[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.