In the poker community, we often use the term “recreational player” to refer to anyone who is not a professional. There is great variation among non-professional players, however. Some play primarily for the company while others play because they enjoy gambling. Some like the strategy of the game and others enjoy the psychology.
Everyone would prefer to make money, but even among recreational players, some are much more invested in that outcome than others. If you want to be more than a small winner, or if you want to win at all in tougher games, you have to put winning first. You may not literally be a professional, but if your goal is to make money at poker, you must approach the game like one.
That means the other things you enjoy about poker must come second. If you want to win money, you may not be able to enjoy the game in the same way you do when playing solely for fun.
When you play for fun, you are a customer exchanging money for entertainment just as you would at a movie theater or concert venue. Different kinds of entertainment are available at different prices. If you want to drink free coffee or beer and chat with friends, you can do that for the cost of your blinds by folding most hands you’re dealt. If you want to gamble it up and play every hand to the river just in case it’s a winner, that will be considerably more expensive.
The problem comes when people want to have it both ways. A long-time recreational player decides it would be great if he could keep playing the game he loves but make some money while he’s at it. If only he could get a little better, he thinks, he could have it all.
Unfortunately, “getting better” usually means doing less of the things he enjoys and more of the things he does not. The coffee-drinker must take bigger risks, bluffing with bad hands and calling down with marginal ones. The gambler must suffer the pain of folding J3s only to see his flush come in. Worse, he must sometimes find the discipline to fold the J3s even after he makes the flush.
As a professional poker player myself, I like to say I enjoy my job more than most people enjoy their jobs but less than recreational players enjoy playing poker. It is still a job, which means I’m often doing things that are not exactly what I’d otherwise prefer to do in order to make money.
Winning at poker is often boring. It involves a lot of folding. You are not constantly in action, as you would be at the craps table. There is a reason one cannot earn a living at the craps table.
Yet making money at poker also entails more risk and more stress than the coffee-drinker’s preferred style. It is not as simple as waiting for big hands and then getting paid off. Sometimes you have to invest a lot of money in a small edge. Sometimes you come away looking foolish. You cannot afford to care about such things.
The coffee-drinker is already getting the easy, low-risk money. He’s raising Aces when he gets them. He’s winning pots when he flops sets.
If he wants to win more than he currently is, it will not be a matter of getting Aces more often or flopping more sets. It will require finding new edges. It will require doing things his opponents are not doing, and there will be a reason his opponents are not doing those things. Those plays will be either unpleasant or non-obvious, often both.
The misguided would-be moneymaker hopes that these unexplored options are merely non-obvious. He wants to go on getting all that he enjoys from the game without the additional hassle of stressful decisions, big losses, and embarrassing mistakes—or, at least, plays that will look like mistakes to his fellow players. For ego-oriented players, that amounts to the same thing. There may in fact be a few such opportunities he has left untapped, but it will require a different sort of unpleasantness to access them: study, focus, and discipline. In other words, work.
If a profitable play is not as obvious as raising with pocket Aces, then finding it requires effort. The less obvious the play, then more work is required to find it, but also the greater the reward for adding it to your repertoire. Making money in poker requires doing things your opponents are not doing. The harder an opportunity is to recognize, the less likely other players are to be making use of it and so the higher its value.
The point is, it’s work. For most people, studying solver outputs and crunching EV calculations is less fun than sitting at a poker table, just as folding is less fun than betting or raising. But it’s what you have to do if you want to win money in the game.
What’s more, you have to approach studying like a professional. You must do targeted work to identify and improve upon your weaknesses. Watching Twitch streams and PokerGo is not studying, even when the commentary includes strategy discussion. These channels are more like sticking out your tongue in a snowstorm; you might catch a few snowflakes, but you won’t quench your thirst.
None of this is to say that making money from poker is all work and no play. You should enjoy it, or at least derive satisfaction from it. There are better ways to make a quick buck, if that’s all you’re after.
The enjoyment you can derive from playing winning poker has more in common with the enjoyment of solving a Sudoku or crossword puzzle than the thrill of gambling at blackjack. Indeed, playing winning poker requires solving many puzzles. Not just each hand but each individual decision is a puzzle to be solved. Your task is not to rake in pots, book a winning a session, or figure out your opponent’s exact holding. It is to find the solution to each puzzle, the absolute best choice at each decision point, given all available information.
Again, this requires work. If you are playing strictly for fun, you’re free to slack off. You can settle for the “good enough” plays. Checking top pair might be the very best play, but it can lead to tough decisions and maybe even losses down the line. It will be stressful. Betting is easy, and it’s “good enough”. Turning your hand into a bluff might be more profitable than checking it down and taking whatever showdown value you have, but it involves a lot of risk, and you might look foolish if it doesn’t work. Checking it down is “good enough”.
Truly recreational players don’t have to do the work. That’s not what they’re there for, and that’s not what they’re paying for. If you’re willing to pay for it, then you can sit back, relax, and enjoy the swings while sipping your free intoxicant of choice. If you want poker to pay you, then you have to put in the work, on and off the table.
Both are valid options. It’s up to you to decide why you play poker and what you want out of the game. The only problem comes when you aren’t aware or honest with yourself about what you want and what will be required to get it.
