Is it possible to earn enough money to live on in $5 buy in sit n gos?

Do you think it is possible to earn a living just playing very cheap entry sit n gos at around $5 buy in.
Certainly playing 1 or 2 tables you would not earn enough with the variance but I think it would be possible playing a minimum of 4 tables.

Depends on what you consider 'living'. If you mean food, electricity, and some other activities other then sitting in front of a computer....no, it is not possible.

If you muti-table 10 sng(say 1 hr to play) 10 hours a day in a month you would have played 3000 sng. 3000 at 5.50 each(this is on stars) that is $16500 total invested.

At different ROI rates it looks like this:

4% ROI=$660 for a hourly win rate of $2.20(assuming 10hr per day X 30 days=300hr per month.
5% ROI=$825 for a houly win rate of $2.75
8% ROI=$1320 for a houly win rate of $4.40
10% ROI=1650 for a houly win rate of $5.50

As you can see not what you would call a living wage. From what I understand(and I could be wrong) a 10% ROI is very good for SNG. At these lower limits you might do better but I can't see you doing better than getting a real job.

Good luck.

Can I ask something about ROI? I guess there will be countless threads and reports etc but it's just a quick thing to make sure I've got it right.

Do you calculate (total profits)/(total investment)*100%

For eg:

Say I play 17 $0.25 buyin SNG's and get ITM 4 times ($3.49, $3.49, $1.86, $0.67)

Then it would be

100%(3.49+3.49+1.86+0.67-(17*0.25))/(17*0.25) ?

giving 123.8%

Reason being this seemed v.high. So maybe do you not do the *100% so it would be

1.24%

Help please!

Yes iRiis it is 123.8% ROI. You invested $4.25(Did the .25 include the rake?). At 123.8% x $4.25(your investment)=$5.26(your winnings/return on you investment).

thanks :>

no rake at .25 on PS

simple answer to question in topic title - looooool no

Pfft... 10 tables?

Let's play 200 TABLES!! That's 110$ per hour!!

oh, and what dorkus said

If you win every sit and go.

If you live in a 3rd world country where $20/day is enough to live on.

Would it not be possible to have a higher ROI at those buy ins.
10% seems kinda low as theres a lot of donks there.

Yes, it would be very possible at this level. The problem is that you could have a very high ROI when only playing 2 at a time but it would sink the more tables you add. To make a living playing these would take volume play. You will have to find the perfect combo of (number of tables played to ROI).

10% 10-tabling is a godly ROI even at micros.

Short term, maybe it seems a little low. But long term, where you've gotta take the inevitable downswings into account... Dorkus said it, 10% is equivalent to running like god.

And even if you manage to double that you're still only looking at $11/hr, working ten hour days and ten-tabling.

Have you tried multi-tabling more than a couple of SnGs, BTW? It's very different to cash games.

If you really want to make a living playing poker, learn cash games and if you ever get to a level where you can crush 100nl / beat 200nl, you could make a decent salary out of it.

You could also make some decent money mass multitabling $30+ sngs, but you'll want to kill yourself before the end of the month, imo.

Anything less than that and you're just kidding yourself with short term good luck giving you a wrong perspective on the achievable win rates.

plus if you were winning at 5$ sngs while multi tabling, the obv thing to do would be to move up.....

+1

"... so you're tellin me there's a chance." -- Lloyd Christmas

Because there are a lot of donks out there is why its so low. You could get it in right all of the time (which you won't) and people suckout with the dumbest hands. Sure you win a lot too, but there is a higher than average suckout rate imo.

Yes, you can!

-1

According to Chris Fergueson, you can expect to win around 2/3 of your one table sng and around 1/8 of MTT tournaments. I have only played about 100 of the (9) sngs and have made ITM about 90% of the time. I find that if you play 3 games get 1- 1st, 1-3rd, and 1-4+(a loss) then you end up making the amount of the buy- in as profit. A $1 sng pays on average $1 if you play 5 of them you make $5.

Can you live on $5 sngs? Can you achieve the 2/3 win ratio and the 1/3 1st place ratio? Can you still achieve this if you multi-table? Can you still achieve this if you play turbo?

A regular one table sng on FT takes about an hour a turbo take about 1/2 hour.

I think you need at least $100 a day to survive!

So how are you going to get the 20 games in a day:

4 at a time for 5 hours (2.5 for turbo)

2 at a time for 10 hours (5 for turbo)

THESE ARE NOT LOFTY GOALS IT CAN BE DONE IF YOU ARE SERIOUS!

As far as ROI is concerned if you have less than 10% you may need to think about skilling up, leveling down, decreasing the number played simultaneously, or stop playing turbos (my ROI is over 200% look it up if you feel you need to)!!!

Don't know what kind of advice ur looking for, but if ur only going to play 5$ tournys just have fun, u don't need fancy formulas to tell u that you will not have enough to live on. see u on the felts.

IMO (in my opinion) is not necessary to include in your blogs, in fact it is gramatically incorrect. Your name is on the blog already anyone reading the blog knows it is just an opinion.

LMAO

When I read his I thought not a chance ansd I see from some of the responses already that the arguements against have already been made. Heed te advice and get a more reliable job.

you, sir, are going to be sooooo disappointed when your hot run ends.

ACE i did SS you and the only reason your ROI is so hihg is due to one big win..looks like around a 200$ win? other that yes you are still going up in your graph but your roi isnt from consistently play sngs...plus you have less than 400 games played...thats nothing tbh

i lol'd pretty hard

You'd probably need to 20 table $20+ turbo sngs to get by. I spose that would work out to something like 40 sngs/hr if you had the right setup/hotkeys/scripts to automatically join games, etc. @ 5% ROI + 25% rakeback would give you an average of $1.25/game if the rake is $1 for turbo sngs (no idea). So that would be $50/hr, which should be fine but it would probably be pretty hard to do 5% ROI 20tabling constantly unless you are pretty good so i'd suspect you need to play $30+ most likely (which are still pretty much micro sngs).

$5 sngs @ 4 tables would be like <$5/hr.

There ya go, a $1 player telling you how to make a living, playing sit and go's. You should listen to him.

^^^ LOL

Afaik CF is a totally unknown noob who never won anything and has no skills.

2/3 sngs and 1/8 MMT win rate is nearly impossible.

No, wait - I just won one and now I'll start a new stat - wow I'm at 100%.

20% sng win rate and 10% ITM in large MTTs is good imo.

Maybe if you live at home and still get an allowance and ride a bike everywhere. Otherwise get a job.

Here is a way to find out if you can make a living. Play for 6 months and figure out how much money you made at poker. Is that enough to cover your expenses without hurting your bankroll? Better yet, look how much you made last month, was that enough to cover all your expenses plus increasing your bankroll?

If it's not, don't be disappointed. If you keep progressing maybe in a year or two you will be at the high stakes tables and you'll be able to make a living without any compromises. At this point, maybe concentrate on increasing your BR.

Good luck if you decide to make a make poker your living.


As far as Chris Ferguson's comments about WINNING 2/3 of the SnG's....can someone find that and post the link? I think that might have been taken out of context. The top players are finishing 35% ITM for SnG's and MTT players are doing well if they finish 15% ITM. I think you need a sample size of about 1000 games to see where you are really at. Anyone can go on a heater and catch cards and have their cards hold up on 60/40 races. The real test of a player is how well they handle the 10-15-20 game losing streaks. I'm almost positive I'm not the only one who has experienced something like that. Oh by the way, as good as Chris Ferguson is, he is not immune to downswings. On his $0-$10k challenge he went up to $27k then went on a major losing streak all the way back to $9k. This is Chris Ferguson, I mean CHRIS F'N FERGUSON......$27k to $9k. If it can happen to him, it can happen to all of us.