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What Winning $250k at Poker Taught Me About Money

229 points by wallflower 8y ago

droithomme 8y ago
Interesting article. Interesting that her net take was $10,000 after subtracting expenses from the $200k win. I wouldn't say she won that money, I'd say she earned it. Lottery one wins at and is pure luck. Poker is some luck but mostly skill and persistance. FWIW, she refers to it as earnings and income in the quotes in the article.
- bluedino 8y ago
  You can win something with skill. The better team in <sport> wins the game. You also win an auction without luck.
  - chucksmash 8y ago
    > The better team in <sport> wins the game. In response, I give you this snippet from "The Drunkard's Walk" by Leonard Mlodinow: > ...if one team is good enough to warrant beating another in 55% of its games, the weaker team will nevertheless win a 7-game series about 4 times out of 10. And if the superior team could beat its opponent, on average, 2 out of 3 times they meet, the inferior team will still win a 7-game series about once every 5 match-ups. There is really no way for a sports league to change this. In the lopsided 2/3-probability case, for example, you’d have to play a series consisting of at minimum the best of 23 games to determine the winner with what is called statistical significance, meaning the weaker team would be crowned champion 5 percent or less of the time. And in the case of one team’s having only a 55-45 edge, the shortest significant “world series” would be the best of 269 games... (p. 70-71) And that's the case of repeated games which would lower the effect of variance on the outcome. The saying "that's why they play the game" applies. You can get around it by defining the better team as the winner of the game but then "the better team wins the game" is tautological.
- splonk 8y ago
  Yeah, the important thing is to ignore any number you ever see in a headline about poker winnings, because it basically just means gross revenues. It says nothing at all about whether someone actually made money. (Okay, so it's pretty hard to lose all of a really big score, but the sort of people who make them are also disproportionately likely to be able to lose them in a hurry as well).
  - rightbyte 8y ago
    That's true. I never though about it that way. Where I live there's a commercial for online Casino ("Mr Green") where a woman hit a 2,5 million approx. USD jackpot, and 2 years later she won 5 million USD. The commercial was reported for fraud by someone of the public because it was unbelievable, but the casino showed for the investigators that the winnings were real. However, guessing that the woman probably played for a lot of her winnings, a second jackpot is not that improbable. And I guess she didn't stop there either ... That was a game of pure luck though, and Poker seems to be somewhat equal that off golf in skill vs luck at top level. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9469/72de84cd72f5f7edbcedf4d950f990473312.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9469/72de84cd72f5f7edbcedf4...
DigiMortal 8y ago
"No one knows what cards you have. All they know is the information that you convey. I think that’s a very valuable thing to remember in any negotiation."
- comboy 8y ago
  Well, except business is not zero sum. The game is not over when you lay all your cards on the table.
  - raldi 8y ago
    Nor is poker. You'll play with the same people over and over.
- galfarragem 8y ago
  Until somebody is in position of calling your bluff and you're busted. IMHO poker is about bet optimization and risk management. To take as much as possible with the lower risk possible.
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tie_ 8y ago
> When it comes to you, nothing is too good to be true. It’s too good to be true for someone else. But you always think, “Oh, I deserve this. This is evidence of how smart I was in making this decision.” Poker forces you to let go of that very, very quickly. That is indeed a very valuable lesson!
- module0000 8y ago
  Day trading will teach a very similar lesson, in no time flat :)
RyanRies 8y ago
In the article, she is quoted as saying that winnings from poker can be taxed at 60%. But I Googled it and the first few sites that I clicked on say more like 25%. What am I missing?
- misterprime 8y ago
  Perhaps it's adding local, state, federal, and sales tax altogether? I don't know.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- baking 8y ago
  Maybe European tournaments?
- exclusiv 8y ago
  I didn't follow that either. Wouldn't it just be ordinary income?
- splonk 8y ago
  Depending on whether you're filing as a professional or not, you may be paying self-employment tax. But in general, gambling winnings of that nature (big tournament scores) are pretty likely to put you in a high tax bracket and/or trigger AMT. You can deduct losses but it's a bit of a fight with the IRS every year, since they have records of every time you've won $1200 or more, but no records of every time you've lost $10k entering a tournament and not cashing.
  - baking 8y ago
    If you fail to keep a receipt for a $10k entry fee I think that's on you. Edit: I think you can't carry over losses from prior years, so if you lose money one year and make money the next, your taxes on your net earnings can be higher. Rule of thumb for professional poker players: If you don't have a profitable tax year, it is time to quit.
kadabra9 8y ago
Tournament poker is just brutal. It's entirely common to go 15, 20 tournaments without cashing. You can play great poker, sometimes over the span of a few days, and suddenly get hit with a cold deck or get unlucky and poof you are eliminated with nothing, along with your chance at a 5 or 6 figure top prize. Then you have to suck it back up and move on to the next one. The variance is just insane, which is why a lot of professional players are backed, or sell some of their action or swap with other players. I played a ton online before the Black Friday days and did pretty well, and will usually try to play a few big live tournaments a year, but these days I mostly just play cash games as a fun hobby and a way to grind out some extra income. There's less variance and the money is more consistent. That being said, as brutal as the swings in tournaments are, cash games have nothing like the rush of running deep in a poker tournament. The intensity and increase in stakes/prizes as the blinds move up and more players get knocked out and you inch closer to the big money is almost like chasing a high. So for me, cash games are the way to go if your goal in poker is to make money, but tournaments are a fun way to chase the dragon from time to time. I personally don't think I would have the stomach to play tournaments full time though.
- technofiend 8y ago
  >You can play great poker, sometimes over the span of a few days, and suddenly get hit with a cold deck or get unlucky and poof you are eliminated with nothing, along with your chance at a 5 or 6 figure top prize. Then you have to suck it back up and move on to the next one. I specialized in small, quick tournaments for this reason. Live players still weren't used to the even faster pace of online play but with rapidly escalating blinds it was critical. They were lulled into indecision and procrastination by the low early blinds, not realizing that they escalated quickly to force stacking out of the small players. I could easily make $1k+ a day clearing Binion's tournaments. I tried playing in a couple of Venetian Deep Stack events and usually busted out. I finally adapted to the slower play, longer rounds, bigger field and frankly better players to leave after two days of play with the same payout from winning one three hour Binion's tournament. The biggest upside being able to say I got my name published in Card Player magazine. LOL. Since for me it was just entertainment and I could reliably pay for my vacation in the smaller tourneys I went back to small ball.
Tangokat 8y ago
I used to play a lot of poker online back in the day, two lessons stuck with me: Speaking to the variance of the game: "Eventually you will run worse than you ever thought possible" Poker teaches, contrary to most business literature, to not be results oriented. It is the decision not the result that matters. "You can do everything right and still lose".
- kaycebasques 8y ago
  What’s the opposite of results-oriented in this case? I.e. what should you orient toward, if not results?
  - gagagababa 8y ago
    To maximize expected value (EV). You can go all in with AA pre-flop and get a bad beat from someone with 27o. While the result is bad (you lost this time), you made a +EV decision because you were ~80% favorite to win so over the long run this move will actually be profitable.
    - yingw787 8y ago
      I really like this way of thinking! It gives an air of clarity and calm to your decision making because you are looking at the big picture, which is really hard to do.
    - davidscolgan 8y ago
      This right here. But a key aspect of using the expected value idea is that you have to be able to make lots of these bets. If you have a good expected value decision but only make it once or twice, you could just get burned by luck. Only if you can make that same high percentage play many times does this work. The book Antifragile is all about this. His advice for entrepreneurs specifically is to "avoid your risk of ruin". Starting a business is never guaranteed to succeed, and if you stake your entire life savings on one business venture and take out loans, you could just get unlucky regardless of EV. If you, say, kept a part time job and worked on your business in the rest of your time and had infinite runway, you'll eventually succeed if you don't quit. This idea has strongly impacted the way I face decision making.
dawhizkid 8y ago
Is there any game that offers so many "life lessons" than Poker?
- dragontamer 8y ago
  Go is pretty good at "life lessons" too. The game is over when both players decide it is over (skipping a turn). Its usually not worth it to try to kill opponents: the winning strategy is to typically capture territory. There's always more territory (especially in the early game) rather than aiming for conflict. You've got to know when to fight battles, you've got to know when to sacrifice pieces. The entire opening is basically tradition and still has no unifying theory (there's 3-4 opening and a Joseki for how professionals seem to play, but there's no hard proof that this is the optimal strategy). So its still a very open-ended game with a lot of unknowns.
- freyir 8y ago
  Is one of those life lessons "stop playing poker"? Because in my many hours frittered away in card rooms, I never once thought "these people have it all figured out."
nickjj 8y ago
Online poker was really interesting before Black Friday. I used to play back then. Nothing crazy, about 60,000 hands of NLHE at low stakes cash games for fun. But the really interesting thing to me was how successful the video learning platform SAAS business was for Poker. These sites started to pop up where high level players would record their sessions and talk through their hands, then you paid per month for access to these videos. I remember when Card Runners[0] just came out. It was one of those niches that lined up perfect for a SAAS business. No shortage of games, lots of online pros playing with different styles, and some of them were really good at talking through their thought process. All they had to do was play (which they were doing already) and comment on their hands. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CardRunners https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CardRunners
- dbancajas 8y ago
  hey man! used to follow the scene too! I remember cardrunners and deucescracked! Tri Ng also had his 99$ book w/c i beleive was scammy. Did you win a lot?
  - nickjj 8y ago
    I came out ahead in the end but it wasn't a lot. I deposited $50 on PS initially, then grinded the micro stakes and mostly hovered around NL25 while taking shots at NL50. I still remember how gratifying it was to purchase PokerTracker with some winnings. It's funny to think back then I was sitting there 4-6 tabling NL10 with a PT HUD thinking I was on the top of the poker world. How about you?
MR4D 8y ago
Great article with many insights that I never would have expected! This quote in particular gave me an interesting thought: >> Trust everyone, and people will take advantage of you. >> Distrust too much? That’s just as bad — you’re going to be the one calling every hand, thinking everyone’s always bluffing you, out to get you. >> You need to figure out when to distrust and when to trust. That last line is interesting, especially when compared to mutual funds. I wonder how comparable poker outcomes at a tournament (or many tournaments over time) compare to an active fund manager? And then that leads me to wonder what a simple ETF comparison would be in poker - someone who always calls? It would be interesting to see how that "ETF" poker player would compare the the rest of the people in a tournament. Obviously a top poker player will not fail out early very frequently, so that's one difference, but on average, what does the "average" poker player at a tournament look like number wise?
- MFLoon 8y ago
  I'm not super familiar with how ETFs work, but I'm guessing the parallel would be ETFs as ABC players making safe, low variance plays, while the actively managed funds would be a pro looking to capture all of their equity edges, regardless of the assumed variance. It is well known how they respectively fare in tournaments - the ETF players make it into the money at a somewhat higher rate, but will typically have a middling to low stack with little hope of making a deep run, so they have a lot of low but positive ROI results - a mincash will typically be around 50-100% ROI. However they still may not eke out enough cashes over the long run to be +ROI. The Hedge Fund players on the other hand tend to bust out earlier but when they do run well will amass a huge stack and be well positioned to make a run at winning the whole thing - most of their results will be losses, but because of the super steep payout structures of tournaments, a single big-field victory can be well over 10000% ROI, so a single "bink" can overcome dozens of losses.
  - MR4D 8y ago
    Sounds like you just described "MoneyBall" :) Seriously, though - thanks for the insight. Hadn't thought of comparing to a hedge fund, and after reading your description, it seems obvious. To add some color to an ETF analogy, an ETF in the financial markets is basically just following an index, which is often created by a firm like S&P (and there are over a thousand of those indices). So, one index may just be "buy all the companies that have dividends", or "buy all companies that have a price to earnings ratio greater than average", or "buy all companies listed on the US stock market". I guess in poker it could be "call on everything", or "fold unless you have at least a three-of-a-kind". Basically, it would be mechanical. Of course, you can have reasonably complex ETF algorithms that have multi-pass filters (such as P/E ratios, Debt/Equity ratios, Dividend minimums, etc.) all in some combination. So maybe there could be something complicated like "bet 1% of your holdings whenever you had a pair, and bet 2% if at least one player folds." This is just a made-up example, but the rules could probably get intricate based on the math and different situations.
edoo 8y ago
If you can play a perfect game you need about $300k bankroll to earn about $60k/year on the tournament circuit. It just isn't the same any more, all the real players know the theory AND can read people.
minikites 8y ago
There's a great video by Jon Bois in his "Pretty Good" series about poker tournaments and he touches on the subject of internet poker too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTUZ2SrSxsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTUZ2SrSxsA
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solotronics 8y ago
I wonder if anyone has tried to play poker online with something like AlphaGo.
- alexashka 8y ago
  Poker bots have been around for a while. They're more or less unbeatable longterm in 1v1 games last I checked.
- 6nf 8y ago
  Bots are part of online poker, pretty much since day 1. There's a lot of time and money going into poker bots and other types of automatic assistants and monitoring of games to find fish etc etc. Anything you can think of is there. And of course on the other side of the story, a lot of effort goes into finding and banning bot accounts, proving that collusion is happening etc.
caprese 8y ago
> When it comes to you, nothing is too good to be true. It’s too good to be true for someone else. But you always think, “Oh, I deserve this. This is evidence of how smart I was in making this decision.” Powerful
pcmaffey 8y ago
Making money in poker is like making money in crypto. Done best when there are lots of fish.
hnick 8y ago
> Women make good poker players because in a male-driven society, we’ve had to be much more sensitive to social cues. We’ve had to read people much better. I’m not saying women are inherently better at this. I think we’ve had to become better at it as a survival mechanism. Because men can be boors and still rule the world, but women really need to know what’s going on. It's a common belief that women are more sensitive to emotional cues than men, but I've never heard it put like this. Interesting perspective.
- alexashka 8y ago
  Poker is completely dominated by men, so I don't know what that is referring to. Poker is hardly about social cues - some of the best players simply sit staring at the same spot and wait a very similar amount of time for any non-trivial decision. It's not very exciting, but boy is it effective.
dbancajas 8y ago
I used to railbird the likes of Tom Dwan(durrr), Ivey, Patric antonious (patonious), ilary sahamies etc.. at full tilt poker. 100K in virtual cash transferring hands in a matter of seconds. Amazing. Durrr even had the million-dollar challenge with jungleman (Daniel Cates). I think he lost it. These were the guys who understood the game on a different level and basically cleaned-out live televised poker cash games (poker after dark anyone?). I aspired to be like them (mostly for the wrong reasons) but was so busy being a phd student. Lol. I heard they go to Macau to play live cash and some were even investigated for money laundering. Wondered what happened to those guys.
l0b0 8y ago
On a related note, is anyone familiar with any decent online poker app which is not scummy? I'm OK with ads in this space, or a one-time payment, but not in-app purchase of chips - I played Pokerist for a week, and I'm pretty sure they switch the choice of tables after a while to bomb people and get them to buy chips.
sigi45 8y ago
After always wanting to play poker in a casino, 2 years ago I did. I payed 100$ sat down, played a few hands and 20 minutes lateri was done. I liked the experience and I will not play again in a casino: - dealer is really quick. It's stress and you can't think - you can see super quick who will lose all at the end of the day and who is here to grab it from the others - they don't like to talk just Don't see the appeal to learn to become so much better so that I might become good. Prefer to just go to work
- mettamage 8y ago
  Hmm... I played online poker as a kid, between 16 to 18 for negligleble amounts. When I came into the casino, I was nervous but my math mind took over. I did well enough to get in the money of sit 'n go tables. I got awkward in the beginning, by unintentionally straddle betting and violating all kinds of other table rules that I didn't know. But that irons out quite quickly. It's a fun experience to feel awkward and realize you're still going to go away with the price.
  - sigi45 8y ago
    Sure but when you go away with the price, 9 others don't :) And every game was like 5$ min to just see the cards. 100/5 20 games later you have to win something.
arisAlexis 8y ago
again misleading title. she won 250k but gained 10k during the year.

229 points by wallflower 8y ago

Interesting article. Interesting that her net take was $10,000 after subtracting expenses from the $200k win. I wouldn't say she won that money, I'd say she earned it. Lottery one wins at and is pure luck. Poker is some luck but mostly skill and persistance. FWIW, she refers to it as earnings and income in the quotes in the article.

bluedino 8y ago
You can win something with skill. The better team in <sport> wins the game. You also win an auction without luck.
- chucksmash 8y ago
  > The better team in <sport> wins the game. In response, I give you this snippet from "The Drunkard's Walk" by Leonard Mlodinow: > ...if one team is good enough to warrant beating another in 55% of its games, the weaker team will nevertheless win a 7-game series about 4 times out of 10. And if the superior team could beat its opponent, on average, 2 out of 3 times they meet, the inferior team will still win a 7-game series about once every 5 match-ups. There is really no way for a sports league to change this. In the lopsided 2/3-probability case, for example, you’d have to play a series consisting of at minimum the best of 23 games to determine the winner with what is called statistical significance, meaning the weaker team would be crowned champion 5 percent or less of the time. And in the case of one team’s having only a 55-45 edge, the shortest significant “world series” would be the best of 269 games... (p. 70-71) And that's the case of repeated games which would lower the effect of variance on the outcome. The saying "that's why they play the game" applies. You can get around it by defining the better team as the winner of the game but then "the better team wins the game" is tautological.
splonk 8y ago
Yeah, the important thing is to ignore any number you ever see in a headline about poker winnings, because it basically just means gross revenues. It says nothing at all about whether someone actually made money. (Okay, so it's pretty hard to lose all of a really big score, but the sort of people who make them are also disproportionately likely to be able to lose them in a hurry as well).
- rightbyte 8y ago
  That's true. I never though about it that way. Where I live there's a commercial for online Casino ("Mr Green") where a woman hit a 2,5 million approx. USD jackpot, and 2 years later she won 5 million USD. The commercial was reported for fraud by someone of the public because it was unbelievable, but the casino showed for the investigators that the winnings were real. However, guessing that the woman probably played for a lot of her winnings, a second jackpot is not that improbable. And I guess she didn't stop there either ... That was a game of pure luck though, and Poker seems to be somewhat equal that off golf in skill vs luck at top level. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9469/72de84cd72f5f7edbcedf4d950f990473312.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9469/72de84cd72f5f7edbcedf4...

DigiMortal 8y ago

"No one knows what cards you have. All they know is the information that you convey. I think that’s a very valuable thing to remember in any negotiation."

comboy 8y ago
Well, except business is not zero sum. The game is not over when you lay all your cards on the table.
- raldi 8y ago
  Nor is poker. You'll play with the same people over and over.
galfarragem 8y ago
Until somebody is in position of calling your bluff and you're busted. IMHO poker is about bet optimization and risk management. To take as much as possible with the lower risk possible.

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tie_ 8y ago

> When it comes to you, nothing is too good to be true. It’s too good to be true for someone else. But you always think, “Oh, I deserve this. This is evidence of how smart I was in making this decision.” Poker forces you to let go of that very, very quickly. That is indeed a very valuable lesson!

module0000 8y ago
Day trading will teach a very similar lesson, in no time flat :)

RyanRies 8y ago

In the article, she is quoted as saying that winnings from poker can be taxed at 60%. But I Googled it and the first few sites that I clicked on say more like 25%. What am I missing?

misterprime 8y ago
Perhaps it's adding local, state, federal, and sales tax altogether? I don't know.
- deleted 8y ago
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baking 8y ago
Maybe European tournaments?
exclusiv 8y ago
I didn't follow that either. Wouldn't it just be ordinary income?
splonk 8y ago
Depending on whether you're filing as a professional or not, you may be paying self-employment tax. But in general, gambling winnings of that nature (big tournament scores) are pretty likely to put you in a high tax bracket and/or trigger AMT. You can deduct losses but it's a bit of a fight with the IRS every year, since they have records of every time you've won $1200 or more, but no records of every time you've lost $10k entering a tournament and not cashing.
- baking 8y ago
  If you fail to keep a receipt for a $10k entry fee I think that's on you. Edit: I think you can't carry over losses from prior years, so if you lose money one year and make money the next, your taxes on your net earnings can be higher. Rule of thumb for professional poker players: If you don't have a profitable tax year, it is time to quit.

kadabra9 8y ago

Tournament poker is just brutal. It's entirely common to go 15, 20 tournaments without cashing. You can play great poker, sometimes over the span of a few days, and suddenly get hit with a cold deck or get unlucky and poof you are eliminated with nothing, along with your chance at a 5 or 6 figure top prize. Then you have to suck it back up and move on to the next one. The variance is just insane, which is why a lot of professional players are backed, or sell some of their action or swap with other players. I played a ton online before the Black Friday days and did pretty well, and will usually try to play a few big live tournaments a year, but these days I mostly just play cash games as a fun hobby and a way to grind out some extra income. There's less variance and the money is more consistent. That being said, as brutal as the swings in tournaments are, cash games have nothing like the rush of running deep in a poker tournament. The intensity and increase in stakes/prizes as the blinds move up and more players get knocked out and you inch closer to the big money is almost like chasing a high. So for me, cash games are the way to go if your goal in poker is to make money, but tournaments are a fun way to chase the dragon from time to time. I personally don't think I would have the stomach to play tournaments full time though.

technofiend 8y ago
>You can play great poker, sometimes over the span of a few days, and suddenly get hit with a cold deck or get unlucky and poof you are eliminated with nothing, along with your chance at a 5 or 6 figure top prize. Then you have to suck it back up and move on to the next one. I specialized in small, quick tournaments for this reason. Live players still weren't used to the even faster pace of online play but with rapidly escalating blinds it was critical. They were lulled into indecision and procrastination by the low early blinds, not realizing that they escalated quickly to force stacking out of the small players. I could easily make $1k+ a day clearing Binion's tournaments. I tried playing in a couple of Venetian Deep Stack events and usually busted out. I finally adapted to the slower play, longer rounds, bigger field and frankly better players to leave after two days of play with the same payout from winning one three hour Binion's tournament. The biggest upside being able to say I got my name published in Card Player magazine. LOL. Since for me it was just entertainment and I could reliably pay for my vacation in the smaller tourneys I went back to small ball.

Tangokat 8y ago

I used to play a lot of poker online back in the day, two lessons stuck with me: Speaking to the variance of the game: "Eventually you will run worse than you ever thought possible" Poker teaches, contrary to most business literature, to not be results oriented. It is the decision not the result that matters. "You can do everything right and still lose".

kaycebasques 8y ago
What’s the opposite of results-oriented in this case? I.e. what should you orient toward, if not results?
- gagagababa 8y ago
  To maximize expected value (EV). You can go all in with AA pre-flop and get a bad beat from someone with 27o. While the result is bad (you lost this time), you made a +EV decision because you were ~80% favorite to win so over the long run this move will actually be profitable.
  - yingw787 8y ago
    I really like this way of thinking! It gives an air of clarity and calm to your decision making because you are looking at the big picture, which is really hard to do.
  - davidscolgan 8y ago
    This right here. But a key aspect of using the expected value idea is that you have to be able to make lots of these bets. If you have a good expected value decision but only make it once or twice, you could just get burned by luck. Only if you can make that same high percentage play many times does this work. The book Antifragile is all about this. His advice for entrepreneurs specifically is to "avoid your risk of ruin". Starting a business is never guaranteed to succeed, and if you stake your entire life savings on one business venture and take out loans, you could just get unlucky regardless of EV. If you, say, kept a part time job and worked on your business in the rest of your time and had infinite runway, you'll eventually succeed if you don't quit. This idea has strongly impacted the way I face decision making.

dawhizkid 8y ago

Is there any game that offers so many "life lessons" than Poker?

dragontamer 8y ago
Go is pretty good at "life lessons" too. The game is over when both players decide it is over (skipping a turn). Its usually not worth it to try to kill opponents: the winning strategy is to typically capture territory. There's always more territory (especially in the early game) rather than aiming for conflict. You've got to know when to fight battles, you've got to know when to sacrifice pieces. The entire opening is basically tradition and still has no unifying theory (there's 3-4 opening and a Joseki for how professionals seem to play, but there's no hard proof that this is the optimal strategy). So its still a very open-ended game with a lot of unknowns.
freyir 8y ago
Is one of those life lessons "stop playing poker"? Because in my many hours frittered away in card rooms, I never once thought "these people have it all figured out."

nickjj 8y ago

Online poker was really interesting before Black Friday. I used to play back then. Nothing crazy, about 60,000 hands of NLHE at low stakes cash games for fun. But the really interesting thing to me was how successful the video learning platform SAAS business was for Poker. These sites started to pop up where high level players would record their sessions and talk through their hands, then you paid per month for access to these videos. I remember when Card Runners[0] just came out. It was one of those niches that lined up perfect for a SAAS business. No shortage of games, lots of online pros playing with different styles, and some of them were really good at talking through their thought process. All they had to do was play (which they were doing already) and comment on their hands. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CardRunners https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CardRunners

dbancajas 8y ago
hey man! used to follow the scene too! I remember cardrunners and deucescracked! Tri Ng also had his 99$ book w/c i beleive was scammy. Did you win a lot?
- nickjj 8y ago
  I came out ahead in the end but it wasn't a lot. I deposited $50 on PS initially, then grinded the micro stakes and mostly hovered around NL25 while taking shots at NL50. I still remember how gratifying it was to purchase PokerTracker with some winnings. It's funny to think back then I was sitting there 4-6 tabling NL10 with a PT HUD thinking I was on the top of the poker world. How about you?

MR4D 8y ago

Great article with many insights that I never would have expected! This quote in particular gave me an interesting thought: >> Trust everyone, and people will take advantage of you. >> Distrust too much? That’s just as bad — you’re going to be the one calling every hand, thinking everyone’s always bluffing you, out to get you. >> You need to figure out when to distrust and when to trust. That last line is interesting, especially when compared to mutual funds. I wonder how comparable poker outcomes at a tournament (or many tournaments over time) compare to an active fund manager? And then that leads me to wonder what a simple ETF comparison would be in poker - someone who always calls? It would be interesting to see how that "ETF" poker player would compare the the rest of the people in a tournament. Obviously a top poker player will not fail out early very frequently, so that's one difference, but on average, what does the "average" poker player at a tournament look like number wise?

MFLoon 8y ago
I'm not super familiar with how ETFs work, but I'm guessing the parallel would be ETFs as ABC players making safe, low variance plays, while the actively managed funds would be a pro looking to capture all of their equity edges, regardless of the assumed variance. It is well known how they respectively fare in tournaments - the ETF players make it into the money at a somewhat higher rate, but will typically have a middling to low stack with little hope of making a deep run, so they have a lot of low but positive ROI results - a mincash will typically be around 50-100% ROI. However they still may not eke out enough cashes over the long run to be +ROI. The Hedge Fund players on the other hand tend to bust out earlier but when they do run well will amass a huge stack and be well positioned to make a run at winning the whole thing - most of their results will be losses, but because of the super steep payout structures of tournaments, a single big-field victory can be well over 10000% ROI, so a single "bink" can overcome dozens of losses.
- MR4D 8y ago
  Sounds like you just described "MoneyBall" :) Seriously, though - thanks for the insight. Hadn't thought of comparing to a hedge fund, and after reading your description, it seems obvious. To add some color to an ETF analogy, an ETF in the financial markets is basically just following an index, which is often created by a firm like S&P (and there are over a thousand of those indices). So, one index may just be "buy all the companies that have dividends", or "buy all companies that have a price to earnings ratio greater than average", or "buy all companies listed on the US stock market". I guess in poker it could be "call on everything", or "fold unless you have at least a three-of-a-kind". Basically, it would be mechanical. Of course, you can have reasonably complex ETF algorithms that have multi-pass filters (such as P/E ratios, Debt/Equity ratios, Dividend minimums, etc.) all in some combination. So maybe there could be something complicated like "bet 1% of your holdings whenever you had a pair, and bet 2% if at least one player folds." This is just a made-up example, but the rules could probably get intricate based on the math and different situations.

edoo 8y ago

If you can play a perfect game you need about $300k bankroll to earn about $60k/year on the tournament circuit. It just isn't the same any more, all the real players know the theory AND can read people.

minikites 8y ago

There's a great video by Jon Bois in his "Pretty Good" series about poker tournaments and he touches on the subject of internet poker too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTUZ2SrSxsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTUZ2SrSxsA

deleted 8y ago

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solotronics 8y ago

I wonder if anyone has tried to play poker online with something like AlphaGo.

alexashka 8y ago
Poker bots have been around for a while. They're more or less unbeatable longterm in 1v1 games last I checked.
6nf 8y ago
Bots are part of online poker, pretty much since day 1. There's a lot of time and money going into poker bots and other types of automatic assistants and monitoring of games to find fish etc etc. Anything you can think of is there. And of course on the other side of the story, a lot of effort goes into finding and banning bot accounts, proving that collusion is happening etc.

caprese 8y ago

pcmaffey 8y ago

Making money in poker is like making money in crypto. Done best when there are lots of fish.

hnick 8y ago

> Women make good poker players because in a male-driven society, we’ve had to be much more sensitive to social cues. We’ve had to read people much better. I’m not saying women are inherently better at this. I think we’ve had to become better at it as a survival mechanism. Because men can be boors and still rule the world, but women really need to know what’s going on. It's a common belief that women are more sensitive to emotional cues than men, but I've never heard it put like this. Interesting perspective.

alexashka 8y ago
Poker is completely dominated by men, so I don't know what that is referring to. Poker is hardly about social cues - some of the best players simply sit staring at the same spot and wait a very similar amount of time for any non-trivial decision. It's not very exciting, but boy is it effective.

dbancajas 8y ago

I used to railbird the likes of Tom Dwan(durrr), Ivey, Patric antonious (patonious), ilary sahamies etc.. at full tilt poker. 100K in virtual cash transferring hands in a matter of seconds. Amazing. Durrr even had the million-dollar challenge with jungleman (Daniel Cates). I think he lost it. These were the guys who understood the game on a different level and basically cleaned-out live televised poker cash games (poker after dark anyone?). I aspired to be like them (mostly for the wrong reasons) but was so busy being a phd student. Lol. I heard they go to Macau to play live cash and some were even investigated for money laundering. Wondered what happened to those guys.

l0b0 8y ago

On a related note, is anyone familiar with any decent online poker app which is not scummy? I'm OK with ads in this space, or a one-time payment, but not in-app purchase of chips - I played Pokerist for a week, and I'm pretty sure they switch the choice of tables after a while to bomb people and get them to buy chips.

sigi45 8y ago

After always wanting to play poker in a casino, 2 years ago I did. I payed 100$ sat down, played a few hands and 20 minutes lateri was done. I liked the experience and I will not play again in a casino: - dealer is really quick. It's stress and you can't think - you can see super quick who will lose all at the end of the day and who is here to grab it from the others - they don't like to talk just Don't see the appeal to learn to become so much better so that I might become good. Prefer to just go to work

mettamage 8y ago
Hmm... I played online poker as a kid, between 16 to 18 for negligleble amounts. When I came into the casino, I was nervous but my math mind took over. I did well enough to get in the money of sit 'n go tables. I got awkward in the beginning, by unintentionally straddle betting and violating all kinds of other table rules that I didn't know. But that irons out quite quickly. It's a fun experience to feel awkward and realize you're still going to go away with the price.
- sigi45 8y ago
  Sure but when you go away with the price, 9 others don't :) And every game was like 5$ min to just see the cards. 100/5 20 games later you have to win something.

arisAlexis 8y ago

again misleading title. she won 250k but gained 10k during the year.