How one guy turned his C&C skills into millions with online poker
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's hard to fathom how much variance really exists in poker. Lucky and unlucky streaks can and do last months to years for people who play thousands of hands per day. Statistics dictates that there will always be a number of outliers who, due to a combination of moving up aggressively and running hot at the right times, become millionaires in a short time and draw a lot of attention, but unless they're the real deal and sufficiently bankrolled to cover the swings, it will all go back, often as quickly as it came. Most of the famous players on TV actually fit this mold, go broke constantly, and only make consistent money due to endorsements. Among real high stakes pros (mostly math-oriented, highly self-disciplined nerds you've never heard of), a large portion of the TV stars are considered fish. I've always found it interesting how distorted the general perceptions are versus reality.
And like i said, likely pretty poorly:
It's about the metrics, or lack there of. And what a critical distinction that makes in pro poker vs most any other business endeavor.
The irony, tho, is even within the "reality" you mention...of those we deem or see as "quiet and disciplined nerds" who look down on the "famous tv pros"...
An equally false sense of success and financial gains define them.
Empirically....and logically it makes the most sense too...the truest of winners in poker are those who come closest to treating it like a normal/more traditional business, with real metrics...and act and think as legitimate entrepreneurs running a business.
He built most of his roll grinding stakes lower than he was capable of playing because he understood variance, skill etc. It was only more recently that he stepped up to play durrrr et al (early last year, IIRC). Before that, he was famous for declining games with the stars
Sounds like the article didn't do him any justice
I worked for an online gambling company for several years in the analytics area. I saw young players rise meteorically, win millions (not exaggerating) and eventually go broke.
Almost everyone is human. Once losses start to mount, it's hard to play with according to the program and stay emotionally detached while your world is crumbling with every lost pot.
Never underestimate the cheaters. Most online poker players don't understand how rampant collusion is. Dumb colluders are easy to spot. Smart ones will stay undetected until someone gets greedy. Almost everyone is human. It's hard to maintain discipline.
I myself thought about playing online professionally. After I realistically evaluated my chances and my stats, it became clear that I would make more money on a guaranteed basis by being a consultant than a professional poker player. When you have a family that depends on you, stable income becomes very important.
Online gamblers live a very unfullfilling life: you are staring at several computer screens many hours each day, you don't really create anything and you have wild swings in your income. With exception of few lucky, hard working, disciplined and possibly intelligently colluding players you will not make good money in the long run.
In the short run, impossible is nothing. Play that tourney, enjoy a night in a casino. It's good fun if it's not your job.
Then I got serious about learning , put in another $200, and didn't deposit ever again. Worked that up to around $20kish, kept that as a bankroll, and played in the 5/10-30/60 range, whatever games were good. I mainly focused on limit hold 'em, shorthanded and later heads-up.
I was consistently making in the 150-200 an hour range, but I'm not very money driven and so didn't play that much. Maybe 20-30hrs per week around 6-8 months of the year. So it was easy money and gave me lots of free time, which was great, and the mechanics of the game are truly fascinating and I got very absorbed early on, but you're completely right about how boring and unrewarding it is ultimately.
After a few years I felt like a hamster on a wheel. It became a drag to play so I avoided it and tried to reduce playing to the minimum necessary--which ended up putting strain on the bankroll during bad patches. You're right: the swings are very hard to stomach day in and day out. I didn't save or manage my money at all--spent it mostly on food and travel, which I don't regret. Still, I determined that I absolutely had to do something creative and contributory rather than repetitive and predatory, went the clueless 20 year old failed start up attempt route, learned how to program along the way, and now I'm much happier with life, and though I still make a lot less per hour than those days, it seems conceivable that in a few years I could eclipse it doing something I dig.
The poker community is also crowded with degenerate gamblers, guys who pretend to be your friends one minute and then would kill your parents for $100 the next. They are difficult to avoid and their bad habits have a tendency to rub off onto otherwise good people.
I don't mind playing semi-frequently, even on the live circuit, but I would never make it more than a passing interest and hobby.
It also doesn't feel great to think about where the money is coming from. Who knows if that pot you just took off a degenerate gambler is his mortgage or child support for the month. I'm not trying to accuse pros of anything unethical--people are responsible for themselves and he's going to blow that money anyway, so you might as well take it. Just the rules of the game. But still, I feel better about creating value in the world than taking it away from someone else, even if it's fair.
This cannot possibly, possibly be true. The expected deviation goes as the square root of the sample size, which means that the percentage deviation goes as the inverse square root of the sample size, which means that if you play thousands of hands a day for a year, your deviation ought to be less than 1%.
Anything that persists over 100,000 samples is not luck.
1% seems to be a small number in your mind, I guess. Take one million people and if the chance to hit the jackpot is 0.1% you still get around one thousand people, who are lucky enough.
Maybe everthing changed, but in the early days of online poker, 6 or 7 years ago, we said that you need around 600k hands to have some(!) trust in your win rates (your Big Blinds per hundred hands, to be precise).
100,000 hands is nothing. Ask any long time pro who understands the game. I've personally known several who play a very consistent, disciplined style against a consistent level of opponents whose results would vary greatly across 100k hand sets, from being a huge winner to barely breaking even to losing even though they all were at least steady winners overall.
When you get in the 500k+ realm, it starts to get more reliable, but even streaks of this size are possible at the statistical fringes.
Let's say you came out even after 100,000 hands. If I randomly divided those hands into two sets of 50,000 each, would you expect one of those sets to be up by 10% and one of those sets to be down by 10%?
Not sure I understand your other question. There are no percentages in particular that I would 'expect', but if you ran the sim enough times then yes they'd revert to some mean. I've never done such analysis so I don't know what the results would look like.
Luck on these bigger pots has a huge impact on overall win rate, but in a set of 100,000 hands, you may only be involved in 2-3000 of them, and you may only expect to win something like 400 or 500 (very rough estimates). Maybe that helps explain why there's more variance than you might expect in a seemingly large sample.
Playing 6+ simultaneous tables isn't as romantic (it's a boring way to play) or hard (there's software to help you keep track) as this article makes it out to be, when you're essentially asking the same question every hand, doing the same calculation. It gets to be mind numbing. There are few situations in poker that are truly interesting when you've played tens of thousands of hands.
I'd liken the experience less to Command and Conquer and more to mining for gold in World of Warcraft.
And that was the difference between me and the others in my circle that still play full time: Mental stamina.
Seeing the chips as points and not money is really a defense mechanism to keep you playing rationally. Where many good, but not great, online players lose it is in the grind of constantly calculating pot odds.
Oh well. I wouldn't have listened either when I was his age.
I hate to give up on something once I start. If I start reading a terrible book, it burns me because I feel obligated to finish. This also means its pretty tough for me to fold a hand after I've been had.
Given this bias, I've predicted that my highest EV move in poker is not to play.
(By the way, take out the extra periods from your links)
From what I understand, many of the Korean pros get into online poker as well.
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=205...
If I was him I'd be socking away a % monthly for saving and rainy day funds
To answer your question though, online poker is in a kind of legal limbo. The Unlawful Internet Gambling and Enforcement Act (UIGEA) was tacked onto the SAFE Port Act of 2006 in a midnight rush job, making it illegal for banks to facilitate transactions related to online gambling. It didn't specifically make the act of playing illegal beyond what has been on the books since the Interstate Wire Act of 1961. In theory, poker's ace up the sleeve is that it's a skill game and can't fall under the same restrictions that regulate other games of chance.
At a state level, there are states that have specifically made online poker illegal, Washington (where it's a felony) and Kentucky are two, if memory serves but I think there might be one or two more by now. Then you see other states NJ/CA/NV moving to legalize and regulate intrastate network gaming.
Probably most of the players winning smaller amounts just don't bother to declare, and the bigger players are filing Form W2-G the same as they would for offline winnings.
And guess what? It was never about the money. Sure, I always wanted to see the number go up, but I had no intentions of withdrawing any of it. It was about being right. It was about pushing the envelope. And most importantly, it was about trying to figure something out.
I don't care if you make millions or go bust... or go back and forth between the two. As long as you leave your emotions at the door, you'll be fine. And to be honest, I was good at that (and still am). But it's probably not a life you want...
I mean, yeah, it's fun trying to solve something and seeing if you're right or wrong. But you're only doing it for yourself. You and no one else. And if that tickles your fancy, go for it - I have nothing against it. But what if you chose to share your passion for wanting to be right, for wanting to push the envelope, for wanting to figure something out...
In my eyes, it wouldn't necessarily make you a better person, it'd just be hard to call that bet a loss.
With midrange professional players, I don't think you really see those kinds of crazy swings. Once you reach a certain level, you start doing dumb things, like playing head-to-head games at ridiculous stakes against players you're equally matched with.
Which is why poker doesn't scale well. Eventually you're not going to hit a level where you don't have as clear an advantage over your opponents. Your profits will eventually end up capping out. You either need to find a new angle or start gambling like a degenerate to further advance.
Players like Matusow aren't going to scale down their stakes when their bankroll starts to shrink dramatically.
Becoming a successful poker player not only requires you to be quite skilled, but you also need to run well at the beginning of your career.
That's a pretty bold statement to make to somebody who built a simulator. Can you point to any specific coding or algorithmic errors?
I think you misunderstood his point, which is that it's easy to burn through your starting bankroll, even if you play well.
I have written quite a bit of poker software and played close to 700k hands of poker over the last 5 years so I understand how luck works better than most.
My point is, that if you imagine 10 hypothetical identical players (they make the same move in the same situations) with $1000 starting bankrolls, all with moderate a positive expectation of 1bb/100 hands many of those players will lose a lot at the beginning, get discouraged and give up playing poker in the first 10-20k hands they play because they ran poorly.
The people who were "lucky" and ran well at the beginning of there careers (like me) have a chance to grow a larger bankroll and will be less likely to go broke in the future as their risk-of-ruin decreases.
This is exactly what the simulator does. It takes identical players, under identical game conditions and looks at possible outcomes. You can see for yourself how wildly different the results can be for a player with a 1bb/100 win rate. (Note: the simulator of course is inherently flawed because games conditions and the mental condition of the player are not accounted for)
Not too encroach upon anyone's character or existence, let alone the actual people in the article...
Poker is an inexorable gambit; both in lifestyle (subjectively define by 'sanity', and career (objectively define buy debt and financial bottoming out.
Poker is a fairly pure, distilled hologram of the caprice/randomness, and skill/will that resides over living and life itself, and a stripped bare interplay of emotional and psychological alchemy that everyone has, and lives with.
The greatest poker success carries little to not weight, in terms of posterity. IMO, greatest difference between poker and "other jobs".
Even aject fail in other occupational pursuits almost always carries over some tangible good productive benefit for you and your career. Whether it's contacts, savings, reputation, experience itself.
Contra poker; even after enormous success, the above benefits are a double edged sword at best, where your experience and connections (ability to get back in) are as likely to be the underpinnings of cyclical, fixed failure.
At best, it's a totoal unknown; emoyrically, it's pretty obvious.
And either way, poker is devoid of true metrics...in the same way -- IMHO -- other businesses get/should be hinged upon.
Ironic, since poker is all about a scoreboard and 'statistics'. But the living and breathing reality of metrics is a seperate (undomesticated) species from standard business metrics.
One more thing, hopefully more concrete (I'm reticent to be too specific since I know/knew a lot of the actual ppl involved),
The luck of poker, applied to people otherwise talented and able, is most profound in the beginnings of their poker experience, most often at adolescent ages where an underlying emotional caprice and aversion (or tolerance..) to risk is extremely strong.
Majority of the "long"term winners, had remarkably pain-free beginnings, when their emotional and psychological poker fortress got created. Still, many dropped out of school after losing/borrowings appreciable sums, to persevere.
Pointedly, of the latter...most were in financial umbrella's of school and family, and insulated from the psycholigical tumult n emotional traumas that define any poker career.
This got too long n fumbling, but personal experience/a vacuum of time on the treadmill/and a general interest necessitated.
People who win at high stakes poker count in wins/losses, not in value of money earned. Poker has become a lifestyle game. It's about the prestige, not the money.
It's always about the money; the lifestyle is the way poker players show it off to the world, that is otherwise disconnected from their success...or occupation.
It's still not even about the money then. But ceaseless acquisition. Of what? The question and answer is virtually irrelevant, despite it being obviously money/chips, and the money/chips being important.
The "lifestyle game" perception is a facade. It's easy to digest, and it's what most articles that get written support as the reality.
Money is the prestige. And if there is a top, it's apocryphal.
Poker doesn't scale. The goal is to increase your hourly rate. Spend your time coding.
Playing poker with PEOPLE, at least (not online) has enormous benefits. Learning how to read people in-depth is incredibly valuable. Also learning how to stand your ground and unflinchingly bluff (or deliberatly avoid telegraphing your hand) is also a great skill to have.
There's so much more to poker than the money. Unless you're talking only about online poker.
You think that playing poker teaches you how to read people past the poker table? In what context? This sounds very delusional to me. In business, if you are doing anything with a lot of money at stake (that is not illicit), then the cards are always face up if you do enough work.
> Also learning how to stand your ground and unflinchingly bluff (or deliberatly avoid telegraphing your hand) is also a great skill to have.
You think this is a "great" skill? I think its valuable, but not as valuable as learning code or understanding how the economy works.
Also, you didn't even mention discipline or emotional control. Those are real values that poker will teach you. Bankroll management, dealing with long term variance, and getting bad beats make you either toughen up or break.
How old are you? How long have you been playing poker? I don't mean it derogatorily. I've played A LOT of poker and I've done a lot of other things. Poker has given me less skills than organizing soccer games.
I failed to convey this, though. I totally agree with your points about disciple and emotional control. I just can't help but feel the skills I've gotten from playing poker with people are valuable. Who you play with matters a great deal, of course. I've gotten job offers based on my poker game not because I was a star or anything, but because I successfully illustrated my ability to execute strategy well. Etc. Etc. I turned down the jobs, by the way.
End of rant.
If anything, I've learned not to get emotionally attached to day-to-day swings and try to rationally focus on the bigger picture.
Sure poker teaches you a lot, but you could get the same thing running a lemonade stand. You have to realize that the "skills" poker teaches is nothing but marketing fluff. This is why you see people coming from other skills and going into poker. I haven't heard a lot about going the other way (of course I am sure it exists). The fact is it is just about money.
"Andrew: What kind of things does an entrepreneur do to fool you into thinking that they’re really determined?
Interviewee: Well, being seeming really tough and calm during the interview. I mean, why am I telling people about this guy?
Andrew: Because you guys are going to get better, and as long as this information is out there, you might as well get it all the way out there in even playing field.
Interviewee: There’s the danger of life. Matt Maroon of Blue Frog gaming. He was a professional poker player, talk about pokerfaced. So, he came in for his interview and he just seemed like absolutely unflappable. We thought, ‘Boy, this guy is tough. This guy is not a wimp.’ Actually, we were right, he was really tough. But, to this day, he is genuinely unflappable. I probably would want to fund more people who are really good poker players. I’ve noticed, empirically, there seems to be a high correlation between playing poker and being a successful startup founder. That’s how he seemed tough."
Anyone curious enough should check out http://code.google.com/p/openholdembot/
that eliminates all the nuts and bolts of botting (screen scraping, action-taking, etc.) and leaves you time to figure out strategy. About a year ago I made a bot that 12-tabled at low stakes and made about $10 an hour...and then I realized I could be doing more interesting stuff with my life instead of staring at a screen, making minimum wage to make sure my bot didnt crash and lose my whole roll
I spent quite some time reading about poker bots / strategies and doing a base implementation, but never actually ran it on a live poker site. Some other project (also with a higher $/hr ratio) caught my interest and I abandoned it.
Still, I'd be very interested in discussing what tactics you used. For example, did your bot play a generic strategy, or adapt it based on the person(s) it was playing against?