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Similar story here. I’ve always played, mostly online, before Black Friday (pretty sure I was a minor when it happened) but played all the offshore sites through college. Professional software career took off and bounced out, finally ~3y ago I decided to get back into it and I would only play challenging games (only thing challenging about a 1/3 or tourneys is the grind). So, started with 2/5, within a week was playing the 10/25, 25/50.

1. Emotional control and pushing through the variance are key, I would play all nighters and it was mostly a subtle rise up vs big pots (except the one that did me in)

2. You absolutely do read players, I didn’t need to be a pro to learn how to observe the degenerates. Even decent players signaled things here or there (obv not how they eat an oreo , but I had a knack for knowing when someone was off their style). And it’s not even close wit a normal group of friends.

3. the sharks and their meta game… I had run up to about 50K within 3 weeks from my starting 2-3K. Had the pipe dream. I thought I had a growing bond with the pros. When I say pros I’m not talking grinders, I’m talking consistent big winners. About a handful of them. None of them tv personalities. - There were few times we’d run into each other, but I picked off a few donk bets here or there. However their persistence is what did me in. Went the entire month observing their advanced play style, which the meta was harsh, there were few rivers that mattered more than pre flop and continuation/donk betting. This style of play was like nothing I was seeing on tv. But I was winning with them. The last time I played, about a month into my run, I was on a 12h 25/50 game winding down, turned 30k into 70k (had 20k sitting back) pulled QQ and went up against a pre-flop donker. I face a 3 bet and get that gut feeling but put on lower pair or AK. Flop rainbows, large betting action. Turn, junk, I face an insane Re raise after testing a raise of my own, I know it’s off but it’s either AA/KK or AK at this point. My guts off but I’m too far in to quit. On the river I’m defeated, check, face bet, ultimately end up throwing 50K into the pot, lose to aces.

I never had a gut feeling so intense though. Like I was screaming at myself to get out. But I was caught.

Such a draining hand I never went back. I don’t have the discipline to grind games, and the tech industry pays more.

When you say tech industry pays more, I'm assuming the effective long-run hourly earnings of poker players is way less glamorous than it looks from an outsider seeing highlights? Doing a basic google search led me to https://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/ranking/6737/, which seems to suggest that 81 players earned over 1mm USD in 2021. But presumably those players don't earn that YoY, and even if they did, plenty more software engineers earn > 1mm USD per annum, so this seems to support your conclusion. OTOH, I have no insight to the home games or whatever sources are not included in these rankings, so I'd love to hear a little more.

FanaHOVA mentioned the main thing you missed. One other thing I'd mention is that a lot of pros have staking arrangements (the article briefly mentions some versions of them). For example, I know one pro (who's won one of the more prestigious WSOP bracelets) who gets 30% of his tournament winnings in exchange for having all his entry fees paid by his backer. I suspect he's traded off more upside in favor of stability than most, but there's a lot of deals out there where the players aren't taking home anywhere close to 100% of their public winnings.

Those aren’t net of buy ins. Negreanu for example won $3.1M, but spent $2.56M in buy ins, so net profit was around $600k (doesn’t account for all his content ofc, but that’s not every player)

The other commenters said it for tourneys. I can’t stand tournaments.

For cash games, I was only playing on the casino. For the 1/3 (1$/3$ blinds) the earnings rate seems absolutely abysmal and you have to account for rake. There are grinders who play these games, along with 2/5. My assumption is any grinder playing here is down under or not making enough to compete with a professional career in the tech industry.

Next is 2/5. Here I could’ve sustained a decent salary. A pro at these stakes showed me his past year earnings which was 180k.

It’s hard to tell with the 10/25, 25/50 pros. There were definitely dudes sitting on 500k+, maybe way more, chips that they kept in the casino and I assume similar amounts of cash at home. There were guys leaving with big nights but still losing 90k in a night. I’d hear about some being down under 200K at any point. There were probably some money launders. There was the occasional private investment fund guy that came in, was short with slick back hair, very loud mouth, would brag and show off one of his 17M personal banking account. Then there were the very quiet, calculated guys. It seemed that they were operating on some formula I never cared to figure out. They’d avoid big hands for the most part. Some form of grind I didn’t have the discipline for. I also didn’t have the discipline to handle large swings at those stakes, nor the bankroll, or desire to play lower stakes to build a bankroll.

You lost $50k in a 25/50 online game? Was the pot 2000 BBs??? I've never even heard of anything close to it.

Casino, there was no max. A lot of players sitting on 100k+. There were far bigger hands than this one.

> Probably the one biggest misconception people have is that pros have sick reading abilities since TV likes to emphasize staredowns, when the actual single biggest skill long term pros have is the ability to lose hand after hand for hours and still play their best game.

This is absolutely true, but let me add to this: live pros like Phil Ivey, who have played the game in person virtually their entire lives, do have sick reading ability. However, it mostly works against amateurs. Actual pros know how to hide their tells better. If you take an online pro who has been clicking at the computer all day on multiple tables, that pro will not have anywhere close to the reading ability of Phil Ivey.

I think old school pros like Ivey and Dwan are very good at reading the entire table. Dwan emphatically and correctly states who had the best hand against his bluff [1]. Ivey emphatically and correctly basically calls a guy a liar at the end of a hand over what the guy said he folded [2]. They have amazing "situational awareness".

[1] https://youtu.be/dS_uv88YuPs?t=179 [2] https://youtu.be/IN1bW4jo4i4?t=72

Indeed, but it should be made clear that these kinds of reads aren't necessarily (or likely) coming from physical appearances alone - there's all sorts of metadata to consider. For example, in the Dwan hand, the timing of Eastgate's call on the flop tipped his relative hand strength, showing that he had a very strong hand but also capping his range. A hand weaker than trips would have deliberated between folding and calling, and a hand stronger than trips with a weak kicker would have likely paused to consider raising. Of course, savvy players can fake these timing tells, but Dwan also knew that Eastgate was out of his depth (a tournament player making a charity appearance on a televised cash game because he'd just won the WSOPME and had yolo money), so he was unlikely to be doing this - more situational metadata.

So how much have you won and lost in total? I don’t have any knowledge of poker, so I don’t know how to ballpark this. And the impersonal questions are boring after seven lifetimes, so I thought I’d ask.

It would be interesting to see a GitHub style graph of poker activity, with won and lost corresponding to added lines and removed lines.

6 figures. Turns out there's a lot more (and less risky) money in software development than there is in poker. I gave up the professional poker life pretty early and actually made quite a lot more as a talented "amateur" with a Silicon Valley software dev salary that took away the risk of ruin constraints I had a pro. Plus I didn't really enjoy playing professionally anyways - it's pretty mindnumbingly boring to play the number of hands you need to in order to get the EV/variance tradeoff to some acceptable point, at least for me.

My highest and lowest sessions were in the 5 figure range (cash game player, not tournament), so I was never up in the really nosebleed stakes, but I was high enough up that a lot of the nosebleed players would play in my games. Some of them have an impressive ability to play their A-game even when switching between games an order of magnitude in stakes apart. Some of them, uh, don't. People you've seen on TV are overwhelmingly more likely to be in the second category and were generally welcome in my games, at least for monetary reasons. (There was an old screenshot of Phil Hellmuth sitting at a full 9- or 10-handed 300/600 limit hold'em table online. He's out of chips and every other player is sitting out, waiting for him to reload. I have a pretty similar live story about him.)

I imagine that for pro players to play at their best can be taxing and wouldn't be surprised if some just wanted to play less costly games for more what they could deem to be more fun.

Are you Paul P?

Nah, he's def Tony G

Guessing you're talking about extempore on HN, but no.

> The natural portion of your hands to bluff with is the absolute worst ones - you don't want to bluff with your middling hands because you have some small chance of just winning a showdown when it checks around.

I don't understand this logic, can you elaborate a bit more? What do you suggest to do with middling hands then?

One very simplified model is that on the river, all your hands fall into certain buckets, from strongest to weakest. (I'm ignoring a ton of nuance here and there are actually many more buckets in a real game)

- Worth betting, because you have the best hand

- Worth calling, because your hand is good enough to beat a bluff (and maybe some value bets as well).

- Intending to fold, because your hand is bad, but maybe it's good enough to win if the opponent's hand is worse and they don't bluff.

- Worth bluffing, because your hand is so bad it can't win otherwise.

The middling hands would literally be the middle two buckets in this example. Call with the better ones, fold with the worse ones. (To complicate this more, in a real world situation the worst part of the "intending to fold" bucket might become a "planning to bluff-raise" bucket, due to similar logic as to why you bluff with your worst hands.)

Yeah but that only works in the very simplified model. In the real game you pretty much always choose bluffing hands based on card removal (the ones that makes your opponent holding a calling hand less likely).

I think he’s saying you don’t want to “waste” a bluff on a hand you might end up winning anyway just by checking it down.

> What do you suggest to do with middling hands then?

You try to get to a showdown. With middling hands there's a chance the opponent has a worse hand. It's when your hand is so bad your opponent has you almost certainly beat that you get to the bluffing territory, as that's the only way for you to win.

Interesting, I read some Sklansky books about 15 years ago and he talked about semibluffs, where you're partly bluffing but you've also got some chance to win. Sounds like strategy has evolved into doing the exact opposite.

The distinction is that semi-bluffs are for when there are still cards to be dealt.

Would we call that thin value betting on the river?

I don't really think of thin value betting and semi-bluffing as the same concept on different betting rounds. Thin value betting gets its positive expectation (versus checking) entirely from getting called with a worse hand. It doesn't really have positive expectation from inducing a fold the way that semi-bluffing does.

At least, that holds if you assume the opponent will always call with hands above a threshold and fold with hands below it. Which is correct play (though kindly ignore raises, for simplicity - but they don't blow up the argument). Only if they behave very strangely, e.g. folding with the very best hands and worst hands but calling with the decent ones, can I see a better connection with semi-bluffing on early streets.

I should also say my explanation assumes we're in last betting position here. If we're first to act, the logic is somewhat more complicated than I can successfully conjure up here without going back into the books - it's been many years since I played seriously.

Ahh, ok thanks.

Good to see poker theory approaching the way I naturally thought when I played on PokerStars (before Chuck Schumer and co shut it all down for us).

People used to make fun of me for playing limits and sucking out on people. And no limit I would have some crazy strategies to fake out a table and make them anger-bet into my connected straight flush draws, when I was “representing” a two pair etc.

On large tables, often you want many people to stay in, until the river, because then the pot is big enough that multiple people will go all-in. You just have to be very sure you probably have the best hand (such as a flush that you were drawing for). I woul actually “goad” people with raising small amounts, whenever I had suited connectors for example, and if I hit a draw or the nuts on the flop, I would act as if I am “protecting” a top pair or so. On the other hand, when you are on a draw and if you want to see the next hand on the turn, you have to bet the flop much harder, because then it signals to most “basic” people that you’re “protecting” a hand — therefore gaining you an informational advantage when you do hit — as well as the “intimidation” factor that lets you “check” the turn to see the river — because they often think you’re checkraising them and also check, giving you another free card. You pay more on the flop but have two free cards after. Also If you don’t hit your draw, sometimes they didn’t hit either, and you can take it down with an aggressive bet since you were “representing” that you flopped a strong hand. To summarize:

  1) play large tables
  2) play suited connectors, or suited Ace-something
  3) limp in or if you are late-position, double the bet to make people call and grow he pot and be more excited to bet later, you also represent a reasonably high pair
  4) after a flop - if you are one card away from hitting a very strong draw (eg ace high flush) then bet hard on the flop — late position is always best for this… otherwise you have to bet less to keep people in
  5) regardless of whether the turn card makes your draw, check on the turn … you may have to call any bet if multiple people stay in, and play the odds
  6) if you made the nuts on the river, checkraise all in (since you represented that you are protecting a flooped hand).
  7) there were also timing factors, people get more annoyed if you take too long. And you can play multiple tables online until you hit these kinds of starting hands

People said I was playing wrong but I intuitively felt like this would give a lot higher payoffs than just straight play with no bluffs.

PS: Against a really intelligent table where people don’t churn, you’d have to leave after a couple big wins and do the same thing elsewhere. The whole idea in poker is to take advantage of most people just executing some common strategy or mindset.

> People said I was playing wrong but I intuitively felt like this would give a lot higher payoffs than just straight play with no bluffs.

No winning players nowadays would advocate for a strategy that doesn't involve bluffing.

Not to be harsh, but just to point it out for any novices who might be seduced by the simplicity of what you propose: the "strategy" you outline is simply nonsense and would not be winning in the long run even vs a fairly weak field. Maybe vs the level of play in the pre-solver world it did okay (though I doubt it would win except vs the very weakest fields), but today it would simply be burning money, even at microstakes.

Some of the heuristics you describe work in some situations, but you make no mention of accounting for other players positions, other players ranges, or the cards on the board; it is simply based on your hand and your perception of the player populations tendencies (which have changed dramatically since the pre-solver days). Ignoring the majority of the publicly available information in a given hand, in this game of incomplete information, is a grave strategic mistake.

Cool tip thx. How did you do with this strategy?