I’ll probably break this post up into multiple parts, so that I can respond to people’s questions on certain parts. Because of the audience here, I’ll keep the post relatively basic to start. I’ll make this thread as in depth as people would like, so feel free to ask about things you don’t understand, or things you want to know more about.
Myths/facts about poker:
Poker is all luck... false.
There is plenty of ‘short term luck’ in poker, but in the long run the good players will get the money. I might go all in with Aces pre-flop and lose 3 times in a row, but long term that hand will win me good money in those situations. The same applies to other situations as well, just the edges are going to be smaller than getting in pre-flop with Aces. Once you learn when you have the advantage, you can get your chips in as the favorite. You’ll lose plenty of times when you’re the favorite. In the long run, all the good and bad short term luck evens out though, and if you’re getting chips in with the best of it, you will end up with the money.
Only the house wins at poker... false.
In poker you’re not playing against the house. The house takes a small “rake” for every hand that a flop is seen. Similar to something like ebay charging auction fees. The seller isn’t competing against ebay. Ebay’s providing them with a service. They bring the customer to them, so the seller gives them a very small fee for that service. The seller still has a margin, so they will still make a profit. The casino/online poker room provides the service of putting the game together/dealing the cards, etc... From a professional player’s perspective, you could say they provide our “customers” as well. :smxB: The player with an edge, will still make a profit.
Now that you know this, one thing I think that might really open people’s eyes is that all you have to do to make money at poker, is be better than the people you play with. Think about that for a minute. You just have to be better than the guys playing at your table. That’s it. You don’t even have to be better than all of them. Just be one of the better ones at the table and you’ll make money. Simple as that. The beautiful thing about that is in poker, everyone thinks they can play. Because of the short term luck that’s involved in the game, it’s tough for a lot of people to understand when they don’t actually know what they’re doing, or if someone has an edge on them. Can you imagine if you were good at basketball, and everytime you went to the gym people who were worse than you would willingly play you for money. Or bowling, everytime you went to the bowling alley someone who bowls a 180 would play you even though you bowl a 230. Golf, if you were a 4 handicap but guys with 15 handicaps would play you anytime you wanted. That’s the everyday life of a skilled poker player. The great thing about poker is, there’s no “score” or “rating” of how good someone is, everyone thinks they are good, so they will unknowingly play people who are better than them all day long, assuming they are just getting unlucky when they lose. If you played one on one vs. a professional basketball player it’d be pretty clear that you have no business being on the court with them, and even someone real cocky who thinks they’re better than everyone at everything wouldn’t be dumb enough to put money on the line against them. If you were playing poker against a professional poker player, you might never know. You don’t have to be a pro to make money. Just be better than the other guys you play with, and if you are, the funny thing is, they’ll never even know.
I don’t have a lot of money, so I couldn’t get started playing poker... false.
I started with $50. As I’ve said in the past, in my opinion poker is one of the best ways in the world to build up money with minimal amount of capital. Hopefully by the end of this thread, it will be clear why this is.
Fun fact: Biophase is a good friend of mine. For fun, he wanted to take $1, and a little poker advice, and see what he could do with it in his spare time. So, he set a challenge on his blog, to turn $1 into $1,000. A few months later he sent me a nice graph once he crossed the $1k mark.:smx1:
Okay, so you can start with next to nothing, but you’ll need a huge bankroll to make the big money... false.
Once you build yourself a decent bankroll, you’d be surprised how little you need to actually “operate your business.” I’ll get into this in another section, but for example my graph in this post from the first week of August: http://www.thefastlanetomillions.co...ssion/15773-week-life-poker-pro-snowbank.html - I needed just over $10,000 for my working capital to be comfortable for the stakes I was playing that week. With rakeback(I'll explain this later), my return for the week was over $25,000.(don't expect those results though, just showing an example of what's possible without needing a huge amount of capital)
Oh, you’re a professional poker player, are you on tv?
Being a professional poker player doesn’t mean you’re on tv, and being on tv doesn’t mean you’re a professional poker player. What they show on tv is usually tournament poker. They rarely show cash game poker. Personally, I play cash game poker.
Why don’t you/and others play tournaments? Don’t you want to be on tv?
Cash games are more profitable. Personally, I don’t have a desire to be on tv. I just want to make money. Overall, cash games are much more profitable.
A lot of the people you see on tv playing poker don’t have a lot of money, despite having a lot of big cashes. Many of them are backed(put into tournaments with others money) so they only get a small % when they do win money. Most people don’t understand the bankroll you need for big buy in tv tournaments is huge. Just to give an example of the %’s, I know a large number of players who were backed into the main event by “staking groups”(often players with a lot of money who pool their money together to stake other players into expensive tournaments that the players can’t afford the swings of, if they think the players they’re staking in the long run will net them a positive % return on their investment), and the players often got 20% if they cashed.(30/70 deals are also common if you’re doing makeup- which means you play many tournaments for the backers, but keep a running tab of ‘what you owe’ once you do finally make a big cash) So if one of the guys who were staked(which is a large number of people), let’s say won $1 million, they’d actually only take home $200k., their backers would get the rest.(and often more, if they had makeup owed to them by that player) The player gets a risk free lottery ticket and a chance at tv time(which potentially means sponsorships if you’re entertaining), so it’s not a bad thing to get staked. Not many people have the bankroll themselves to withstand the swings of what it would actually take to play big buy in tournaments full time. Another thing people don’t understand, is how often you’re actually going to have a big pay day is rare. Like I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of short term luck in poker, so even a great poker player will not win many big tournaments, and even a crappy player can win a tournament. There is a running joke when tourney players tell people how much they’ve won at tournaments trying to show off to non-poker people, you should ask, “ya, but how much did you lose” since tourney players often enter a bunch of tourneys- let’s say 20 $10k tournaments and have a $150,000 cash in their 20th, and tell all their friends they made $150,000. They forgot to mention the $200,000 in buy ins before they cashed, so they’re still in the red. The great thing for tournament players is it only lists your winnings, so it’s not uncommon to have $1,000,000 in tournament wins, but maybe it cost you $800k in entries to get that. Often players will get lucky and have a big score in a tournament or two and profess to anyone who will listen how much they’ve won or how good they are at poker, but if they talked about poker with anyone who really knew poker for 2 minutes, that person would be able to tell the real story behind their results pretty quickly.(I expanded way more on this part, because I get this question so often, and so many things are misunderstood about what is seen on tv. Figured I'd just expand now rather than later in the thread.)
Live poker vs. online poker:
Live poker is much, much easier than online poker. You may be thinking, “snowbank, then why the heck do you play online?” The ability to play as many tables as you want online, thus multiplying your hourly rate as many times as you want(or as many tables as you can handle while still playing your game.) As soon as a casino announces they’ll allow you to multi-table their games, I’m there. :smx9: Also, live poker is pretty boring if you’re used to online. In live poker, you see roughly 30 hands/hour. With all the tables I play online, I often play about 800 hands/hour, sometimes even up to 1,000. You can see how boring live poker would seem to an online player.
As far as skill level comparison, many live players who try out online poker get obliterated because they don’t know coming in how big the skill difference is. They assume “online must be rigged” because they don’t know how they can win at the casino playing 1/2nl but get crushed online. To show you how the levels compare, a good 1/2nl online player skill-wise could comfortably play in a lot of 10/20nl games at the casino.(bankroll wise they might not be comfortable doing that, but skill wise they often could)
Part 2: coming soon...
Part two should be up in the week or so. This will include a lot more of the "how to" rather just general info. Part 2 topics I will be covering: treating poker like a business, general poker playing advice, how much money you can make, and more.
Myths/facts about poker:
Poker is all luck... false.
There is plenty of ‘short term luck’ in poker, but in the long run the good players will get the money. I might go all in with Aces pre-flop and lose 3 times in a row, but long term that hand will win me good money in those situations. The same applies to other situations as well, just the edges are going to be smaller than getting in pre-flop with Aces. Once you learn when you have the advantage, you can get your chips in as the favorite. You’ll lose plenty of times when you’re the favorite. In the long run, all the good and bad short term luck evens out though, and if you’re getting chips in with the best of it, you will end up with the money.
Only the house wins at poker... false.
In poker you’re not playing against the house. The house takes a small “rake” for every hand that a flop is seen. Similar to something like ebay charging auction fees. The seller isn’t competing against ebay. Ebay’s providing them with a service. They bring the customer to them, so the seller gives them a very small fee for that service. The seller still has a margin, so they will still make a profit. The casino/online poker room provides the service of putting the game together/dealing the cards, etc... From a professional player’s perspective, you could say they provide our “customers” as well. :smxB: The player with an edge, will still make a profit.
Now that you know this, one thing I think that might really open people’s eyes is that all you have to do to make money at poker, is be better than the people you play with. Think about that for a minute. You just have to be better than the guys playing at your table. That’s it. You don’t even have to be better than all of them. Just be one of the better ones at the table and you’ll make money. Simple as that. The beautiful thing about that is in poker, everyone thinks they can play. Because of the short term luck that’s involved in the game, it’s tough for a lot of people to understand when they don’t actually know what they’re doing, or if someone has an edge on them. Can you imagine if you were good at basketball, and everytime you went to the gym people who were worse than you would willingly play you for money. Or bowling, everytime you went to the bowling alley someone who bowls a 180 would play you even though you bowl a 230. Golf, if you were a 4 handicap but guys with 15 handicaps would play you anytime you wanted. That’s the everyday life of a skilled poker player. The great thing about poker is, there’s no “score” or “rating” of how good someone is, everyone thinks they are good, so they will unknowingly play people who are better than them all day long, assuming they are just getting unlucky when they lose. If you played one on one vs. a professional basketball player it’d be pretty clear that you have no business being on the court with them, and even someone real cocky who thinks they’re better than everyone at everything wouldn’t be dumb enough to put money on the line against them. If you were playing poker against a professional poker player, you might never know. You don’t have to be a pro to make money. Just be better than the other guys you play with, and if you are, the funny thing is, they’ll never even know.
I don’t have a lot of money, so I couldn’t get started playing poker... false.
I started with $50. As I’ve said in the past, in my opinion poker is one of the best ways in the world to build up money with minimal amount of capital. Hopefully by the end of this thread, it will be clear why this is.
Fun fact: Biophase is a good friend of mine. For fun, he wanted to take $1, and a little poker advice, and see what he could do with it in his spare time. So, he set a challenge on his blog, to turn $1 into $1,000. A few months later he sent me a nice graph once he crossed the $1k mark.:smx1:
Okay, so you can start with next to nothing, but you’ll need a huge bankroll to make the big money... false.
Once you build yourself a decent bankroll, you’d be surprised how little you need to actually “operate your business.” I’ll get into this in another section, but for example my graph in this post from the first week of August: http://www.thefastlanetomillions.co...ssion/15773-week-life-poker-pro-snowbank.html - I needed just over $10,000 for my working capital to be comfortable for the stakes I was playing that week. With rakeback(I'll explain this later), my return for the week was over $25,000.(don't expect those results though, just showing an example of what's possible without needing a huge amount of capital)
Oh, you’re a professional poker player, are you on tv?
Being a professional poker player doesn’t mean you’re on tv, and being on tv doesn’t mean you’re a professional poker player. What they show on tv is usually tournament poker. They rarely show cash game poker. Personally, I play cash game poker.
Why don’t you/and others play tournaments? Don’t you want to be on tv?
Cash games are more profitable. Personally, I don’t have a desire to be on tv. I just want to make money. Overall, cash games are much more profitable.
A lot of the people you see on tv playing poker don’t have a lot of money, despite having a lot of big cashes. Many of them are backed(put into tournaments with others money) so they only get a small % when they do win money. Most people don’t understand the bankroll you need for big buy in tv tournaments is huge. Just to give an example of the %’s, I know a large number of players who were backed into the main event by “staking groups”(often players with a lot of money who pool their money together to stake other players into expensive tournaments that the players can’t afford the swings of, if they think the players they’re staking in the long run will net them a positive % return on their investment), and the players often got 20% if they cashed.(30/70 deals are also common if you’re doing makeup- which means you play many tournaments for the backers, but keep a running tab of ‘what you owe’ once you do finally make a big cash) So if one of the guys who were staked(which is a large number of people), let’s say won $1 million, they’d actually only take home $200k., their backers would get the rest.(and often more, if they had makeup owed to them by that player) The player gets a risk free lottery ticket and a chance at tv time(which potentially means sponsorships if you’re entertaining), so it’s not a bad thing to get staked. Not many people have the bankroll themselves to withstand the swings of what it would actually take to play big buy in tournaments full time. Another thing people don’t understand, is how often you’re actually going to have a big pay day is rare. Like I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of short term luck in poker, so even a great poker player will not win many big tournaments, and even a crappy player can win a tournament. There is a running joke when tourney players tell people how much they’ve won at tournaments trying to show off to non-poker people, you should ask, “ya, but how much did you lose” since tourney players often enter a bunch of tourneys- let’s say 20 $10k tournaments and have a $150,000 cash in their 20th, and tell all their friends they made $150,000. They forgot to mention the $200,000 in buy ins before they cashed, so they’re still in the red. The great thing for tournament players is it only lists your winnings, so it’s not uncommon to have $1,000,000 in tournament wins, but maybe it cost you $800k in entries to get that. Often players will get lucky and have a big score in a tournament or two and profess to anyone who will listen how much they’ve won or how good they are at poker, but if they talked about poker with anyone who really knew poker for 2 minutes, that person would be able to tell the real story behind their results pretty quickly.(I expanded way more on this part, because I get this question so often, and so many things are misunderstood about what is seen on tv. Figured I'd just expand now rather than later in the thread.)
Live poker vs. online poker:
Live poker is much, much easier than online poker. You may be thinking, “snowbank, then why the heck do you play online?” The ability to play as many tables as you want online, thus multiplying your hourly rate as many times as you want(or as many tables as you can handle while still playing your game.) As soon as a casino announces they’ll allow you to multi-table their games, I’m there. :smx9: Also, live poker is pretty boring if you’re used to online. In live poker, you see roughly 30 hands/hour. With all the tables I play online, I often play about 800 hands/hour, sometimes even up to 1,000. You can see how boring live poker would seem to an online player.
As far as skill level comparison, many live players who try out online poker get obliterated because they don’t know coming in how big the skill difference is. They assume “online must be rigged” because they don’t know how they can win at the casino playing 1/2nl but get crushed online. To show you how the levels compare, a good 1/2nl online player skill-wise could comfortably play in a lot of 10/20nl games at the casino.(bankroll wise they might not be comfortable doing that, but skill wise they often could)
Part 2: coming soon...
Part two should be up in the week or so. This will include a lot more of the "how to" rather just general info. Part 2 topics I will be covering: treating poker like a business, general poker playing advice, how much money you can make, and more.
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