[ryana]

I have much more experience with this phenomenon in poker than I do in business, but here's my viewpoint.

I've seen a lot more people who think they have maximized their success and want to keep their "secrets" to themselves who end up crashing and burning because they don't realize what they're doing wrong. Meanwhile, people with 4-figure hourly rates keep talking strategy to root out mistakes and find new areas to exploit.

Now, if you think you alone are smarter than the collective then go for it I guess. If you think the community isn't trustworthy and you get less from it than you gain maybe you should find another group to work with.

But isolation isn't going to make you more successful.

[alttab]

Honestly it felt like the entire article was written about iOS and the app store. The truth is your shit gets stolen fast there.

[maxerickson]

Is the typical online poker player really that bad?

[ryana]

Really how bad? "Bad" is relative obviously since you only have to be worse than the best 5-10% to not be making money once you start paying rake.

[gravitronic]

I had to parse that last sentence 3 times so I'm rewriting it for anyone else in my shoes:

"Bad is relative obviously since you have to be in the top 5-10% to be making money once you start playing rake."

[bornhuetter]

"Bad is relative, obviously, since you have to be in the top 5-10% to be making money (once you start playing rake)"

[zem]

that is superficially the same sentence, but you've removed the key part. while "you only have to be worse than the best 5-10% to not be making money" is logically (in the truth table sense) the same as "you have to be in the top 5-10% to be making money", the implication of the former sentence is that it's surprisingly easy to fall out of the zone in which you are making money, whereas the implications of yours are that it's hard to enter that zone.

[maxerickson]

Bad enough that they are mostly just spending money. Which they sort of have to be if other people are collecting like you say.

[ryana]

Yeah, I mean there are some terrible players out there. But most of the losing players at the high end would be winners at the low end. They're playing high because either they have money to blow (Tony Parker and Guy Laliberte come to mind) or because they usually play lower stakes but are taking a shot to move up.

It's also worth pointing out that the highest stakes tables have starting stacks in the 10s of thousands of dollars and pots in the hundreds of thousands. Your ROI doesn't have to be super high to pull in 4-figure hourly rates at those levels.

But for fun sometime, do a search for "Isildur1" in late 2009, early 2010.

http://www.pokerlistings.com/online-high-stakes-the-isildur1...

http://www.pokernews.com/news/2009/12/pokernews-exclusive-is...

And the biggest pot in online poker history ($1.4M) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfn6FjF0tc8