JonnyCosMo United States. Dec 20 2012 18:15. Posts 7292
Been listening to a lot of Joe Rogan recently, and I absolutely love how he brings up things that people just don't talk about all that often. I've been wanting to write this for a long time now, so hopefully it will be an interesting read. Sorry if it starts sounding like I'm rambling, because there will definitely be some parts that will be. The other day, Maz posted the 'How has poker changed in 4 years' thread and it really made me think about a lot of things. Clearly a lot has changed in the past 4 years. What will change in the next 10 years? If you're a poker pro, do you plan on still being a poker pro in 10 years?
When Daut won PCA (Pic w FrinkX, RainKhan, Daut, and me)
I consider 2007 the first year I became a full-time pro. I had finally made my way up to $2/$4 and $3/$6 6-max / heads-up dabbling in shots at $5/$10 from time to time. Even thou I was still in college at the time I basically brought my laptop to every single class / lecture room and played none stop. The games were still very soft, and anytime I found myself in a downswing the solution would be the same: Load up more tables and play for longer. There weren't regs that exploited auto-piloting multi-tablers. Just play more hands and eventually you'll stop running bad and win again. Cardrunners was already the leading poker training website, and anybody who was a serious pro was a member. You could see the regs fixing leaks very fast. I remember there was a 6-max reg who open-limped a ton. Every time he raised preflop it would be with JJ+ (not AK), and he just played very tight/solid post flop. I remember this guy because for a year straight I would shit all over him and he was the biggest loser on my PokerTracker by a large margin, even thou he was definitely still winning overall in these games... One day he stopped open-limping, and started raising all of those hands. That was a very sad day.
Grinding online in 2006
Eventually all the regs got a lot better, and the uber fish started to slowly die out. The games had become more aggressive, and with that came higher variance. Oct/Nov/Dec of 2009 there was a long stretch of time where I was down swinging online. My old strategy of just loading up more tables and playing for longer hours were only making things worse. I had lost the confidence to play. I would question if I was even winning anymore. I would always play stupidly over-rolled for any game, so it wasn't really losing money that was bugging me, it was seeing regs that I use to crush start crushing me. In an attempt to regain confidence I moved down to $1/$2 only to run into another break even stretch. One morning I woke up, and as I was loading up my tables, I get stacked in the very first hand I played. I instantly closed all the tables I was loading up and just sat there staring at the screen. I was listening to Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance'. Your brain can connect certain moments, thoughts, memories, feelings with certain sights, sounds, or smells. It was at this moment where I first thought about quitting poker. It's weird now that every time I hear that song Ooooh Oh, Caught in a Bad Romance... it immediately reminds me of how I felt that day. I got really honest with myself on that day and made a decision for the better. December 20th 2009, 3 years ago to the day, I quit playing online poker as a full-time pro.
ElkY and me at Wynn Classic 2008
Lucky for me, live poker is basically what online poker was in 2007. I know some people find live poker retardedly slow and frustrating but in a weird way I find it relaxing. There are a few things that have come to my attention over the past 3 years thou. You never notice this online since the player pool is massive (atleast at the mid-stakes on Stars & FTP it was) but when it comes down to it, poker is a negative sum game once you factor in the rake. There are so many players online that you rarely see the true effects of this. San Diego is not a small city, but it's not like Vegas, Miami, or LA either in terms of it's poker community. When I first started playing live, there were probably 40 players that called themselves a "pro". And by "pro" I mean, the only thing they did was play poker, and they brought in no outside income into the game. Of these 40 players, there are only 5 or so that remain. It's crazy how true AndrewSong's post in that thread of "90% of the regs from 2008 went busto" actually is. It will happen thou, a game needs outside income in it to run. If you put 9 pros at a table and have they are forced to play together everyday, eventually 8 will be broke and the lone winner will be left without a game to play.
For my next reference: The Hyperbolic Time Chamber from DBZ
Perhaps the funniest (soon to be sad and scary) thing I've noticed is the evolution of Hold'em in live poker and how it's starting to mirror the evolution of Hold'em in online games. In Dragon Ball Z (one of the best anime's ever made btw) there was this room called the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. When you're in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, 1 day in real world = 1 year in the time chamber. The room extends to infinity and the gravity is x100 earth's gravity and there is 1000 degree flames of fire and all kinds of fucking brutal ass-kicking shit. Goku and Gohan go in the Hyberbolic Time Chamber, evolve into higher level Super Saiyans, come out and rape everyone's face in the real world. Online poker is the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. You are able to learn the game so much faster online than you are able to live. In some ways, it's actually extremely hard to correctly learn Hold'em when playing live since it's so slow, it's very hard to see the long run.
Live @ The Bike: Nits make me laugh
Ronin Talken on 2p2 wrote a good article on 3betting meta game in Hold'em a while back and I'll just take a quote from it:
History of 3betting cliffnotes for lazy people:
- Everyone 3bets a merged value range.
- Everyone realizes that 4bets are really big in No Limit, and folding JJ preflop sucks.
- Everyone stops 3betting, unless they have KK+, AK.
- Everyone stops calling 3bets, because no one 3bets anything but QQ+, AK.
- Smart people started 3betting ATC because nits are hilarious.
- Nits got less nitty and started 4betting.
- Even smarter people invented polarization.
- Etc...
When I started live poker everyone was somewhere between the first two steps. Now most people have gotten to the: Everyone stops 3betting, unless they have KK+, AK. And some have moved on to: Everyone stops calling 3bets, because no one 3bets anything but QQ+, AK. This is where most live games are today, especially at the $5/$10 and $10/$20 level. That was like 2008 online poker! Sure enough thou, the improvements in player's game in live poker is mirroring how players improved online.
Live @ The Bike: Running into sets
So now I channel my inner Joe Rogan, and get real and honest. Online poker is most likely never going to return to USA. If it does, the games will be terrible. So where does this leave us as poker pros? What's the future like 10 years from now if you decide to continue playing this game? I know it might be depressing to think about, but it's definitely something that should be on everyone's mind. The longer you play this game the tougher it becomes to transition into other real world rolls. Is this something you commit to all the way? Will it still be viable to play without another source of income in the future? I'd like to hear your guys thoughts on the subject.
0 votes
Everyone needs to see that you are king of the castle - PoorUser
Last edit: 20/12/2012 18:34
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vasoline73 United States. Dec 20 2012 18:36. Posts 808
5/5 nice blog . Don't have any insight tbh but interested in seeing responses from others.
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PuertoRican United States. Dec 20 2012 18:44. Posts 13044
fun post to read. No matter how you look at it, in your case, when you decide to stop, you've made more than most people on the planet doing something fun. You can go do a million different things.
xD
And for the prophecy, I might be way off. But it seems poker is kinda, in a way getting a little easier now. Most people aren't that workhard as they pretend to be. Most people don't want to force themself to work mentally, most people want to just sit and the table, talk about poker, and look at hands. A few vods here and there.
Not many people take the time to really get into it, spend hundreds of hours analyzing in hem, looking for small inches etc.
When you look at the Asian market, maybe something awesome will happen, 2nd boom xD. Also a lot of interesting poker things happening when it comes to facebook, that skypoker thingy.
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eestwood United Kingdom. Dec 20 2012 19:28. Posts 698
On December 20 2012 18:03 Tensai176 wrote:
5/5 last pic is priceless
A lot of you winning players are very smart individuals and underestimate how much fun you'd have in the real world.
I wasn't a large winning player by any means, but I saw what was happening back in 2006 and realize I don't want to wake up 10 years from now firing up tables or sitting down at a 10 ring live table at the casino so I jumped ship.
If you don't want to wake up 5 or 10 years and still be playing cards, pull all your money, get out, go back to university if you have to. You're all still in your 20s.
If was making any excess of money at poker I would keep hammering it. Having an excess on cash which you can use to invest is the best way to make a living I think. Compound interest is the shit, early retirement goal is what I think most people should be after. No need to retire, but just having the option to
Its just about not being lazy. I find that poker and weightlifting correlate a lot in what takes to be sucessful, namely, consitency and hard work.
At least most people here on liquidpoker seem quite smart, and give me the impression they are not making money because they are flat out lazy. In the weightroom, despite how you feel, you are ALWAYS able to lift 90% of your 1 rep max for a single, baring and injury. Grinding should be the same. Just put in the damn hard work. If you wait till you "feel" like lifting, you never do; same poker. Establish ur workload, and just god damn do it.
The other side of the work is improving your knowledge on poker. That is EXACTLY the same as reading on program design, ways to improve ur lifting technique, etc.
Basically:
Studying poker = Studying lifting
Grinding = Time in the gym
Almost everyone sucks at the gym, and so do most poker regs, at least in low stakes (and dare I say mid stakes, but can't talk from experience)
I've re started poker and will post a blog entry soon, but all I can say is that nl10 is SUPER EASY and all that rake makes low stakes unbeatable is non sense.
For people that start threads/posts like this (and these days, there are a few); is your desire for independence/autonomy outweighed by a lack of desire to put the work in to maintain it, do you just not enjoy the game anymore, or have you just not realised/capitalised on the comparative freedom/opportunities that profitable poker playing has over a salaried desk job?
I'm surprised that so many smart, profitable poker players who are armed with a measure of risk-taking ability and desire for independence/autonomy think of their choice of whether or not to continue in poker largely as a function of whether they will be able to beat the games in x years or 'omg how hard will it be to transition to y when poker as a source of income (for hero) is gone'. Even if this happens, do you not back yourself to replicate your success in another field?
imo the primary driver of whether you decide to continue to play poker is whether you still enjoy it enough to keep putting the work in to beat the game. Not specifically aiming this at JohnnyCosmo but I feel like a lot of people rationalise their own lack of desire to put work in to improve by making the blanket statement that the games are getting unbeatable, when really they're just too lazy or don't love it enough now that there's less 'free money' in it. As an extension some of them probably blew too much of their 'free money' without realising how much harder it is to come by so much free cashflow in other endeavours. There are guys playing highstakes HU hyperturbo SNGs that still make absurd amounts of money despite thin winrates, plenty of people that win loads live, still a good chunk of people beating midstakes+ at a great clip and almost all of them have work ethic (and an ability to keep working hard) in common rather than some super sick intellect.
If you don't love the game, be honest about it. If you don't want to put the work in to get better, be honest about it. But don't delude yourself into thinking that a) it's impossible to make great money in it, or b) you won't be able to take your talents and the money you bank from the game and transition into something else that is lucrative and enjoyable if the circumstances necessitating that arise in the future.
ps. I love Joe Rogan podcasts too - don't you think it's interesting that he makes great money doing something that for many could be considered a 'dead' profession from an earnings perspective?
thing about poker is that while you do make a lot of money doing it, you better commit fully to it because in the real world you just turn out to be a huge fish with a lot of money and no idea what to do with it. for me it becomes a huge waste of time because it makes you dumb in all other areas in life. e.g. relationships, investing,business, social skills etc.
if you decide to keep playing now make sure you're ok with doing it for years and years just so that you dont half ass it and lose money in the process. all good things come to an end and to think this will get any better is just fooling oneself. lots of more profitable industries have failed within the same 10 year timetable so thinking online poker will have a resurgence just because stars wont allow it to fail is just silly.
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thewh00sel United States. Dec 20 2012 22:17. Posts 2734
I have just set my sights on a shorter time table to ensure that I achieve financial independence through poker sooner than 10 years. That way if the games become too difficult to beat the rake or w/e I will already have enough passive income from other investments to sustain myself. Also my wife has a career going now too so I've got that going for me.
To me it doesn't seem that unlikely that I'll still play poker regularly in 10 years...It's been 7 years already since I started playing professionally; 5 years in Vegas. Time flies.
A government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. - Ayn Rand
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NeillyJQ United States. Dec 20 2012 23:00. Posts 8947
to each there own
mtts til death baby
Just remember you need to be god damn sure about their tendencies. -Artanis11 http://www.pocketfives.com/profiles/neillyaa/
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NeillyJQ United States. Dec 20 2012 23:03. Posts 8947
jlost88 and i were talking about this in 2008-2009.
this has been how poker has been heading from the start, if you didn't look forward thats your fault
which is when i switched to mtts cuz they soft for long long time~
ne ways, happy you're having a realization.
gl
Just remember you need to be god damn sure about their tendencies. -Artanis11 http://www.pocketfives.com/profiles/neillyaa/
Last edit: 20/12/2012 23:03
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thewh00sel United States. Dec 20 2012 23:22. Posts 2734
@neilly I'm not sure MTTs are softer than cash from a theoretical standpoint. There's only so much innovation/adjustments you can do with 10-40bb. Not saying either is dead or dying any time soon but edges are smaller in MTTs and rake eats a lot of profits.
A government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. - Ayn Rand
On December 20 2012 22:22 thewh00sel wrote:
@neilly I'm not sure MTTs are softer than cash from a theoretical standpoint. There's only so much innovation/adjustments you can do with 10-40bb. Not saying either is dead or dying any time soon but edges are smaller in MTTs and rake eats a lot of profits.
if 10-40bb is not as complex as deeper poker, shouldn't it become tougher quicker than cash.
United States. Dec 20 2012 22:17. Posts 2734
