A realistic winrate to have as goal to make a living from online cash poker?

[turnupthebb]

Many pros who teach poker including Galfond say that it's very hard to have a 3bb/100 winrate. Many of these pros have shown their winrate and that is usually what their winrate is. Not even the best players can get much higher than 3bb/100 winrate at Zoom.

So if 3bb/100 is kind of the soft ceiling of what we can expect as winrate if we become one of the best players, what does that mean? It means BAD because of variance.

3bb/100 is terrible if you want to make a living from playing poker. online poker has very high variance (std deviation).
So just go use a variance tool for poker and see for youself if you haven't already.
3bb/100 winrate means you can play half a million hands and still be losing money, you will not be profitable after half a million hands. Half a million hands is a lot of hands.

500k hands will take you 1-3 years of hard grinding multi tables 5 days per week. So after 1-3 years you will have lost money even if your true winrate is 3bb/100. But you will maybe think your winrate is negative (losing) because you don't know what your true winrate is, you only see the winrate that is result of variance.

So is this good for making a living from poker if you have to grind full time for 1-3 years and lose money? This is not a good enough winrate to make a dependable living from. You would need maybe 8bb/100 winrate but that's not something many pros have. It would require to play very few tables and doing a lot of table selection to bum hunt and exploit. You can't just sit down at any table or play zoom. Also you need to be incredibly good at poker, better than the ones who teach you poker. Do you think you can achieve 8bb/100 true winrate at 1k nl?

Even if you can get a 3bb/100 winrate which is very difficult, its as you can see yourself from a variance tool, not dependable as income because you have to pay your rent and food and internet but you are just losing every month for 1-3 years, losing and losing because of variance even if your true winrate is 3bb/100. How will you survive for 1-3 years losing? Not easy. And i haven't even mentioned how it will affect your mental health, your confidence in poker, tilt, etc.

Also don't get fooled if you have played maybe 100k hands and have a good winrate. That is probably not your true winrate, you could have been lucky and maybe your true winrate is much lower, maybe only 1bb/100 or maybe even -1bb/100 or worse. Losing players can win money if they get lucky and they can get lucky for 100k+ hands, that's how variance works.

I have seen some pros who have 17bb/100 winrate, they brag about it. But then they also show that it's only like 15k hands or 40k hands or something. So that is meaningless. Go look and play with a variance tool and see yourself.. it means absolutely nothing to show a winrate with so few hands. You need to play millions of hands before you can start to think about if this is your true winrate. 50k hands is just gambling and not something anyone can make a living from.

Just don't know if I wanna really get back to studying and learning poker again. Variance and soft caps on how much we can expect to have winrate and how all politcians hate poker and want to make it impossible to play and so much trouble everywhere with poker. Maybe it's better to i dont know, maybe try my luck at writing a best seller book lol. If I dedicate myself to poker then I want at least 8bb/100 winrate, 3bb/100 winrate is not enough, but it seems stupid to have 8bb/100 as goal when most pros can't have that winrate.

Also poker keeps getting tougher with more and more people using GTO charts, solvers etc which means true winrates should slowly be decreasing every few years.

 

[pentazepam]

Online poker as a way of making a living is dead as a dodo. At least if you live in the Western world.

Only Live Cash Games are left.

Some sites open to only Americans or Asians can be a little soft still.

But if you look at pokerstars for example any level above 10-25NL plays like 400-1000NL 15 years ago.

My recommendation is to learn everything you can about the coming of the AI revolution.

Jobs as we know it won't exist in 5-10 years. Maybe less if politicians, the governments, and the military allow the current development to continue.

It will be a utopia or a dystopia - nothing in between.

 

[Claudiunm]

Yes you are right. The best thing to do is to abandon Poker as a source of income and just play for fun.

 

[turnupthebb]

There is one thing I actually sort of missed when I looked at a variance tool which is good news for us.
The variance I talked about is worst case scenario.
But there is in the variance tool I use a line on the graph which says what is with 95% probability the most you will lose and also another line which says what is 75% chance the most you will lose.

So I prefer from now on to use the 75% line, not the absolute worst case scenario. Because 75% chance is quite high chance that it won't be catastrophic. And this is not life time we're talking about, it's "just" 1-3 year. And sure you could be unlucky with that 25% chance first 1-3 years then against 25% unlucky the next 1-3 years, that's very possible but also it's much more likely to most of the time (75%) things won't be so bad. And this if poker so I think we should be ok with not having absolute guarantees.

So I will play online poker anyway.

 

[YLAN]

To make a living from online cash poker doesn't only depend on winrate. if it's very hard to have a 3bb/100 winrate for you then you can still make it with 1bb/100 winrate... just simply raise the stakes.

 

[turnupthebb]

To make a living from online cash poker doesn't only depend on winrate. if it's very hard to have a 3bb/100 winrate for you then you can still make it with 1bb/100 winrate... just simply raise the stakes.

You missed the point. It's about variance. With 1bb/100 winrate then variance is going to be even more difficult to survive. I think 3bb/100 is the absolute minimum needed to play poker for a living. If you have 1bb/100 and think the problem is solved by moving up in stakes it's not correct because that doesn't change variance, actually it probably will just make variance even worse because it should be tougher the more high you go in stakes.

 

[YLAN]

You missed the point.

Howdy bud. Apologize if I misunderstood your point.

Just be clarified that win rate is actually total variance including all things that allows a win or lose including the selection of the right tables, even seat selection, etc. Most regard that 3bb/100 win rate is a winning player & good enough for a living on low stakes such as NL2 up to NL50. That is because, for example @NL25, 3bb/100=$0.75, assuming 100 hands/hr X 8 hr/day X 30days/ month = $180/ month. This could be a living for some. 3bb/100 win rate means you must win a total 3bb$ every 100 hands consistently. It is certainly not an easy feat since only a few can win more than they lose consistently. Typically, low stakes also has bigger variance than higher stakes since fishes/ donks proliferate at these levels. Higher stakes are mostly sharks that are outplaying each other.

Now, if 3bb/100 win rate is too tough to be consistent, 1bb/100 is easier. That is, just win a total of 1bb$ every 100 hands which is a lower win rate. In our example of NL25 that is just $60/ month which may not be a living. But at higher stakes like NL100, 1bb/100 = $240/ month which could be a living for some. Tho it is simply much easier said than done. High risk, high reward.

That is just to reply on the question of win rate & making a living.

My friendly advise, however, is to just play poker for fun & small profits are a bonus. Making a living with poker requires a very strong mentality, deep bankroll capability, advanced poker strategy, & a lot of luck. Very few lucky ones make it & most loose more than they can afford.

Good luck.

 

[WrongUsername]

there is no realistic win rate cause u can´t control the outcome of cards come on.

 

[turnupthebb]

Howdy bud. Apologize if I misunderstood your point.

Just be clarified that win rate is actually total variance including all things that allows a win or lose including the selection of the right tables, even seat selection, etc. Most regard that 3bb/100 win rate is a winning player & good enough for a living on low stakes such as NL2 up to NL50. That is because, for example @NL25, 3bb/100=$0.75, assuming 100 hands/hr X 8 hr/day X 30days/ month = $180/ month. This could be a living for some. 3bb/100 win rate means you must win a total 3bb$ every 100 hands consistently. It is certainly not an easy feat since only a few can win more than they lose consistently. Typically, low stakes also has bigger variance than higher stakes since fishes/ donks proliferate at these levels. Higher stakes are mostly sharks that are outplaying each other.

Now, if 3bb/100 win rate is too tough to be consistent, 1bb/100 is easier. That is, just win a total of 1bb$ every 100 hands which is a lower win rate. In our example of NL25 that is just $60/ month which may not be a living. But at higher stakes like NL100, 1bb/100 = $240/ month which could be a living for some. Tho it is simply much easier said than done. High risk, high reward.

That is just to reply on the question of win rate & making a living.

My friendly advise, however, is to just play poker for fun & small profits are a bonus. Making a living with poker requires a very strong mentality, deep bankroll capability, advanced poker strategy, & a lot of luck. Very few lucky ones make it & most loose more than they can afford.

Good luck.

Have you used a variance tool? It just don't sound like it.
I don't know how I can make it any clearer how you are missing the entire point about variance.
If you have a true 3bb/100 winrate that doesn't mean you will win 3bb every 100 hands, it means you will win 3bb on average every 100 hands in the very long term. The long term could be 10 years or 20 years or even longer. Because in "short term" which culd be 1-3 years you can be losing player even if your true winrate is 3bb/100.

If you have 1bb/100 true winrate then variance will be even much worse.

 

[Station_Master]

Have you used a variance tool? It just don't sound like it.
I don't know how I can make it any clearer how you are missing the entire point about variance.
If you have a true 3bb/100 winrate that doesn't mean you will win 3bb every 100 hands, it means you will win 3bb on average every 100 hands in the very long term. The long term could be 10 years or 20 years or even longer. Because in "short term" which culd be 1-3 years you can be losing player even if your true winrate is 3bb/100.

If you have 1bb/100 true winrate then variance will be even much worse.

If you play enough hands in a year or three years it's really unlikely you will be down if you are genuinely a winning player. How many hands are you looking at over the course of a year.

If you can win 3bb/100 at 1knl this is $30 per 100 hands. Many pros will multitabling, so perhaps you would be playing 300- 500 hands per hour, earning $90 - $150 an hour. This is good money. The hard part is achieving such a win rate at such high stakes.

 

[turnupthebb]

If you play enough hands in a year or three years it's really unlikely you will be down if you are genuinely a winning player. How many hands are you looking at over the course of a year.

If you can win 3bb/100 at 1knl this is $30 per 100 hands. Many pros will multitabling, so perhaps you would be playing 300- 500 hands per hour, earning $90 - $150 an hour. This is good money. The hard part is achieving such a win rate at such high stakes.

It's not so unlikely. Just go take a look yourself at a variance tool.
More hands per hour means lower winrate too. Playing Zoom is probably the lowest winrate but in return you get the highest amount of hands.
But 50k hands is very high chance to be losing if your true winrate is 3bb/100. 100k hands is 75% chance the worst is breakeven, 95% chance that the worst is losing 3.3k bb. and 100% chance that the worst is losing 7.7k bb.
With 500k hands it actually gets better as I updated later to explain because there is 95% chance that the worst case scenario is still going to be profitable. Before I looked at the worst case scenario which is losing 10.5k bb.

But like I explained in my 2nd post in this topic I think at least in my opinion, using the worst case scenario isn't best idea, at least for me, I prefer to use the 95% or 70% likelyhood ranges. That's why I will go for it with poker. But now I just need to deposit to some poker site but it's difficult to do that. I hope crypto poker goes mainstream soon so all these fiat headaches can go away.

Maybe the problem is you don't know any variance tool so I will link to the one I use: www.primedope.com/poker-variance-calculator

You will see that variance is really difficult to survive with a low winrate. With 1bb/100 true winrate there is 95% chance the worst case is losing 9.1k bb after 500k hands. So as you can see, winrate makes a big difference. If you played 500k hands and losing losing all the time losing for half a million hands, would you really have the strength to continue and believe in yourself?

 

[Station_Master]

It's not so unlikely. Just go take a look yourself at a variance tool.
More hands per hour means lower winrate too. Playing Zoom is probably the lowest winrate but in return you get the highest amount of hands.
But 50k hands is very high chance to be losing if your true winrate is 3bb/100. 100k hands is 75% chance the worst is breakeven, 95% chance that the worst is losing 3.3k bb. and 100% chance that the worst is losing 7.7k bb.
With 500k hands it actually gets better as I updated later to explain because there is 95% chance that the worst case scenario is still going to be profitable. Before I looked at the worst case scenario which is losing 10.5k bb.

But like I explained in my 2nd post in this topic I think at least in my opinion, using the worst case scenario isn't best idea, at least for me, I prefer to use the 95% or 70% likelyhood ranges. That's why I will go for it with poker. But now I just need to deposit to some poker site but it's difficult to do that. I hope crypto poker goes mainstream soon so all these fiat headaches can go away.

Maybe the problem is you don't know any variance tool so I will link to the one I use: www.primedope.com/poker-variance-calculator

You will see that variance is really difficult to survive with a low winrate. With 1bb/100 true winrate there is 95% chance the worst case is losing 9.1k bb after 500k hands. So as you can see, winrate makes a big difference. If you played 500k hands and losing losing all the time losing for half a million hands, would you really have the strength to continue and believe in yourself?

Your missing the point. Over a year a pro would play 500k - 1m hands or more, so the variance would be manageable at 3bb/100. Plus you would get rakeback/bonuses on top which act to mitigate the worst possible outcomes.

 

[turnupthebb]

Your missing the point. Over a year a pro would play 500k - 1m hands or more, so the variance would be manageable at 3bb/100. Plus you would get rakeback/bonuses on top which act to mitigate the worst possible outcomes.

I'm not missing any point. First of all that is that pro's observed winrate, not true winrate. 1 million hands is not enough to know the true winrate. He could be lucky with variance. I also am not sure if you realize how much 1 million hands is. You're talking as if this is something all pros should be able to do. I think 1 million hands per year if you're not a zoom player is not really that much of a thing, but sure there could be maybe 1 sick player in the world capable of doing that 1 year but i doubt that they would keep doing 1 million hands every year unless it's zoom.