K
karl coakley
Visionary
Silver Level
Hi there, at least one person per day writes a post on this topic on a Poker forum. I think what often happens is that people have the wrong idea about how profitable Poker is. You are playing a very difficult game where the biggest winners are only making a modest profit margin. This margin is a lot smaller than most people realise. The sickest pros have an average winrate of somewhere in the region of 5% (Over many thousands of hands). In plain English, this means that on average, out of every 20 pots they play they will win 11 of them and lose 9. I realise that these are ideal generalisations but I'm just trying to explain it clearly. The number 9 and 11 are not that far apart. And it gets worse. These wins and losses do not appear in a neat line. They can be spread out in any sequence throughout a player's session. This is why pros can often have long strings of losing sessions. They never know from pot to pot what is going to happen, they only know their expected average return over a large sample, and this is what they play for. A lot of depression is caused in Poker due to players expecting to see instant returns on their efforts. Sadly the game is just not built that way. The winning player's margin is so small, that it can take a very long time to see any meaningful results. For example if you're an NL2 cash player (Blinds $0.01/$0.02) with a modest winrate of 3bb/100 hands, then this translates to $0.06 / 100 hands. This is a winrate of $0.0006 per hand of Poker. If that same player plays 78 hands per hour then their hourly rate is $0.05 per hour. (5 cents per hour). This is equivalent to a tournament player grinding $0.50 SNGs with an ROI of about 10%.. (Roughly). You would probably make more money walking around for that hour looking for coins on the ground, and this is why many players choose to multitable.
Here's another example: A 5% winning player at $3/$6 can expect to make 5bb/100 hands = $30. If that player is also doing about 78 hands per hour then they can expect an average hourly rate of about $23 per hour. This is meaningful money. (This figures are approximate but they are fine for getting my point across). After 8 hours at this rate, that's like a full day's pay. So a player who is winning at a rate of 5% is feeling ok about the time they're putting in, and so they don't mind losing 9 pots out of every 20. But at the micros it tends to cause a lot of pain because there's nothing to show for the time spent. The same applies to SNG players who have positive ROIs but aren't seeing the effect because the amounts are so small. Moving up is the only way to solve this problem but it has to be done by beating each of the limits in succession. If you skip over the lower limits and can't beat them then what skills are you going to bring to the higher stakes games? The answer is none because you won't have them. These skills are practiced and perfected using amounts of money that don't matter until you are ready to up the ante.
And just to note, these figures don't even include the rake! You have to beat that too AND have a positive ROI or bb/100. So again, only the very best players are going to achieve this consistently without relying on luck. At the higher limits, these winrates translate to bigger and more useful amounts of money, and the rake% are also lower which increases the good player's winrate. So my point is, this game is going to be loaded with losing sessions and winning sessions spread out in random patterns. If you expect a reliable pattern in your results then you are going to be very disappointed and therefore become depressed. It's very easy for the whole game to seem like a conspiracy against us when we are in that mindset. But the key to success is getting control of your mind first and how it deals with these emotions that Poker generates. Play for the long term. Maybe take a break for a few months and save up a larger bankroll. Then you can come back and play for more meaningful amounts of money. That way, your modest wins will seem much more significant. But again, don't forget to learn the skills required to beat the limit you're playing at. Best of luck. R
LoL, The reality of poker....
Kind of reminds me of golf, a few mins to learn a lifetime to master.
Not only do you have to learn a profitable game, you also need to learn how to manage your sessions and bankroll which will kill you just as fast as leaks.