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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.
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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.
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