3 ms·

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 wa

by 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.
  - Octabrain 3y ago
    Your story reminded me of a case I personally know of a guy who was a very disciplined poker player for a period of time and one day won a sweet €90000 prize in an online tournament after a lot of effort. Apart from poker, his life was a mess (living with his mother, no even a driving licence, no serious job). He spent the whole amount on partying, hotels and cocaine. He never got again any substantial money from poker and his life is still a mess last time I knew.
    - Obscurity4340 3y ago
      Moderation in all things, including moderation...but also cocaine. Many have come, few have passed
mulnz 3y ago
[flagged]
- mulnz 3y ago
  this will likely be downvoted … just shit posting as I know what the term means and was quite involved with this as a lucrative hobby ~03-07 and never knew a single player to describe marking a soft player this way… and datamining was the biggest buzzword before cloud
- skipkey 3y ago
  I worked for a company that did this for awhile - they had custom written clients for all the major sites, just watching tables and recording the hand histories, which they provided as a subscription service. You could absolutely use the data to improve your margins. Think knowing how loose or tight your opponents were over thousands of hands. Then we got acquired by Zynga and that business got sold off.
busyant 3y ago
> looking for soft players that I had datamined I knew someone on the other end of this. Back in the early 2000s, the wife of a guy I worked with fancied herself a decent poker player. She lost some non-trivial amount of money in an online game and was worried about telling her husband. So, she tried to win it back and lost even more. I think you know where this is going (if not, see Gambler's ruin). She lost all of their savings trying to break even. Stopped paying the bills. At some point in the ensuing months, my co-worker came home to an eviction notice (plus, his wife was hiding the letters threatening to shut off the heat, etc.). ---they got divorced.
- xwdv 3y ago
  This is why you always keep separate savings accounts away from a spouse.
  - busyant 3y ago
    > This is why you always keep separate savings accounts away from a spouse. Your username bio is hilarious--and it is also consistent with your advice. Have an upvote (on your way to 1K)
    - jrs235 3y ago
      I just viewed their profile. They're at 999 karma. Trying to figure out if they have a bot monitoring their own karma that invokes a bot to down vote some other comments of theirs.... UPDATE: Something has to be involved... Or karma aggregation/recalculation isn't instant. I just upvoted their comment, they're still at 999. LOL.
      - __s 3y ago
        I was hoping they try to straddle 1000, while below 1000 they try post karma gaining comments, while above 1000 they try post karma losing comments, changing their bio depending on the mode (maybe having a bot maintain the bio)
waprin 3y ago
Live poker is still quite soft. While you do have to be better compared to years past, it's also far easier to get better because you can study solvers. I used to be a "good but not great" online player, but the extent to which you could truly understand hands was limited due to the limitations of the software at the time (mostly equity calculators that could not truly calculate EV). That changed with the release of Piosolver in 2015 that lets you calculate the EV of various strategies and give you the "correct" answer assuming various assumptions. Those assumptions are always wrong but it's still informative in the "all models are wrong, some are useful". I used to "plateau" in my undertsanding of the game but you no longer plateau because the game can now be understood at a more complete level. Live poker will always be soft because there will always be plenty of people there to have fun and gamble no matter how much software exists. Furthermore, only a slim minority of players even actively trying to win actually put serious effort into studying (see also, dan luu's post on how it's relatively easy to reach the top 5% of any endeavour, even if very difficult to reach the top 1%). I can't help but use the opportunity of poker on the front page of Hacker News to note that I have a strategy blog and training app on this exact topic: www.livepokertheory.com There's a lot of beginner to advanced strategy articles on applying practical solver outputs to live poker games as well as a preflop training based on solver generated preflop charts. Poker is currently my only significant source of income and I "eat my own dogfood" on this site so I'm very incentivized for it to be good!
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Yes, live poker is still pretty soft, and since the players are worse, your winrate and edge should be better. But then again, I'm not sure you can get enough hands/hour to be as profitable as an online player--everything is just so much slower. You could have a year long downswing live where, if that happened online you are probably just a losing player. So you need to spend all your time at the casinos. You can't make a living grinding home games even if your edge there is astronomical. Just my viewpoint as a solidly recreational player. Although I'm a decently profitable cash player (I donk my cash winnings away by losing tournaments), I'm not good enough to go pro online and I'm not patient enough or willing to spend my life in the casino to go pro live.
saucymew 3y ago
Not much has changed in the current live poker meta. Yes, the average player may be better, but if you put in the consistent time to study/solvers/hand reviews, IMHO that puts you in the top 20 percentile. It's getting to the top 5-10 percentile that is killer. Ultimately, like life, the only true edge you can control is game selection. Hence, that Rounders quote that rings eternal: "Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker."
- Animats 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - frutiger 3y ago
    > This also applies to the crypto world, which, like poker, is zero-sum or worse. Can we please avoid derailing this interesting topic by mentioning the inflammatory crypto scene? We all know everything about it, and have all made up our minds about it, and no new information is being said about it. Thank you!
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - yccs27 3y ago
        [flagged]
        j-a-a-p 3y ago
        [flagged]
- Kranar 3y ago
  I don't have the greatest references available, but a naive Google search brings up quite a few sources from databases and surveys that say that while 30% of poker players do better than break even, only 18% of actually manage to make any kind of worthwhile income from poker and only 5% of poker players make what is considered good income from it. I don't know what "good income" is, whether it's like 100k a year or 500k a year... but I can take a pretty good guess that unless you're in the top 15%, poker is probably not worth it professionally.
bashwizard 3y ago
I used to play professionally during 2003-2007 until all the poker coaching sites started popping up everywhere. The money was indeed crazy and I was making roughly $400k/year at NL1000 back then. Eventually my winrate started dropping along with all the fish leaving the game and the whole boom died out. I did a year coaching but later decided to leave poker for good. Good times though and kind of surreal for a 20 something year old dude.
thedangler 3y ago
Now there are apps that tell you to play your hand or not based on your opponents playing style and previous hands. You pay for the app and the app is created by the online poker site. My friend plays professionally full time and he uses these apps for a slight edge. They all do. The apps do not play for him. They just say 80% user Smith123 folds.
matwood 3y ago
I played a lot in person around the same time frame, and did pretty well. It was hugely popular with a lot of dumb money floating around. When I would travel for work, I would find nearby reservation casinos which always seems to have tons of easy money. Like you said, winning poker is a grind, and for me, extremely boring. I rarely play anymore, and if I do it's with friends. But, I have memories of some big hands in Vegas that I'm happy to have experienced. I also learned a ton about risk management, my personal risk tolerance, and controlling my emotions.
whoami_nr 3y ago
Author here. Yes, the grind is something like that. I used to watch couple hours of theory videos and maybe have a hand review session before 4pm. The grind starts around 6PM and I play on-off till 5-6am. Rinse repeat for all 7 days of the week. Every couple months I used to travel for some juicy tournament series to try my hand at live games.
- 97s 3y ago
  It is frustrating isn't it to watch people back when we played idolize it as some glorious career, when it reality it is probably one of the most stressful, depressing and negative jobs mentally a person can have. The variance and amount of hands required to overcome it with skill can be a living nightmare to work through. I can't imagine playing when you played. It was pretty easy back when I did it, but still taking peoples money by isolating bad players with addictions wore me out after a while. I am happy to have played and the skills and determination I learned there helped me throughout the rest of my life. I run my own business from home now and I am much happier. I am glad you found some peace as well.
Decabytes 3y ago
This is basically what the streamer Lifecoach has said his life was like for a very long time. I think he is much happier now

by 97s 3y ago

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.
- Octabrain 3y ago
  Your story reminded me of a case I personally know of a guy who was a very disciplined poker player for a period of time and one day won a sweet €90000 prize in an online tournament after a lot of effort. Apart from poker, his life was a mess (living with his mother, no even a driving licence, no serious job). He spent the whole amount on partying, hotels and cocaine. He never got again any substantial money from poker and his life is still a mess last time I knew.
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    Moderation in all things, including moderation...but also cocaine. Many have come, few have passed

mulnz 3y ago

[flagged]

mulnz 3y ago
this will likely be downvoted … just shit posting as I know what the term means and was quite involved with this as a lucrative hobby ~03-07 and never knew a single player to describe marking a soft player this way… and datamining was the biggest buzzword before cloud
skipkey 3y ago
I worked for a company that did this for awhile - they had custom written clients for all the major sites, just watching tables and recording the hand histories, which they provided as a subscription service. You could absolutely use the data to improve your margins. Think knowing how loose or tight your opponents were over thousands of hands. Then we got acquired by Zynga and that business got sold off.

busyant 3y ago

> looking for soft players that I had datamined I knew someone on the other end of this. Back in the early 2000s, the wife of a guy I worked with fancied herself a decent poker player. She lost some non-trivial amount of money in an online game and was worried about telling her husband. So, she tried to win it back and lost even more. I think you know where this is going (if not, see Gambler's ruin). She lost all of their savings trying to break even. Stopped paying the bills. At some point in the ensuing months, my co-worker came home to an eviction notice (plus, his wife was hiding the letters threatening to shut off the heat, etc.). ---they got divorced.

xwdv 3y ago
This is why you always keep separate savings accounts away from a spouse.
- busyant 3y ago
  > This is why you always keep separate savings accounts away from a spouse. Your username bio is hilarious--and it is also consistent with your advice. Have an upvote (on your way to 1K)
  - jrs235 3y ago
    I just viewed their profile. They're at 999 karma. Trying to figure out if they have a bot monitoring their own karma that invokes a bot to down vote some other comments of theirs.... UPDATE: Something has to be involved... Or karma aggregation/recalculation isn't instant. I just upvoted their comment, they're still at 999. LOL.
    - __s 3y ago
      I was hoping they try to straddle 1000, while below 1000 they try post karma gaining comments, while above 1000 they try post karma losing comments, changing their bio depending on the mode (maybe having a bot maintain the bio)

waprin 3y ago

Live poker is still quite soft. While you do have to be better compared to years past, it's also far easier to get better because you can study solvers. I used to be a "good but not great" online player, but the extent to which you could truly understand hands was limited due to the limitations of the software at the time (mostly equity calculators that could not truly calculate EV). That changed with the release of Piosolver in 2015 that lets you calculate the EV of various strategies and give you the "correct" answer assuming various assumptions. Those assumptions are always wrong but it's still informative in the "all models are wrong, some are useful". I used to "plateau" in my undertsanding of the game but you no longer plateau because the game can now be understood at a more complete level. Live poker will always be soft because there will always be plenty of people there to have fun and gamble no matter how much software exists. Furthermore, only a slim minority of players even actively trying to win actually put serious effort into studying (see also, dan luu's post on how it's relatively easy to reach the top 5% of any endeavour, even if very difficult to reach the top 1%). I can't help but use the opportunity of poker on the front page of Hacker News to note that I have a strategy blog and training app on this exact topic: www.livepokertheory.com There's a lot of beginner to advanced strategy articles on applying practical solver outputs to live poker games as well as a preflop training based on solver generated preflop charts. Poker is currently my only significant source of income and I "eat my own dogfood" on this site so I'm very incentivized for it to be good!

ryandrake 3y ago
Yes, live poker is still pretty soft, and since the players are worse, your winrate and edge should be better. But then again, I'm not sure you can get enough hands/hour to be as profitable as an online player--everything is just so much slower. You could have a year long downswing live where, if that happened online you are probably just a losing player. So you need to spend all your time at the casinos. You can't make a living grinding home games even if your edge there is astronomical. Just my viewpoint as a solidly recreational player. Although I'm a decently profitable cash player (I donk my cash winnings away by losing tournaments), I'm not good enough to go pro online and I'm not patient enough or willing to spend my life in the casino to go pro live.

saucymew 3y ago

Not much has changed in the current live poker meta. Yes, the average player may be better, but if you put in the consistent time to study/solvers/hand reviews, IMHO that puts you in the top 20 percentile. It's getting to the top 5-10 percentile that is killer. Ultimately, like life, the only true edge you can control is game selection. Hence, that Rounders quote that rings eternal: "Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker."

Animats 3y ago
[flagged]
- frutiger 3y ago
  > This also applies to the crypto world, which, like poker, is zero-sum or worse. Can we please avoid derailing this interesting topic by mentioning the inflammatory crypto scene? We all know everything about it, and have all made up our minds about it, and no new information is being said about it. Thank you!
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - yccs27 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - j-a-a-p 3y ago
        [flagged]
Kranar 3y ago
I don't have the greatest references available, but a naive Google search brings up quite a few sources from databases and surveys that say that while 30% of poker players do better than break even, only 18% of actually manage to make any kind of worthwhile income from poker and only 5% of poker players make what is considered good income from it. I don't know what "good income" is, whether it's like 100k a year or 500k a year... but I can take a pretty good guess that unless you're in the top 15%, poker is probably not worth it professionally.

bashwizard 3y ago

I used to play professionally during 2003-2007 until all the poker coaching sites started popping up everywhere. The money was indeed crazy and I was making roughly $400k/year at NL1000 back then. Eventually my winrate started dropping along with all the fish leaving the game and the whole boom died out. I did a year coaching but later decided to leave poker for good. Good times though and kind of surreal for a 20 something year old dude.

thedangler 3y ago

Now there are apps that tell you to play your hand or not based on your opponents playing style and previous hands. You pay for the app and the app is created by the online poker site. My friend plays professionally full time and he uses these apps for a slight edge. They all do. The apps do not play for him. They just say 80% user Smith123 folds.

matwood 3y ago

I played a lot in person around the same time frame, and did pretty well. It was hugely popular with a lot of dumb money floating around. When I would travel for work, I would find nearby reservation casinos which always seems to have tons of easy money. Like you said, winning poker is a grind, and for me, extremely boring. I rarely play anymore, and if I do it's with friends. But, I have memories of some big hands in Vegas that I'm happy to have experienced. I also learned a ton about risk management, my personal risk tolerance, and controlling my emotions.

whoami_nr 3y ago

Author here. Yes, the grind is something like that. I used to watch couple hours of theory videos and maybe have a hand review session before 4pm. The grind starts around 6PM and I play on-off till 5-6am. Rinse repeat for all 7 days of the week. Every couple months I used to travel for some juicy tournament series to try my hand at live games.

97s 3y ago
It is frustrating isn't it to watch people back when we played idolize it as some glorious career, when it reality it is probably one of the most stressful, depressing and negative jobs mentally a person can have. The variance and amount of hands required to overcome it with skill can be a living nightmare to work through. I can't imagine playing when you played. It was pretty easy back when I did it, but still taking peoples money by isolating bad players with addictions wore me out after a while. I am happy to have played and the skills and determination I learned there helped me throughout the rest of my life. I run my own business from home now and I am much happier. I am glad you found some peace as well.

Decabytes 3y ago

This is basically what the streamer Lifecoach has said his life was like for a very long time. I think he is much happier now