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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29677 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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I was quite surprised when I worked at a startup that was in the process of winding down, and one of our (older, single, but pretty sharp) engineers indicated a backup plan to "go back to grinding at poker." I'm not a gambling man, but I was surprised that there was market space (and still is, since we're still friends) to eke out rent and bills somewhat reliably at a casino in Vegas. Apparently it works (only with certain card games -- you will lose at slots), although he's also bounced between a few engineering gigs.

a backup plan to "go back to grinding at poker." ... Apparently it works

It "works" but:

  • The pay is bad. You will be making something on the order of 10-20% of what an actual professional with similar skill levels makes, and on top of that you will experience massive swings in your net worth even if you do everything right. The rule of thumb is that you can calculate your maximum expected hourly earnings by considering the largest sustained loss where you would continue playing, and dividing that by 1000. So if you would keep playing through a $20,000 loss, that means you can expect to earn $20 / hour if your play is impeccable.
  • The competition is brutal. Poker serves as sort of a "job of last resort" to people who, for whatever reason, cannot function in a "real job". This may be because they lack executive function, or because they don't do well in situations where the rules are ambiguous, or because they can't stand the idea of working for someone else but also can't or won't start their own business. The things that all these groups have in common, though, is that they're generally frighteningly intelligent, that they're functional enough to do deliberate practice (those who don't lose their bankroll and stop playing), and that they've generally been at this for years. At 1/2 you can expect to make about $10 / hour, and it goes up from there in a way that is slower than linear as the stakes increase, because the players get better. At 50/100, an amazing player with a $500k bankroll might make about $50 / hour. I do hear that this stops being true at extremely high stakes, like $4000/$8000, where compulsive gamblers become more frequent again (relative to 50/100, the players are still far better than you'd see at a 1/2 or even a 10/20 table). But if you want to play 4000/8000 games you need a bankroll in the ballpark of $10-20M, and also there aren't that many such games. For reference, I capped out playing 2/5 NL, where I made an average of about $12 / hour. Every time I tried to move up to 5/10 I got eaten alive.
  • The hours are weird. Say goodbye to leisure time on your evening, weekends, and holidays. Expect pretty regular all-nighters, because most of your profit will come from those times when you manage to find a good table and just extract money from it for 16 hours straight.
  • It's bad for your mental health. When I was getting started, I imagined that it would be a lifestyle of pitting my mind against others, of earning money by being objectively better at poker than the other professional players. It is in fact nothing like that at all. Your money does not come from other professional players, and in fact if there are more than about 3 professional players at a table of 10, you should leave and find another table, because even if you are quite good, the professional players just don't make frequent enough or large enough mistakes that exploiting their mistakes will make you much money. No, you make your money by identifying which tables contain (in the best case) drunk tourists or (in a more typical case) compulsive gamblers pissing away money that they managed to beg, borrow, or steal in a desperate attempt to "make back their losses". It is absolutely soul sucking to realize that your lifestyle is funded by exploiting gambling addicts, and that if you find yourself at a table without any people destroying their lives it means you're at the wrong table.

In summary, -2/10 do not recommend.

Great post.

I played poker semi-seriously for a while (mostly competitive bar poker leagues, but a little bit at the casino). I became good enough that I could probably be a winning player at 1/2, but I realized I'd have to study a lot more than I wanted to for a hobby to win at higher tables. And yeah, everything I heard and saw from actual professional poker players made it obvious that this was a "job" of last resort and would kill any actual enjoyment I got out of the game.

How the heck does anyone accumulate a bankroll of $20M if they can only make at best $50/hour grinding at the lower stakes? Grind for 200,000 hours? Or do they just have to get lucky and get it all from a few super whales?

Anyway I appreciate the numbers. I also dabbled in poker for a while, and while I didn't know the exact numbers, I came to the same conclusion. It's just not worth it, making low amounts of money in exchange for such wild swings and very long grinding sessions. It also kind of made me feel like a parasite taking advantage of gambling addicts. I understand it was a lot better in the early days though, when online Texas Hold'em first became popular and lots of people were playing without much knowledge.

Staking is a pretty frequent phenomenon where people will essentially commit a bankroll to a great player in exchange for a cut of winnings, though even that circles back to 'the hourly is pretty terrible' since even if you're winning 2k an hour, if you've committed 90% of your profits to the person who's staked you you end up in the same hole.

I've mostly seen that in the context of tournaments, though. Someone buys your entry fee, in return for a cut of your winnings. It's sort of an insurance system, to spread out the variance. Giving someone $20 million to play online at a higher stakes than they normally play is... I don't know, that sounds insane.

$20 million would be a bit insane but I definitely know of staking arrangements for Online balances.

How the heck does anyone accumulate a bankroll of $20M if they can only make at best $50/hour grinding at the lower stakes?

They don't. The people playing those games are not professional poker players choosing that particular game because they've done the math and established that playing that game is Kelly optimal. They're compulsive gamblers who are good at poker and like high-stakes bets. Making things more complicated is that you have people like Phil Ivey who are both very good poker players that have a massive edge in terms of skill, and are also compulsive gamblers.

As a side note, if you look at the most successful poker players you're going to see cases where luck played a substantial part in their success (i.e. they made Kelly overbets, and got lucky and won those bets). Asking how to be successful at that level is like asking how to be successful at playing the lottery.

Also the amount of truly great Poker Players who died broke and/or are in large amounts of debt due to their general degeneracy is a pretty large number. Tom Dwan one of the best to ever do it, but in huge debt etcetera.

For the record, this isn't out of line with the rest of the attached stories. Thanks for sharing!

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