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Quitting the full-time poker scene

158 points by ankit70 3y ago

jesseab 3y ago
One of the best HN posts I’ve ever read. Thanks for sharing your story. I don’t have any doubt you’ll be happy about your pivot and successful in your next phase. Good luck.
- whoami_nr 3y ago
  Author here. Thanks for the kind words and happy to answer any questions. If you like my writing, checkout my blog at rnikhil.com where this was posted originally.
clubm8 3y ago
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huytersd 3y ago
I was under the impression that online poker rooms are low key rigged and at the very least just cycle through preexisting card combinations rather than doing even a programmatic randomization (let alone using a true external source of randomization).
- PaulRobinson 3y ago
  Source? That behaviour quite likely lands everyone involved in jail in regulated (think big name entities with licenses in Malta types) companies. These can be FTSE listed companies with valuations in the billions, and subject to intense regulatory and legal scrutiny. If you play with crypto on the dark web, you deserve everything you get. Rock up to the established brands, you can expect some minimum standards.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > That behaviour quite likely lands everyone involved in jail in regulated (think big name entities with licenses in Malta types) companies. I wouldn't trust these Maltese companies either. They've been embroiled in lawsuits here in Germany for ignoring gambling laws - and after a lot of gamblers won said lawsuits and demanding their losses be repaid, Malta actually passed a law limiting asset seizure orders from other EU nations, in a move likely to be brought towards the EU court system [1]. [1] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/malta-gluecksspiel-100.html https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/malta-gluecksspiel-100....
- chelmzy 3y ago
  I don't know about rigged. But there is a lot of RTA (real time assistance) usage on the sites. Essentially clients that inform you of the best decisions to make according to GTO principles.
  - whoami_nr 3y ago
    Author of the post here. Yes RTA are common. Botting is common. RTA based on simple GTO solvers is common. I have built bot/fraud/collusion detection for the websites along with being on the other side as well. I recently built the poker platform for an Indian decacorn.
- oh_sigh 3y ago
  Seems unlikely, unless you're hitting up an extremely shady online poker room. A more likely source of rigging is either multiple players at the same table colluding with one another, or players just feeding table data into a bot which tells them how to play
- LegibleCrimson 3y ago
  I doubt almost any of them would be rigged. Especially with the rake, having a fully fair online poker game still makes bank on almost no risk without any rigging at all. There's not really any reason for them to be rigged. I played a little for fun on some Bitcoin poker sites about a decade ago, and the sites I used were verifiably fair and gave you the game's seed when you were finished. I don't think I'd ever play for real money on a site that I couldn't verify to be fair. You don't want true external source of randomization for anything other than the seed, otherwise you couldn't verify the game. A rational fear would be more about a site using a predictable RNG, or somebody being able to exfiltrate or deduce the seed of a running game, or players colluding with each other or an employee. Nowadays, an AI assistant (or full-fledged poker bots) probably largely makes playing online poker a crapshoot anyway. There's not really any point in a poker site itself rigging a game when the house always wins anyway.
- treme 3y ago
  there was one major scandal @ UltimateBet where ex-sys admin had superuser access to people's holecards. But besides that, most rooms are legit, the rooms have decent incentive to make sure their RNG is robust since pro poker players are smart enough to pull data to figure things out if things are shady. as another comment said below, RTA is probably biggest ways people take unfair advantage nowadays.
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- thatguysaguy 3y ago
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sneak 3y ago
Poker is my favorite turn-based strategy game and I play it very often. That said, it’s extremely time-consuming, and, while it can be profitable, not extremely so unless you are 99th percentile. For most profitable players, it’s nice money usually but never anything lifechanging. Part of the problem is that it takes huge amounts of time to accomplish anything; most of poker is waiting (and knowing when more waiting is warranted). It’s much, much better as a hobby than a job. Software is a much better gig, with much higher returns in your late-stage career (as the author notes well in TFA). If you are really good at software (but still well below 99th percentile good) you can still earn lifechanging money.
nadermx 3y ago
"I learned another skill and I probably can always find a way to support myself in dire situations" I think this nails it. As a grinder you know the work you put in. And given the game has been around lifetimes, during your life if dire shows up, like any skilled profesional, you do what you know.
- whoami_nr 3y ago
  Author here. You are right. Doing hard things just for the sake it builds your confidence. Relevant article: https://blog.nateliason.com/p/proof-you-can-do-hard-things https://blog.nateliason.com/p/proof-you-can-do-hard-things
Aurornis 3y ago
> Poker has the best hourly rate for any job in India. The money is simply un-comparable to any job a 20 year old can get and is close to VP+ level in unicorn/FAANG companies > Imagine sitting in front of a screen for 12-16hrs a day, clicking buttons > The 95th percentile Poker income is about $200-250k. I knew quite a few people who went through poker phases in college and their early 20s, back before it was heavily regulated. Back then, it was common for random people to join online casinos without any real skill to go along with it, so they were basically milking the average players all day long. They all had similar ideas about how they were going to get huge incomes by applying basic principles and scaling it to as many simultaneous poker windows as they could. Some of these were very smart and talented people. A couple wrote scripts to track and graph their progress and statistics, which they shared online for extra motivation. Honestly, it became depressing to watch the growing dissonance between the high incomes they thought they were going to generate and the actual progress of their balances. Also, staring at poker screens for 12-16 hours per day is soul crushing. Doing that to have a 5% chance of earning $250K (if those stats are correct) is even more depressing. And then there's drawdown periods: Some times odds would align against them or they'd be off their game for some reason. They could go through long periods where their net balance was either flat or in slow decline, which could turn into a self-reinforcing cycle that worsened their play. I don't know anyone who continued for more than a few years. I did recently talk to someone who left their tech job to play poker for 5 years. He was at a level where he traveled to tournaments and got lucky a few times, but realized it was no longer fun nor sustainable. He was having a huge difficulty getting back into a career job. Most interviewers looked at the 5 year gap in his resume to play poker and passed. Those who did give him interviews asked a lot of questions about his career goals, likely because they assumed he was just falling back to a real job for a while before he went back to poker again in a few years. Last we spoke, he still hadn't landed a job.
- ska 3y ago
  Even without the flight risk, a 5 year resume gap is difficult, especially mid-career. Accurate or not, your hiring managers are pretty much going to assume nothing you learned in those 5 years applies, so you are awkward to place. Especially if your salary expectations have grown.
97s 3y ago
I played back during the glory days of 2000-2004 and through the net-teller shutdown for America. Back then the money was absolutely absurd, because the game was very new online and very few people understood basics. This combined with the massive amount of marketing that was going on for television, tons of people were addicted to the thrill of the game. Every single year the game became more difficult as more people studied and I continued to move up into higher and higher stakes. At one point I looked at how much money I had made/compared to how much I hated what I was doing and decided that I was done. People around me never understood why I quit because they knew me and the amount of income I had made, but the thing is no one can understand what it is to live on a grinders schedule like that. I would get up at 10-11AM study the hands from the previous day to make sure I was playing correctly mentally, read over new material, review a partners hands as we both did each others to confirm playstyle and decisions were correct, around 3PM I would start scouting tables across various levels looking for soft players that I had datamined information about. Around 4-5PM I would start playing and continue to add tables with soft players and immediately leave any tables that didn't contain any soft players or they had busted. This table hopping and monitoring is absolutely exhausting, but critical to being as profitable as possible. Repeat this until about 11PM. Then go to sleep until 4AM, get up and play against the players on the other side of the world as they were starting to play loose. Play against them until about 7AM, then go to sleep and get up around 11. Repeat. Do this for 4 years and almost anyone will decide enough is enough even with the amount of income I was making back then. The only rest I took was on weekends, just to remove myself mentally from the exhaustion. Of course poker is much tougher now then it was then. I wouldn't even dream of trying to play now. I was maybe upper 85-90% player, now I would be in the lower 50%.
- ackbar03 3y ago
  How much did you make exactly? That's an extremely disciplined approach. I'd assume you could do pretty well at other stuff if you took it as serious as you did your online poker
  - whartung 3y ago
    Friend of mine did this in the heyday. He’d have, like a dozen games going. Hunting and playing “soft players” (as the GP calls them). I don’t know how long he played, he certainly didn’t mention a grind as described here. But, he netted enough to buy his then new $30k Lexus. A lucrative hobby if nothing else.
osti 3y ago
I used to play PLO (pot limit omaha) full time and made very low 6 figures over 2 years. I quit in 2015 and went back to school for a CS degree, doing much better now financially, and the work is actually usually more interesting than poker, but that might be due to me burning out back then.
- whoami_nr 3y ago
  Author here. I also played PLO for a living. BTW, I made a small tool for professionals to study PLO. Check it out here: https://rnikhil.com/2022/06/15/gtoinspector-startup.html https://rnikhil.com/2022/06/15/gtoinspector-startup.html
  - osti 3y ago
    Are you from India and if so, how's the new tax on deposit regulation affecting you?
    - whoami_nr 3y ago
      The new tax regulations effectively broke the industry. Currently the websites are bearing the tax burden in effect sacrificing CM1 to keep the revenue constant. This is not sustainable to small players and lot of small RMG companies already shut shop. There are lot of articles on the internet about the tax impact on gaming companies. You can check them out for more details
Tarsul 3y ago
I find interesting that no one (yet) in OP or in the comments has talked about my main complaint about playing Poker as a living: it's a zero sum game where you basically only take money from other people. It's not productive. For me, that in itself is as depressing as the grind. But it appears most players don't really care about this, maybe because life oftentimes is not fair and thus being productive is not seen as important as it ought to be? Idk but I find it an important question, culturally.
- coderintherye 3y ago
  The poker player is providing entertainment for others. It's really not much different than working on a company backed by a rich investor where the CEO skillfully plays their cards to maneuver more money out of the rich fish while the other players also try to get what they can out of them.
  - zone411 3y ago
    > The poker player is providing entertainment for others. Yes, and the top earners in poker aren't always the best players, but rather skilled players who have some personality instead of putting on headphones and grinding and get invited to lucrative private games.
    - nadermx 3y ago
      till you don't
  - watwut 3y ago
    Poker players search for weak opponents to extract money from them in games where no one watches. That is the income of full time poker players.
  - bluecalm 3y ago
    Entertainment is much better for recreational players without pro players in the game maybe with the exception of occasional tournament celebrity. Pro poker player doesn't provide anything to anyone with the exception of a challenge to other pro players.
jjxw 3y ago
As a part time live tournament grinder who has a full time job it's always sobering to hear from full time grinders who end up quitting due to how tough the grind is. A couple of observations to add: 1) There is absolutely a huge edge to be had playing live tournaments, even for buy ins in the $1k - $5k range. If you are playing outside of Vegas it is very common to end up at a table where at least half the table are "recreational" (i.e. players who are bad and are likely to make large mistakes). 2) The downside to playing live tournaments is that it is difficult to get reasonable volume in and the variance can be brutal. It is not that unlikely to go on a 20+ buy in downswing even with a decent edge. 3) Having an income source not tied to poker is huge and allows you to not have to be conservative with bankroll management. If you're pulling in mid 6 figures from a day job you don't have to worry about selling action or going down in stakes when you go on a downswing because you can always supplement the bankroll with your income. This, obviously, can be taken too far, but you don't have to be as worried about the variance from shot taking a higher buy in tournament where you know you have an edge like the $10k WSOP Main Event which is by far the softest $10k that exists. As the saying goes, being a professional gambler is the hardest way to make an easy living.
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  It also sounds like an overall horrible, consistently highly amoral way of life. Plus some form of an addiction. All the details in this discussion point pretty clearly to this. You need to be a proper a-hole to be fine doing this long term. If one had only choice between being poor homeless or do this I could accept that relativity, but not like this. I can't have any possible respect for smart capable human living like that by choice, sucking desperate horribly sick people of their possessions, ever. Sure, there are still few humans around worse than that, just look at the news, but its still pretty much the moral bottom. And all I've seen in this discussion just proves that (I don't judge this activity from my experience since I don't play cards, I get my happiness from mountains and extreme sports and that's more than enough, and salary is enough too).
  - sneak 3y ago
    There is absolutely nothing amoral about engaging directly in a fair game with consenting adults. Nobody can lose anything they don’t choose to play. Consent matters. We sell cigarettes on every streetcorner (to say nothing of bars), which is evidence that society has reached widespread consensus on the fact that addicts are allowed to choose to be addicted (or not) to things. (The vast, vast majority of people who play poker are not addicted to playing poker.)
ilc 3y ago
I've played my share on-line. Honestly, I can't see it as a job. The skill at the high levels is insane, the variance is insane. There is a reason people have said "No professional will win the WSOP again." Even if you are 5-10% better than everyone else... There is many, many, many trials to survive, and you only have to lose once when you are right. There's a reason Phil Hellmuth folded KK early in the WSOP. And when you understand why... It speaks volumes of his thoughts about himself. Right or wrong. The fish are out there. It just ain't worth frying them. Go have fun playing. It is a fun game. But a living... for just a few.
mym1990 3y ago
I used to play a ton online before Black Friday shut it down, and I wasn’t really profitable, but learning the game…it was one of the most fun and frustrating things I have ever experienced. And it basically disappeared overnight…
furyofantares 3y ago
I loved poker but it was too all-encompassing for me. I fairly quickly noticed there was just nothing much else going anywhere in my life. I was still getting better at poker, but not at the same rate as when I started, and I wasn't learning or making or consuming anything else. I really did love it. But I really couldn't imagine not learning anything else. I think video game streaming is the same. Not much room left for yourself.
charlieyu1 3y ago
I have to say I can't see how $200k a year is a bad idea. I would do it if only I could make half of that. Is the grind boring? So are many jobs. At the end of the day, if I am going to be making six figures I can spend some money for enjoyment
- urbandw311er 3y ago
  It’s almost like you didn’t read all the bits of the post where they discussed all of this.
  - charlieyu1 3y ago
    I did, and I'm trying to put more time into poker at the moment. Maybe I'm still enthusiastic
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  For some, moral aspects prevent them from doing similar stuff. For others, seemingly there are no moral aspects to consider
- whoami_nr 3y ago
  Author here. Yes, the grind is monotonous and borderline depressing because you are playing a zero sum game. Regarding the money, after you do that for a couple years, money has very little meaning and value.
nickjj 3y ago
Back in the mid-2000s some places had crazy incentives like PokerStars. They had a form of rakeback where you could sit and grind out hands while playing break even'ish poker but still net $100,000 a year back then. The idea there was you could play ~16 tables at a time for ~25 hours a week making robotic decisions based on odds or a quick glance at PokerTracker's HUD. There's a write up about it here: https://www.pokernews.com/news/2010/08/making-supernova-elite-with-team-pokerstars-online-pro-leath-8670.htm https://www.pokernews.com/news/2010/08/making-supernova-elit... There were other places as well. There were so many stories posted on the 2+2 forums[0] of people making really good money doing this. That's one of the most popular poker forums. It's interesting because it's a different type of skill. Tile a bunch of windows, have a lot of mental fortitude and grind it out. It's a completely different strategy than trying to become a "winning" player. I used to play microstates back before online poker was banned in the US so I didn't participate in that. What's funny though is even back then at the 5c-10c ($10 buy in) or 10c-25c ($25 buy in) NL tables you'd have folks 4-6 tabling while looking at a PokerTrack HUD which gathered stats about players and displayed them above their name plate. I can't imagine at how much the game must have progressed since then. [0]: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/ https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/
upupupandaway 3y ago
Yesterday I read a post here on HN about gambling and online casinos and went "pffft, people can't control their actions, isn't there accountability anymore?". Then I remembered that in 2006, while employed at the world's top company in 2006 I got into the poker craze and more than once a week worked from home so that I could multi-screen work e-mails with poker. It was great that I noticed this before degenerating into a full-time addict. I used to grind at $15 9-player STTs and the variance was downright depressing. I cannot imagine what people playing at higher stakes go through. Just out of curiosity, I looked up many of the hotshot professionals of the day, almost none are still playing today. The games became tough and eventually everyone gets surpassed by the new guy using real-time assistance. People starting this grind today simply shouldn't do it. Odds are that the game will become zero-sum at planetary scale given everyone and their mother is using GTO solvers now.
squokko 3y ago
I've played a few hands of casino poker, just for fun (although I once won several thousand dollars when I was bored at the end of the night and went all-in with 4-7 offsuit and then flopped a full house). After maybe 10 hours spent in casinos I cannot even fathom spending my whole career in stinky windowless rooms late at night with that bunch of degenerates. Absolutely sickening thought
politelemon 3y ago
What does this mean, I can't tell if it's a poker term or keyboard term "without tilting"
- greensoap 3y ago
  Going “on tilt” is when you make emotional decisions because you are chasing the wins or running from the losses.
  - politelemon 3y ago
    Thanks! Makes sense. Looks specific to poker but I can see it easily applying to other parts of life too
    - globular-toast 3y ago
      I suppose things like succumbing to the sunken cost fallacy would count?
    - hugg 3y ago
      It's a common term in online video gaming as well
- davidhunter 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilt_(poker) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilt_(poker)
mellifluoua 3y ago
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misja111 3y ago
I played for a living during 5 years in the early 90's. So before the Internet took off. Of course there were some differences with OP's situation, e.g. because games were scarce I didn't play only poker but also backgammon, and basically any other game that had any skill and could be played for money. Like OP, I decided to become professional because of the freedom, but also because I just liked games. But after a couple of years these advantages start to fade away. First of all, you are not really free, especially when games are scarce: you have to be always available because if you miss a good game, it can take days before another one comes along. Also, the fun in playing games erodes if you play them day in day out. Also, like OP points out, variance is brutal. The downswings can wear you out, sometimes I had to take a few days to recover. But the main reason I eventually switched to a career in IT was something that OP also mentions: the main skill in making a lot of money, especially in live games, is not how well you play, but how good you are in finding wealthy suckers that want to play against you. This part really put me off in the end, it just wasn't me.
globular-toast 3y ago
A few of my friends at uni were into poker. I started to get into it myself. But what really put me off was the game does not work without money. People can't seem to play poker just for fun and that makes it a thoroughly inferior game in my opinion. Also, I couldn't get people interested in anything except Texas Hold'em despite the fact 7 Card Stud is clearly a much better game.
Unfrozen0688 3y ago
Why is this on an indian car forum? Is it like bodybuildning forum where its a lot of unrelated stuff?
- whoami_nr 3y ago
  Author here. I originally wrote it on my blog (www.rnikhil.com) and cross-posted on team-bhp.com . Its not just a car forum but just enthusiastic folks discussing anything and everything. Like HN but based on cars and not startups. Somebody posted the link here from team-bhp.
  - ankit70 3y ago
    That would be me. Apologies as I didn't know about the original entry at rnikhil.
    - whoami_nr 3y ago
      No problem. Please replace the above link with the original: https://rnikhil.com/2023/11/12/quitting-fulltime-poker.html https://rnikhil.com/2023/11/12/quitting-fulltime-poker.html
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hkon 3y ago
Playing poker for a living sounds very boring.
bluecalm 3y ago
I was involved in poker for most of my adult life - first as pro player and then as a poker software developer. I was very lucky to be able live off poker winnings as a player and then become financially independent thanks to the success of my software (I am PioSOLVER founder and one of the two original programmers along with my close friend). I agree with about everything the author of the post said. It's a lonely and destructive game. Success if meaningless and comes at expense of others. It's bad for your health both physical and mental. Gambling is fine as an entertainment in moderate amount for people who don't get addicted to it. I don't see any value in professional gambling though. I think almost everyone is worse off in that world. There is a lot of potential lost creating winners and losers in a negative sum game while game organizers make out like bandits luring addicts to their games (both online and live). Professional poker is a very effective trap for smart analytical people. You can find success there faster and easier than in other areas and then you face a dilemma the author talks about: money is great but you feel like your are not building anything and opportunities to become involved in productive and rewarding endeavours slowly drift away. Switching becomes more difficult (and costly) with every passing year. I am one of the big winners of the poker world - not only I made enough money to never worry about it again but I've met a lot o interesting people and learnt a lot of interesting things during work on my poker related project. I have one advice for smart people, especially those similar to me (ADHD, maybe slightly on autistic spectrum who can't imagine working a 9-5 job) - don't get involved it will lure you and chew you out. If you feel you have trouble holding a job or completing your degree which is not caused by your intellectual potential - seek help and maybe medication. After more than 15 years in the industry my biggest professional dream is to one day have enough discipline and energy to start a project in an unrelated area and create something more useful than a tool to help winners beat losers at a gambling game.
- mtremsal 3y ago
  Thank you for sharing! I was just wondering what kind of devs work on solvers as a day job. Would you say that building a “toy solver” for hold em could be a fun way to learn or improve with a language? I’d be curious to see how much work is needed to approximate the shape of the real GTO charts and common bet sizes.
- 3y ago
lifeinthevoid 3y ago
I played microstakes for a while 10c-25c, 25c-50c and was an OK grinder in my teens and could steadily increase my bankroll only to tilt away all the profit (and more) every time. Those were not good times.
nhggfu 3y ago
A +EV decision by the O.P
silexia 3y ago
I was addicted to gambling online via Texas hold em poker for a period in college. I mastered the statistics and broke about even. I should never have done it though, extremely destructive to sleep and healthy mental patterns.
whoami_nr 3y ago
Author here. Happy to answer any questions. @dang please replace the above link with the original: https://rnikhil.com/2023/11/12/quitting-fulltime-poker.html https://rnikhil.com/2023/11/12/quitting-fulltime-poker.html
fairity 3y ago
Whenever there's a large financial incentive to cheat and low consequence for getting caught, it's safe to assume that there will be sophisticated attempts to do so. I think both these preconditions are met (in spades) when it comes to online poker. As far as I can tell, there's no way to stop collusion in the following form: - Create a large remote team of cheaters - Have them all multi-table PLO at the same online casino - Each participant randomly chooses tables to avoid anti-collusion tracking - With a large enough pool of cheaters, you will inevitably have multiple colluders at the same table - Sharing knowledge of your whole cards with other colluding table participants will give you all a huge winning edge Since there's no way to stop the above, and there's a large incentive with low consequences if caught, I assume cheating is a huge problem in online poker. Wondering if anyone can confirm/deny this?

158 points by ankit70 3y ago

One of the best HN posts I’ve ever read. Thanks for sharing your story. I don’t have any doubt you’ll be happy about your pivot and successful in your next phase. Good luck.

whoami_nr 3y ago
Author here. Thanks for the kind words and happy to answer any questions. If you like my writing, checkout my blog at rnikhil.com where this was posted originally.

clubm8 3y ago

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huytersd 3y ago

I was under the impression that online poker rooms are low key rigged and at the very least just cycle through preexisting card combinations rather than doing even a programmatic randomization (let alone using a true external source of randomization).

PaulRobinson 3y ago
Source? That behaviour quite likely lands everyone involved in jail in regulated (think big name entities with licenses in Malta types) companies. These can be FTSE listed companies with valuations in the billions, and subject to intense regulatory and legal scrutiny. If you play with crypto on the dark web, you deserve everything you get. Rock up to the established brands, you can expect some minimum standards.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > That behaviour quite likely lands everyone involved in jail in regulated (think big name entities with licenses in Malta types) companies. I wouldn't trust these Maltese companies either. They've been embroiled in lawsuits here in Germany for ignoring gambling laws - and after a lot of gamblers won said lawsuits and demanding their losses be repaid, Malta actually passed a law limiting asset seizure orders from other EU nations, in a move likely to be brought towards the EU court system [1]. [1] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/malta-gluecksspiel-100.html https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/malta-gluecksspiel-100....
chelmzy 3y ago
I don't know about rigged. But there is a lot of RTA (real time assistance) usage on the sites. Essentially clients that inform you of the best decisions to make according to GTO principles.
- whoami_nr 3y ago
  Author of the post here. Yes RTA are common. Botting is common. RTA based on simple GTO solvers is common. I have built bot/fraud/collusion detection for the websites along with being on the other side as well. I recently built the poker platform for an Indian decacorn.
oh_sigh 3y ago
Seems unlikely, unless you're hitting up an extremely shady online poker room. A more likely source of rigging is either multiple players at the same table colluding with one another, or players just feeding table data into a bot which tells them how to play
LegibleCrimson 3y ago
I doubt almost any of them would be rigged. Especially with the rake, having a fully fair online poker game still makes bank on almost no risk without any rigging at all. There's not really any reason for them to be rigged. I played a little for fun on some Bitcoin poker sites about a decade ago, and the sites I used were verifiably fair and gave you the game's seed when you were finished. I don't think I'd ever play for real money on a site that I couldn't verify to be fair. You don't want true external source of randomization for anything other than the seed, otherwise you couldn't verify the game. A rational fear would be more about a site using a predictable RNG, or somebody being able to exfiltrate or deduce the seed of a running game, or players colluding with each other or an employee. Nowadays, an AI assistant (or full-fledged poker bots) probably largely makes playing online poker a crapshoot anyway. There's not really any point in a poker site itself rigging a game when the house always wins anyway.
treme 3y ago
there was one major scandal @ UltimateBet where ex-sys admin had superuser access to people's holecards. But besides that, most rooms are legit, the rooms have decent incentive to make sure their RNG is robust since pro poker players are smart enough to pull data to figure things out if things are shady. as another comment said below, RTA is probably biggest ways people take unfair advantage nowadays.

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thatguysaguy 3y ago
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sneak 3y ago

Poker is my favorite turn-based strategy game and I play it very often. That said, it’s extremely time-consuming, and, while it can be profitable, not extremely so unless you are 99th percentile. For most profitable players, it’s nice money usually but never anything lifechanging. Part of the problem is that it takes huge amounts of time to accomplish anything; most of poker is waiting (and knowing when more waiting is warranted). It’s much, much better as a hobby than a job. Software is a much better gig, with much higher returns in your late-stage career (as the author notes well in TFA). If you are really good at software (but still well below 99th percentile good) you can still earn lifechanging money.

nadermx 3y ago

"I learned another skill and I probably can always find a way to support myself in dire situations" I think this nails it. As a grinder you know the work you put in. And given the game has been around lifetimes, during your life if dire shows up, like any skilled profesional, you do what you know.

whoami_nr 3y ago
Author here. You are right. Doing hard things just for the sake it builds your confidence. Relevant article: https://blog.nateliason.com/p/proof-you-can-do-hard-things https://blog.nateliason.com/p/proof-you-can-do-hard-things

Aurornis 3y ago

> Poker has the best hourly rate for any job in India. The money is simply un-comparable to any job a 20 year old can get and is close to VP+ level in unicorn/FAANG companies > Imagine sitting in front of a screen for 12-16hrs a day, clicking buttons > The 95th percentile Poker income is about $200-250k. I knew quite a few people who went through poker phases in college and their early 20s, back before it was heavily regulated. Back then, it was common for random people to join online casinos without any real skill to go along with it, so they were basically milking the average players all day long. They all had similar ideas about how they were going to get huge incomes by applying basic principles and scaling it to as many simultaneous poker windows as they could. Some of these were very smart and talented people. A couple wrote scripts to track and graph their progress and statistics, which they shared online for extra motivation. Honestly, it became depressing to watch the growing dissonance between the high incomes they thought they were going to generate and the actual progress of their balances. Also, staring at poker screens for 12-16 hours per day is soul crushing. Doing that to have a 5% chance of earning $250K (if those stats are correct) is even more depressing. And then there's drawdown periods: Some times odds would align against them or they'd be off their game for some reason. They could go through long periods where their net balance was either flat or in slow decline, which could turn into a self-reinforcing cycle that worsened their play. I don't know anyone who continued for more than a few years. I did recently talk to someone who left their tech job to play poker for 5 years. He was at a level where he traveled to tournaments and got lucky a few times, but realized it was no longer fun nor sustainable. He was having a huge difficulty getting back into a career job. Most interviewers looked at the 5 year gap in his resume to play poker and passed. Those who did give him interviews asked a lot of questions about his career goals, likely because they assumed he was just falling back to a real job for a while before he went back to poker again in a few years. Last we spoke, he still hadn't landed a job.

ska 3y ago
Even without the flight risk, a 5 year resume gap is difficult, especially mid-career. Accurate or not, your hiring managers are pretty much going to assume nothing you learned in those 5 years applies, so you are awkward to place. Especially if your salary expectations have grown.

97s 3y ago

I played back during the glory days of 2000-2004 and through the net-teller shutdown for America. Back then the money was absolutely absurd, because the game was very new online and very few people understood basics. This combined with the massive amount of marketing that was going on for television, tons of people were addicted to the thrill of the game. Every single year the game became more difficult as more people studied and I continued to move up into higher and higher stakes. At one point I looked at how much money I had made/compared to how much I hated what I was doing and decided that I was done. People around me never understood why I quit because they knew me and the amount of income I had made, but the thing is no one can understand what it is to live on a grinders schedule like that. I would get up at 10-11AM study the hands from the previous day to make sure I was playing correctly mentally, read over new material, review a partners hands as we both did each others to confirm playstyle and decisions were correct, around 3PM I would start scouting tables across various levels looking for soft players that I had datamined information about. Around 4-5PM I would start playing and continue to add tables with soft players and immediately leave any tables that didn't contain any soft players or they had busted. This table hopping and monitoring is absolutely exhausting, but critical to being as profitable as possible. Repeat this until about 11PM. Then go to sleep until 4AM, get up and play against the players on the other side of the world as they were starting to play loose. Play against them until about 7AM, then go to sleep and get up around 11. Repeat. Do this for 4 years and almost anyone will decide enough is enough even with the amount of income I was making back then. The only rest I took was on weekends, just to remove myself mentally from the exhaustion. Of course poker is much tougher now then it was then. I wouldn't even dream of trying to play now. I was maybe upper 85-90% player, now I would be in the lower 50%.

ackbar03 3y ago
How much did you make exactly? That's an extremely disciplined approach. I'd assume you could do pretty well at other stuff if you took it as serious as you did your online poker
- whartung 3y ago
  Friend of mine did this in the heyday. He’d have, like a dozen games going. Hunting and playing “soft players” (as the GP calls them). I don’t know how long he played, he certainly didn’t mention a grind as described here. But, he netted enough to buy his then new $30k Lexus. A lucrative hobby if nothing else.

osti 3y ago

I used to play PLO (pot limit omaha) full time and made very low 6 figures over 2 years. I quit in 2015 and went back to school for a CS degree, doing much better now financially, and the work is actually usually more interesting than poker, but that might be due to me burning out back then.

whoami_nr 3y ago
Author here. I also played PLO for a living. BTW, I made a small tool for professionals to study PLO. Check it out here: https://rnikhil.com/2022/06/15/gtoinspector-startup.html https://rnikhil.com/2022/06/15/gtoinspector-startup.html
- osti 3y ago
  Are you from India and if so, how's the new tax on deposit regulation affecting you?
  - whoami_nr 3y ago
    The new tax regulations effectively broke the industry. Currently the websites are bearing the tax burden in effect sacrificing CM1 to keep the revenue constant. This is not sustainable to small players and lot of small RMG companies already shut shop. There are lot of articles on the internet about the tax impact on gaming companies. You can check them out for more details

Tarsul 3y ago

I find interesting that no one (yet) in OP or in the comments has talked about my main complaint about playing Poker as a living: it's a zero sum game where you basically only take money from other people. It's not productive. For me, that in itself is as depressing as the grind. But it appears most players don't really care about this, maybe because life oftentimes is not fair and thus being productive is not seen as important as it ought to be? Idk but I find it an important question, culturally.

coderintherye 3y ago
The poker player is providing entertainment for others. It's really not much different than working on a company backed by a rich investor where the CEO skillfully plays their cards to maneuver more money out of the rich fish while the other players also try to get what they can out of them.
- zone411 3y ago
  > The poker player is providing entertainment for others. Yes, and the top earners in poker aren't always the best players, but rather skilled players who have some personality instead of putting on headphones and grinding and get invited to lucrative private games.
  - nadermx 3y ago
    till you don't
- watwut 3y ago
  Poker players search for weak opponents to extract money from them in games where no one watches. That is the income of full time poker players.
- bluecalm 3y ago
  Entertainment is much better for recreational players without pro players in the game maybe with the exception of occasional tournament celebrity. Pro poker player doesn't provide anything to anyone with the exception of a challenge to other pro players.

jjxw 3y ago

As a part time live tournament grinder who has a full time job it's always sobering to hear from full time grinders who end up quitting due to how tough the grind is. A couple of observations to add: 1) There is absolutely a huge edge to be had playing live tournaments, even for buy ins in the $1k - $5k range. If you are playing outside of Vegas it is very common to end up at a table where at least half the table are "recreational" (i.e. players who are bad and are likely to make large mistakes). 2) The downside to playing live tournaments is that it is difficult to get reasonable volume in and the variance can be brutal. It is not that unlikely to go on a 20+ buy in downswing even with a decent edge. 3) Having an income source not tied to poker is huge and allows you to not have to be conservative with bankroll management. If you're pulling in mid 6 figures from a day job you don't have to worry about selling action or going down in stakes when you go on a downswing because you can always supplement the bankroll with your income. This, obviously, can be taken too far, but you don't have to be as worried about the variance from shot taking a higher buy in tournament where you know you have an edge like the $10k WSOP Main Event which is by far the softest $10k that exists. As the saying goes, being a professional gambler is the hardest way to make an easy living.

saiya-jin 3y ago
It also sounds like an overall horrible, consistently highly amoral way of life. Plus some form of an addiction. All the details in this discussion point pretty clearly to this. You need to be a proper a-hole to be fine doing this long term. If one had only choice between being poor homeless or do this I could accept that relativity, but not like this. I can't have any possible respect for smart capable human living like that by choice, sucking desperate horribly sick people of their possessions, ever. Sure, there are still few humans around worse than that, just look at the news, but its still pretty much the moral bottom. And all I've seen in this discussion just proves that (I don't judge this activity from my experience since I don't play cards, I get my happiness from mountains and extreme sports and that's more than enough, and salary is enough too).
- sneak 3y ago
  There is absolutely nothing amoral about engaging directly in a fair game with consenting adults. Nobody can lose anything they don’t choose to play. Consent matters. We sell cigarettes on every streetcorner (to say nothing of bars), which is evidence that society has reached widespread consensus on the fact that addicts are allowed to choose to be addicted (or not) to things. (The vast, vast majority of people who play poker are not addicted to playing poker.)

ilc 3y ago

I've played my share on-line. Honestly, I can't see it as a job. The skill at the high levels is insane, the variance is insane. There is a reason people have said "No professional will win the WSOP again." Even if you are 5-10% better than everyone else... There is many, many, many trials to survive, and you only have to lose once when you are right. There's a reason Phil Hellmuth folded KK early in the WSOP. And when you understand why... It speaks volumes of his thoughts about himself. Right or wrong. The fish are out there. It just ain't worth frying them. Go have fun playing. It is a fun game. But a living... for just a few.

mym1990 3y ago

I used to play a ton online before Black Friday shut it down, and I wasn’t really profitable, but learning the game…it was one of the most fun and frustrating things I have ever experienced. And it basically disappeared overnight…

furyofantares 3y ago

I loved poker but it was too all-encompassing for me. I fairly quickly noticed there was just nothing much else going anywhere in my life. I was still getting better at poker, but not at the same rate as when I started, and I wasn't learning or making or consuming anything else. I really did love it. But I really couldn't imagine not learning anything else. I think video game streaming is the same. Not much room left for yourself.

charlieyu1 3y ago

I have to say I can't see how $200k a year is a bad idea. I would do it if only I could make half of that. Is the grind boring? So are many jobs. At the end of the day, if I am going to be making six figures I can spend some money for enjoyment

urbandw311er 3y ago
It’s almost like you didn’t read all the bits of the post where they discussed all of this.
- charlieyu1 3y ago
  I did, and I'm trying to put more time into poker at the moment. Maybe I'm still enthusiastic
saiya-jin 3y ago
For some, moral aspects prevent them from doing similar stuff. For others, seemingly there are no moral aspects to consider
whoami_nr 3y ago
Author here. Yes, the grind is monotonous and borderline depressing because you are playing a zero sum game. Regarding the money, after you do that for a couple years, money has very little meaning and value.

nickjj 3y ago

Back in the mid-2000s some places had crazy incentives like PokerStars. They had a form of rakeback where you could sit and grind out hands while playing break even'ish poker but still net $100,000 a year back then. The idea there was you could play ~16 tables at a time for ~25 hours a week making robotic decisions based on odds or a quick glance at PokerTracker's HUD. There's a write up about it here: https://www.pokernews.com/news/2010/08/making-supernova-elite-with-team-pokerstars-online-pro-leath-8670.htm https://www.pokernews.com/news/2010/08/making-supernova-elit... There were other places as well. There were so many stories posted on the 2+2 forums[0] of people making really good money doing this. That's one of the most popular poker forums. It's interesting because it's a different type of skill. Tile a bunch of windows, have a lot of mental fortitude and grind it out. It's a completely different strategy than trying to become a "winning" player. I used to play microstates back before online poker was banned in the US so I didn't participate in that. What's funny though is even back then at the 5c-10c ($10 buy in) or 10c-25c ($25 buy in) NL tables you'd have folks 4-6 tabling while looking at a PokerTrack HUD which gathered stats about players and displayed them above their name plate. I can't imagine at how much the game must have progressed since then. [0]: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/ https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/

upupupandaway 3y ago

Yesterday I read a post here on HN about gambling and online casinos and went "pffft, people can't control their actions, isn't there accountability anymore?". Then I remembered that in 2006, while employed at the world's top company in 2006 I got into the poker craze and more than once a week worked from home so that I could multi-screen work e-mails with poker. It was great that I noticed this before degenerating into a full-time addict. I used to grind at $15 9-player STTs and the variance was downright depressing. I cannot imagine what people playing at higher stakes go through. Just out of curiosity, I looked up many of the hotshot professionals of the day, almost none are still playing today. The games became tough and eventually everyone gets surpassed by the new guy using real-time assistance. People starting this grind today simply shouldn't do it. Odds are that the game will become zero-sum at planetary scale given everyone and their mother is using GTO solvers now.

squokko 3y ago

I've played a few hands of casino poker, just for fun (although I once won several thousand dollars when I was bored at the end of the night and went all-in with 4-7 offsuit and then flopped a full house). After maybe 10 hours spent in casinos I cannot even fathom spending my whole career in stinky windowless rooms late at night with that bunch of degenerates. Absolutely sickening thought

politelemon 3y ago

What does this mean, I can't tell if it's a poker term or keyboard term "without tilting"

greensoap 3y ago
Going “on tilt” is when you make emotional decisions because you are chasing the wins or running from the losses.
- politelemon 3y ago
  Thanks! Makes sense. Looks specific to poker but I can see it easily applying to other parts of life too
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    I suppose things like succumbing to the sunken cost fallacy would count?
  - hugg 3y ago
    It's a common term in online video gaming as well
davidhunter 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilt_(poker) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilt_(poker)

mellifluoua 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago

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misja111 3y ago

I played for a living during 5 years in the early 90's. So before the Internet took off. Of course there were some differences with OP's situation, e.g. because games were scarce I didn't play only poker but also backgammon, and basically any other game that had any skill and could be played for money. Like OP, I decided to become professional because of the freedom, but also because I just liked games. But after a couple of years these advantages start to fade away. First of all, you are not really free, especially when games are scarce: you have to be always available because if you miss a good game, it can take days before another one comes along. Also, the fun in playing games erodes if you play them day in day out. Also, like OP points out, variance is brutal. The downswings can wear you out, sometimes I had to take a few days to recover. But the main reason I eventually switched to a career in IT was something that OP also mentions: the main skill in making a lot of money, especially in live games, is not how well you play, but how good you are in finding wealthy suckers that want to play against you. This part really put me off in the end, it just wasn't me.

globular-toast 3y ago

A few of my friends at uni were into poker. I started to get into it myself. But what really put me off was the game does not work without money. People can't seem to play poker just for fun and that makes it a thoroughly inferior game in my opinion. Also, I couldn't get people interested in anything except Texas Hold'em despite the fact 7 Card Stud is clearly a much better game.

Unfrozen0688 3y ago

Why is this on an indian car forum? Is it like bodybuildning forum where its a lot of unrelated stuff?

whoami_nr 3y ago
Author here. I originally wrote it on my blog (www.rnikhil.com) and cross-posted on team-bhp.com . Its not just a car forum but just enthusiastic folks discussing anything and everything. Like HN but based on cars and not startups. Somebody posted the link here from team-bhp.
- ankit70 3y ago
  That would be me. Apologies as I didn't know about the original entry at rnikhil.
  - whoami_nr 3y ago
    No problem. Please replace the above link with the original: https://rnikhil.com/2023/11/12/quitting-fulltime-poker.html https://rnikhil.com/2023/11/12/quitting-fulltime-poker.html

deleted 3y ago

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hkon 3y ago

Playing poker for a living sounds very boring.

bluecalm 3y ago

I was involved in poker for most of my adult life - first as pro player and then as a poker software developer. I was very lucky to be able live off poker winnings as a player and then become financially independent thanks to the success of my software (I am PioSOLVER founder and one of the two original programmers along with my close friend). I agree with about everything the author of the post said. It's a lonely and destructive game. Success if meaningless and comes at expense of others. It's bad for your health both physical and mental. Gambling is fine as an entertainment in moderate amount for people who don't get addicted to it. I don't see any value in professional gambling though. I think almost everyone is worse off in that world. There is a lot of potential lost creating winners and losers in a negative sum game while game organizers make out like bandits luring addicts to their games (both online and live). Professional poker is a very effective trap for smart analytical people. You can find success there faster and easier than in other areas and then you face a dilemma the author talks about: money is great but you feel like your are not building anything and opportunities to become involved in productive and rewarding endeavours slowly drift away. Switching becomes more difficult (and costly) with every passing year. I am one of the big winners of the poker world - not only I made enough money to never worry about it again but I've met a lot o interesting people and learnt a lot of interesting things during work on my poker related project. I have one advice for smart people, especially those similar to me (ADHD, maybe slightly on autistic spectrum who can't imagine working a 9-5 job) - don't get involved it will lure you and chew you out. If you feel you have trouble holding a job or completing your degree which is not caused by your intellectual potential - seek help and maybe medication. After more than 15 years in the industry my biggest professional dream is to one day have enough discipline and energy to start a project in an unrelated area and create something more useful than a tool to help winners beat losers at a gambling game.

mtremsal 3y ago
Thank you for sharing! I was just wondering what kind of devs work on solvers as a day job. Would you say that building a “toy solver” for hold em could be a fun way to learn or improve with a language? I’d be curious to see how much work is needed to approximate the shape of the real GTO charts and common bet sizes.
3y ago

lifeinthevoid 3y ago

I played microstakes for a while 10c-25c, 25c-50c and was an OK grinder in my teens and could steadily increase my bankroll only to tilt away all the profit (and more) every time. Those were not good times.

nhggfu 3y ago

A +EV decision by the O.P

silexia 3y ago

I was addicted to gambling online via Texas hold em poker for a period in college. I mastered the statistics and broke about even. I should never have done it though, extremely destructive to sleep and healthy mental patterns.

whoami_nr 3y ago

Author here. Happy to answer any questions. @dang please replace the above link with the original: https://rnikhil.com/2023/11/12/quitting-fulltime-poker.html https://rnikhil.com/2023/11/12/quitting-fulltime-poker.html

fairity 3y ago

Whenever there's a large financial incentive to cheat and low consequence for getting caught, it's safe to assume that there will be sophisticated attempts to do so. I think both these preconditions are met (in spades) when it comes to online poker. As far as I can tell, there's no way to stop collusion in the following form: - Create a large remote team of cheaters - Have them all multi-table PLO at the same online casino - Each participant randomly chooses tables to avoid anti-collusion tracking - With a large enough pool of cheaters, you will inevitably have multiple colluders at the same table - Sharing knowledge of your whole cards with other colluding table participants will give you all a huge winning edge Since there's no way to stop the above, and there's a large incentive with low consequences if caught, I assume cheating is a huge problem in online poker. Wondering if anyone can confirm/deny this?