Poker Blog

To consistently make money playing online poker, you’ve got to be very, very skilled at the game. Poker experts have estimated that only the top five percent of players are actually consistent, winning players. Online Poker rooms forbid players to open more than one real money account per person at their poker site. The main reason for this ban are their poker first deposit bonus offerings. By forbidding multi-accounting, they prevent bonus fraud. However, this is only a problem for the poker room, and not directly for the other players. It’s certainly not what it was pre-Black Friday, or even pre-UIGEA, but US online poker markets are still excellent. There is money to be made at all games and limits, especially if players use proper game selection. Some as you can see have taken the land based live game route. I’m beating 50NL for over 3bb/100 and I’m still losing money with 77% of my hands. If you are struggling to beat this game then most likely you are still playing a number of unprofitable hands on a constant basis. Understand that there are hands which can’t make you money in the long run and that you need to cut them out of your game.

I recently spoke at a conference in Toronto called Discovery that is put on by the responsible gaming council each year. I was asked some tough questions, but none that I wasn’t prepared for. There was one question that inspired me to write this blog and it came from a man who asked, “I deal with teenage problem gamblers and many of them say they want to be professional poker players. What would you say to those kids?”

I think the most important aspect of dealing with kids like this is to have an honest, coaching conversation with them. One that illustrates the complexities involved in making a living gambling. You don’t want to come from, “It’s not possible,” because obviously it is. There are thousands of professional poker players in the world, but I can’t think of a handful of pros that are successful today that are not treating it like a serious job and working hard both playing and studying the game.

So my intention in this coaching conversation is to really illustrate what it takes to make a living doing this. To have them fully understand what it really looks like, but doing so in such a way where it’s they themselves that are realizing it, rather than me preaching to them that they shouldn’t bother trying.

I start by explaining to them that a professional poker player is a small business owner, in the business of entertaining their customers (players who aren’t as skilled as they are). Most every successful business has a mission statement. Since this is a one man small business let’s call it a vision statement.

The vision statement should be one to two sentences on exactly what you want to see for the company. You are the company of course, so I would encourage you to write this vision statement now. It could look something like this:

My vision in poker is to use it as a vehicle to create abundance in my life. To passionately dedicate myself to learning, improving, and developing my skills, while also being financially responsible.

That’s just one example, you need to write one that speaks to you personally because you will be coming back to this statement often. It is the statement that will guide you during your career. The next step is to get a little more specific and quantify what abundance looks like for you. A concrete yearly income you are hoping to achieve. For this example, let’s use $100,000 as the goal.

So now we have the vision statement and the goal, next up is the HOW. The real plan. Drawing from our vision statement, we need to make sure that our plan is financially responsible and that we are continuing to develop our skills away from the table. To hit the $100,000 a year mark, it also requires that you are able to gauge how much money you can expect to make hourly in the game you are playing.

For example, let’s say your bankroll and skill level have you playing $2-$5 no limit hold’em at Bellagio. It’s important to know how much that game is worth to you. The best place to start would be to ask around and see what the best player in that game can expect to make, then deduct about 30% from that total. Yes, you may become the best player in that game, but until you have proven you can be, lets assume you are still in the learning phase and shouldn’t expect to jump out of the gate and be the best player at the table.

Based on what I’ve heard, the best players in that game may make as much as $30 an hour. Deduct 30% from that, if all goes well you can target $21 an hour. To make the math easier, let’s just make it $20 flat per hour. Since our goal is to make $100,000 a year, now we can have a rough idea of how many hours we actually need to spend at the table playing poker. That comes to 5000 hours a year playing. If we break down that further, that comes to 417 hours a month, which breaks down to over 100 hours a week! This is before we even add all of the study hours required to be in line with our vision statement. For ever 10 hours of play, you should add at least two hours of study time. Add on another 1000 hours a year of study, which boils down to 14 hours a week.

So now we have you playing 105 hours a week, and studying around 14 hours a week for a total close to 120 hours in a week. Do you know how many hours are in a week? 168. If you plan on sleeping 8 hours a night, that’s another 56 hours a week. With work/study at 120 and sleep at 56, that totals 176 hours a week.

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Uh oh, Houston we have a problem! While your vision statement was quite clear as was your goal, your plan just isn’t feasible. It’s just not humanly possible unless you plan on skipping out on sleep entirely and having absolutely no social life whatsoever! No matter how good you play, your plan is destined to fail and it will.

So the most obvious thing to adjust is your expectations on your yearly income. Maybe lowering it from $100,000 down to $50,000 a year. To save time, let’s assume you can make a plan work where you make $50,000 a year working very hard. Will this allow you to create abundance in your life? Maybe, maybe not. That depends on your monthly nut, meaning how much your expenses cost you monthly. We are also going to assume you are a law abiding citizen who pays their income tax, so right off the bat let’s whack of 30% of that $50,000 a year. That leaves you with $35,000 to spend over a 12 month period, or about $2900 a month.

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You want a car, you will have rent to pay, and I assume you also may want to eat food at some point. Maybe even have a telephone and wifi in your apartment. So let’s say you find an apartment for $1200 a month, spend another $300 on your car and gas, and then $1000 a month for food. That’s $2500 total, leaving you $400 a month to cover EVERYTHING else! Not to mention the fact that you need to maintain a bankroll big enough to deal with the inevitable swings. Heaven forbid you ever have to fix your car or get a speeding ticket!

If you aren’t playing with a bankroll big enough to play the games you want and live the lifestyle that you want, then what is your plan if you run out of funds? How will you stay in action? Borrowing from friends is one option, but how will you ever build a bankroll big enough to pay them back? At best, you have an extra $400 a month. If you borrowed $5000 it would take two years of everything going perfectly for you to pay them back. How many people do you know that will loan you $5000 on the hope of being paid back in two years if all goes well? So you will get staked you say? Ok, so now someone is putting up the money for you to play in the $2-$5 game and you get to keep 50% of your winnings. Now you will also have to slash your monthly earnings to $1450 a month while your living expenses are at $2500. You are still underwater. Well what if I get staked to play higher limits? OK, so you are going to find a backer to put you in $5-$10 games where you have no experience, there are tougher players, and your win rate isn’t guaranteed to be any higher than the $2-$5? Good luck with that.

This is all painting a dark picture by design. It is the reality that most of you who are hoping to become professional poker players face. One that can’t be ignored. Is it possible that you have the work ethic, the modest monthly nut, the skill set, the emotional stability, the drive, the will, the bankroll, etc. Sure, but don’t be fooled. There are maybe 2%-5% of people that can make this lifestyle work. Less than 5% of ball players in the minor leagues will ever make the big leagues. Even less high school football players putting on weight in the hopes of an NFL career will make it. There are many careers where the odds are heavily stacked against you. There are heroes, those special people who have “it” and find a way to make it, but most will fail. This holds true in poker as well.

My intention wasn’t to discourage you from chasing your dreams, whatever they may be. My intention was to illustrate to you that it will require HARD WORK. It will not be as easy as it looks on TV. Are you willing to put in all that hard work, all the while knowing that even if you do, it still may not be enough?

I recently passed a milestone in my quest to beat 100NL online. That milestone was playing over 500,000 hands of online cash game poker. The truth is that I’ve played more than 500,000 hands of cash online in my life but these 500,000 make up the vast majority of my online cash game experience. I decided to dive into this data and write up as detailed a post as possible to help share some of the hard facts (data doesn’t lie) about grinding micro and low stakes cash game poker online.
The post has dozens of insights backed up with data but I’m sure there are things that can be included in my analysis. If you would like me to discuss something specific which doesn’t appear in the post then please comment below or email me at justin@thegreatgrind.com.

Distribution of the hands played AKA the high level view of the data

As you can see from the table below the 500k hands were played across all buy-in levels from 2NL (1c/2c) all the way to 100NL (50c/$1). Since February last year when I made the decision to move to cash games I started with only $80 in my account with the aim of building a bankroll. My plan for 2013 was to start at 1c/2c and build up a roll and move through the levels until I was comfortably beating 50NL. It is for this reason that 40% of the hands in the 500k sample were played at 50NL and the buy-in levels with the fewest hands are the very first levels. Since I was able to beat 50NL at around the 400k hands mark, my focus has been on moving up in stakes and beating the 100NL level. As you can see in the 100NL row I still have some work to do.

The 500k hands were played over 699 hours which comes to around 715 hands per hour. On average I see around 65 hands per table at full ring which means that on average I’ve been playing 11 tables simultaneously which sounds about right. Initially I played 4-6 tables and April was the first full month that I played 24 tables. I have since gone down to 12 and even 6 tables while trying to beat 100NL.

The table below shows the distribution of the 500k sample by day of the week. You can clearly see that I play the vast majority of my hands over Friday and Saturday (my weekend).

These 500k hands were racked up in 201 different sessions. During these 201 sessions I lost money 75 times (37%) with my longest loosing streak being 6 sessions. My longest winning streak was 15 sessions (unfortunately this was at 2NL:)). The lesson here is that even winning players loss one in 3 sessions on average. During these sessions I’ve paid $10,012 in rake. Unfortunately I haven’t recorded the money I’ve earned from bonuses.

The law of diminishing win rates

One of the most obvious concepts of poker is that the game gets tougher to beat the higher you go up in stakes. An interesting question though is by how much does one’s win rate go down the higher he climbs in stakes. Before we look at my data to get some sense of the drop, it is important to understand that the shape of the graph of someone’s win rate as you go up in stakes will be very different on a player-by-player basis. The main reason for this is because most players don’t stick to a level they can beat long enough to determine their true win rate. This effect can be catastrophic to some players who move up in stakes too quickly after running hot at a new buy-in level. Ask two poker players how many hands you should play to determine your true win rate and you will get three answers. Later in my analysis you will see that the real number is much higher than what most people think.

Do you notice the different between by actual win rate and my EV adjusted winrate at 2NL and 5NL? The reason for this is because my sample sizes for these buy-in levels are small which means I was running very hot (at 5NL) and very cold (at 2NL). In the long run your actual winrate and EV adjusted winrate will match.

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The plight of the break-even periods

Below are three graphs of periods within my 500k hands sample which almost drove me mentally insane. Let’s look at each one on their own and lets see what we can learn from the horror.

The first graph shows a period of roughly 166,000 hands where I broke even at 25NL and 50NL. Before embarking on my challenge to beat 50NL I knew I could beat 10NL but always got stuck at 25NL so when I finally reached 25NL I was ready for the challenge. About 2 month into playing 25NL I took my first shot at 50NL and it went badly. After dropping $1,000 dollars I went back down to 25NL expecting to continue to beat the level like I was doing before taking the shot at 50NL. Not only did I not sustain my earlier win rate at the level but my confidence took a big knock and my volume suffered. I knew I could beat the level and that my failed shot at 50NL was mostly as a result of run bad (more on this later) so I held firm and pushed through it, 40,000 hands later I saw the light and continued to build the mountain (you know, the shape of my graph:)).

The second break-even period is a bit different from the first. The main difference here is that instead of experiencing an extended period of time where I failed to maintain a positive win rate, I ended up wiping out 5 months of positive results in a mere 33 hours. My first shot at 100NL was so devastating financially in comparison to my positive results over the months that in a mere 12,784 hands I wrote off the winnings I had accumulated over the first 7 months of 2013. The way I got through this blow was by understanding the big picture and that if I can wipe out so much money so quickly, the opposite is also true when positive variance is on your side. Losing $500-$1000 or 5-10 buy-ins over a period of 12k hands isn’t unheard of. It is very important to keep things in proportion and to remember the final goal.

The final break-even graph shows all the hands I played at 50NL in the 500k sample. Do you notice what happened during the first 80,000 hands? The first 80k hands was a special type of hell but when I finally got through it and I broke even at the level something happened, I started to beat the level and haven’t looked back. I think a very important lesson can be learnt from this graph. 80k hands is a hell of a lot of hands for someone who plays this game on the side and I know there are many players out there who couldn’t handle going through so many hands without showing a profit for their work. The reality is that if I decided to call it quits after 80k hands at 50NL I would have cost myself thousands of dollars and perhaps even tens of thousands of dollars if I successfully beat 100NL. The lesson to be learnt here is that it can take you tens of thousands of hands to beat a level so keep your head up and don’t quit.

Your aces will break 10 percent of the time and you should fold 9 2

Did you know there are 169 different hands you can be dealt in a Texas Holdem hand? I know what you’re thinking, there are a lot more than 169 different combinations of hands that someone can be dealt. You’re right, there are actually 1,326 combinations but if you had to group those into suited combinations and unsuited combinations you would get 169 different combinations. Don’t believe me, just look at the table below. 13 hands per row, times 13 rows equals 169.

Now that we have determined that there are 169 different hand strength combinations that you can be dealt, lets have a look at how each one fairs.

There are a number of very interesting things we can gather from this table:

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• Even the strongest hand in poker loses 1 in 10 times.
• You will flop a set 11.7% of the time (1 in 8.5).
• On average you will be flipping (50-50) when all in pre-flop.
• Even though 500k hands is a large sample size, when you are breaking it down by 169 different hand combos, there will still be variance on a hand per hand basis. This explains why pocket 3s is my biggest losing hand when looking at dollars won and lost and why I’ve lost more money with QJs vs 82o.
• I’ve mis-click folded AA or timed out when I was dealt them 5 times (whoops!!).

One stat which I find very interesting is the fact that I’ve lost money with 130 of the 169 hand combinations shown in the table above, that’s a majority of 77%. I’m beating 50NL for over 3bb/100 and I’m still losing money with 77% of my hands. If you are struggling to beat this game then most likely you are still playing a number of unprofitable hands on a constant basis. Understand that there are hands which can’t make you money in the long run and that you need to cut them out of your game.

How tight is the competition?

Something which was extremely obvious to me when I was moving up in stakes was the increase in the number of regs at my tables. The first level where I noticed this was at 25NL which seems ridiculously reg infested (50 and 100NL aren’t much better). I decided to dive into my data and see the difference in the tightness level for each buy-in level. Check out the pie charts below which show the percentage of players with certain VPIP ranges per buy-in level.

I was surprised by these results because from the 4 pie charts above it seems 10NL is tighter than 25 and 50NL which wasn’t my experience. One of the issues with this data is that we don’t necessarily know the true VPIP of many of the players in the sample. Check out the table below to see the average number of hands for players based on their VPIP. You can clearly see that the tighter players have a much higher average number of hands which makes sense because these are the regulars which are multi-tabling and putting in a lot of hours. We can also clearly see that players which play above 25% of their hands don’t last.

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Final thoughts

There is an almost unlimited number of analyses I could add to this post but I’ve decided to stop here. I think there is enough here for now and I hope that even the most seasoned professional will find something in this post which will help them improve their game. I would love to hear your thoughts on this post and what you would like me to include in my analysis.

If you enjoyed this post and want to learn how to analyze your own poker stats then check out this detailed guide on the poker stats which matter at 2NL. You can also subscribe to this blog or follow me on Twitter by clicking on the follow button below.

Good luck at the tables.