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Can't agree more.

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.

Yeah, I was a pro for about 5 years before I got good enough at programming to do that instead. For the first couple years I was awed by the easy money (it was waaaay easy back then). Before really learning, I stupidly blew about $1200 doing all the stupid gambler things (was in college so that was like... all my money).

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.

Interesting story. There seems to be a big overlap between poker and hackers/developers. I considered going pro a few years back but couldn't justify it considering the lifestyle (I spent a month in vegas for the WSOP two years ago, it was insane) and the swings involved. Not worth it and you have better opportunities in startup land.

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.

Yeah, the culture surrounding poker is quite seedy and materialistic. I much prefer the hacker community.

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.

reminds me of day trading.

I haven't read the article yet, but I do hang in poker circles and play. jungleman is an absolute legend in the online poker world - mostly because he is not the reckless Hansen type.

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

On the second page the article goes into the exact details you mention.

Lucky and unlucky streaks can and do last months to years for people who play thousands of hands per day.

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.

You mean it is quite unlikely that somebody has luck for as long as 100k hands or more. But the funny thing about "unlikely" is, that it occurs if you let a big group of people do the same stuff (like playing poker online). It is actually very, very likely that there are some (few) people who are hitting the luck box for much longer then just 100k hands.

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).

The statistical math involved in determining standard deviation in poker is a lot more complex than you're giving it credit for. A hand itself is a very large set of potential outcomes, not just a win/lose scenario.

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.

Still skeptical. What happens when you have pokerbots play against each other? Do they have similar variance across 100,000 hands?

Yes. Some of the first statistical analyses of poker I came across when I was learning were based on simulations using bots run by none other than Nate Silver (he used to be a poker pro). His conclusions were in line with what I've been saying, and these simulations were using full and 6-handed tables if I remember correctly. Heads-up has even more variance.

Er, sorry but I don't suppose you've got a link?

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%?

Wish I did but it's buried deep in the archives of the twoplustwo.com forums. You'd probably stand a better chance of finding it by contacting Nate and seeing if he has a copy of the writeup lying around still than using their godawful search interface.

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.

K - thanks for answering!

Not sure if you're still following this thread, but another major factor is that only a very small percentage of hands actually have much monetary significance. At a full table in limit Hold 'Em, a strong player will fold ~80-85% of his hands preflop, and of those that go to the flop, only ~40% of those go to a showdown, and only a fairly small percentage of those are medium to large pots.

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.

Exactly,

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.