to "plateau" in my undertsanding of the game but you no longer plateau because the game can now be understood at a more complete level.

Live poker will always be soft because there will always be plenty of people there to have fun and gamble no matter how much software exists. Furthermore, only a slim minority of players even actively trying to win actually put serious effort into studying (see also, dan luu's post on how it's relatively easy to reach the top 5% of any endeavour, even if very difficult to reach the top 1%).

I can't help but use the opportunity of poker on the front page of Hacker News to note that I have a strategy blog and training app on this exact topic:

www.livepokertheory.com

There's a lot of beginner to advanced strategy articles on applying practical solver outputs to live poker games as well as a preflop training based on solver generated preflop charts. Poker is currently my only significant source of income and I "eat my own dogfood" on this site so I'm very incentivized for it to be good!

[bluecalm]

Hello fellow HN'er! I am PioSolver author and thanks for mentioning my software as a turning point in poker theory evolution. Feel free to pm me (by Pio email or Discord). While I am no longer involved much in the poker world it's always nice to keep in touch with people doing interesting things in and around the industry!

[whoami_nr]

Author of the post here. Your software is literally the reason I made any money in Poker. Must have studied using your software for more than a 1000hrs haha.

On a related note, I made a small tool for PLO folks to study their preflop game. Check it out here: https://rnikhil.com/2022/06/15/gtoinspector-startup.html

[ryandrake]

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 make a living grinding home games even if your edge there is astronomical.

Just my viewpoint as a solidly recreational player. Although I'm a decently profitable cash player (I donk my cash winnings away by losing tournaments), I'm not good enough to go pro online and I'm not patient enough or willing to spend my life in the casino to go pro live.

[waprin]

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 accepted so if you don't want to do those things you're at a disadvantage. There's also serious risk of collusion , team play, card sharing, doubly so on unregulated sites.

It's hard to overstate the difference in skill between online and live. You see VERY weak players buying into games with $5k stacks live while online games with $200 buyins are considered very tough. Even regular players in high stakes live games make surprisingly fundamental mistakes, like checking back extremely strong hands on the river rather than betting them for value, or almost never bluffing.

I would say that if someone plays poker 20+ hours a week and has a losing year live they are also probably just a losing player. I'm friends with many live poker pros, and I've never heard of any of them having losing years. Obviously they pick games they know they can beat and mostly stick to them.

Tournament variance is extremely high and I think being a live tournament pro is unnecessarily risky unless you sell / swap action which most pros do. Or pray you run good and win one. But cash is a safer bet.

As far as spending all your time in a casino in order to make a living, that's basically the equivalent of spending all your time in an office, it's a job and you go to it. It certainly can be grindy. I understand it's not for everyone. But it's not super far removed from many other in-person jobs. And as others have said, it can actually be nicer than staring at a screen 10 hours a day, especially staring at a screen to play poker, because it has the social aspect with the other players and the dealers, the tactile aspect of the chips and the cards, etc.

I'm not advocating for anyone to become a live poker pro, certainly I'm sharing my project on hacker news with the hope that some "serious recreational" players take interest in it since very few poker pros lurk here. Most people should not play pro poker for various reasons - on Hacker News the obvious one being they can almost certainly make more money and easier money with plain software engineering, software engineering is generally more intellectually engaging, and also most people aren't mentally equipped to deal with the swings.

I'm mostly doing it currently because it's a niche that I understand well having done it in the past, and I wanted to do an indie software project and "make money playing poker to reduce my burn rate while building a poker blog and training app" has a natural synergy to it as an entry point into bootstrapped software entrepreneurship. Plus so far its my best received project, has a small but growing audience and respectable retention on the app despite it being an MVP.

Moreso than advocating people become live poker pros, I'm just noting that basically anyone who wants to can win a bunch of money at poker, if they're willing to study the massive amount of resources that exist now. Those resources always existed but the advent of solvers has changed those resources from "these are very good heuristics beating the games" to "this is the solution to the game under certain constraints".

Based on experience talking to "hacker news" type people, they tend to be introverted and so would strongly prefer the nature of online poker rather than casino poker, but I would again warn people that online games are both far tougher and require a lot of extra tooling and precautions that aren't necessary in a casino game.

Plus, at some point, in live poker, you get to put all the solver nonsense away and just look a man in the eye and decide if he's bluffing you or not :)

[ryandrake]

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.

[whoami_nr]

Author here. Live poker is soft but getting enough hands/hour is a pain. Rake is insanely high in Indian casinos that the overall winrate drops hard.

[huytersd]

I wonder if you could have the oculus sunglasses setup run a live OCR+solver for you.

[garblegarble]

It's going to be obvious to other players that you're wearing a camera, and who would want to stay in a game where it looks like another person is cheating?

Making other players leave seems like it would be the fastest way to get yourself a lifetime ban to your local casinos.

(that's even ignoring the fact the casinos have already seen every trick in the book already, and will be onto you immediately)

[saucymew]

Not much has changed in the current live poker meta. Yes, the average player may be better, but if you put in the consistent time to study/solvers/hand reviews, IMHO that puts you in the top 20 percentile. It's getting to the top 5-10 percentile that is killer.

Ultimately, like life, the only true edge you can control is game selection. Hence, that Rounders quote that rings eternal:

"Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker."

[Kranar]

I don't have the greatest references available, but a naive Google search brings up quite a few sources from databases and surveys that say that while 30% of poker players do better than break even, only 18% of actually manage to make any kind of worthwhile income from poker and only 5% of poker players make what is considered good income from it.

I don't know what "good income" is, whether it's like 100k a year or 500k a year... but I can take a pretty good guess that unless you're in the top 15%, poker is probably not worth it professionally.

[hayd]

Surely there's a lot of HUD/automated play now. Where players are simply seeing the GTO play for the entire hand. Sites make an attempt to prevent this but today I'd play online with extreme scepticism.

Real-time assistance simply wasn't a thing back in the day.

[bashwizard]

I used to play professionally during 2003-2007 until all the poker coaching sites started popping up everywhere. The money was indeed crazy and I was making roughly $400k/year at NL1000 back then. Eventually my winrate started dropping along with all the fish leaving the game and the whole boom died out. I did a year coaching but later decided to leave poker for good.

Good times though and kind of surreal for a 20 something year old dude.

[busyant]

> looking for soft players that I had datamined

I knew someone on the other end of this.

Back in the early 2000s, the wife of a guy I worked with fancied herself a decent poker player.

She lost some non-trivial amount of money in an online game and was worried about telling her husband.

So, she tried to win it back and lost even more.

I think you know where this is going (if not, see Gambler's ruin).

She lost all of their savings trying to break even.

Stopped paying the bills.

At some point in the ensuing months, my co-worker came home to an eviction notice (plus, his wife was hiding the letters threatening to shut off the heat, etc.).

---they got divorced.

[xwdv]

This is why you always keep separate savings accounts away from a spouse.

[amoss]

> Help me get to 1000 karma and I’ll stop posting forever.

This beautiful, it has a hook in both directions. Like a little piece of art sitting here on the site.

[mchaver]

I am downvoting xwdv because I want him to keep posting.

[Obscurity4340]

You just helped me notice/discover the downvote button. Still don't wanna use it tho, I like to focus on the positive except where there's an ultimatum like that lol. I will fall in line for the occasion

[busyant]

> This is why you always keep separate savings accounts away from a spouse.

Your username bio is hilarious--and it is also consistent with your advice.

Have an upvote (on your way to 1K)

[jrs235]

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.

[__s]

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)

[xwdv]

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

[paulddraper]

Tragic.

[voitvod]

She is like a unicorn because I have personally never met a losing poker player.

Everyone is crushing it no matter what the rake in these games. "The games are all so soft". Sometimes they eventually though get bored of making all this money and move on to something else.

Same with sports betting now. "I win some, I lose some but overall I am up". Everyone says the same thing, even when betting on sports they don't even personally follow or watch.

You know what they say, the house always loses.

[ackbar03]

How much did you make exactly? That's an extremely disciplined approach. I'd assume you could do pretty well at other stuff if you took it as serious as you did your online poker

[whartung]

Friend of mine did this in the heyday. He’d have, like a dozen games going. Hunting and playing “soft players” (as the GP calls them).

I don’t know how long he played, he certainly didn’t mention a grind as described here.

But, he netted enough to buy his then new $30k Lexus.

A lucrative hobby if nothing else.

[Octabrain]

Your story reminded me of a case I personally know of a guy who was a very disciplined poker player for a period of time and one day won a sweet €90000 prize in an online tournament after a lot of effort. Apart from poker, his life was a mess (living with his mother, no even a driving licence, no serious job). He spent the whole amount on partying, hotels and cocaine. He never got again any substantial money from poker and his life is still a mess last time I knew.

[Obscurity4340]

Moderation in all things, including moderation...but also cocaine. Many have come, few have passed

[matwood]

I played a lot in person around the same time frame, and did pretty well. It was hugely popular with a lot of dumb money floating around. When I would travel for work, I would find nearby reservation casinos which always seems to have tons of easy money.

Like you said, winning poker is a grind, and for me, extremely boring. I rarely play anymore, and if I do it's with friends. But, I have memories of some big hands in Vegas that I'm happy to have experienced. I also learned a ton about risk management, my personal risk tolerance, and controlling my emotions.

[thedangler]

Now there are apps that tell you to play your hand or not based on your opponents playing style and previous hands. You pay for the app and the app is created by the online poker site.

My friend plays professionally full time and he uses these apps for a slight edge. They all do. The apps do not play for him. They just say 80% user Smith123 folds.

[whoami_nr]

Author here. Yes, the grind is something like that. I used to watch couple hours of theory videos and maybe have a hand review session before 4pm. The grind starts around 6PM and I play on-off till 5-6am. Rinse repeat for all 7 days of the week.

Every couple months I used to travel for some juicy tournament series to try my hand at live games.

[97s]

It is frustrating isn't it to watch people back when we played idolize it as some glorious career, when it reality it is probably one of the most stressful, depressing and negative jobs mentally a person can have. The variance and amount of hands required to overcome it with skill can be a living nightmare to work through. I can't imagine playing when you played. It was pretty easy back when I did it, but still taking peoples money by isolating bad players with addictions wore me out after a while. I am happy to have played and the skills and determination I learned there helped me throughout the rest of my life. I run my own business from home now and I am much happier. I am glad you found some peace as well.

[Decabytes]

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