Let's talk about rake, late 2025 edition.

If other things in life are more important to you, than choose a job that doesn't require a huge time commitment. Spend your time doing things you love, if playing poker isn't what you love - do something different. That is literally all I'm saying. Trying to start a poker career simultaneously with starting a family probably a poor idea.

Having a family when you've built a six figure bankroll and are good enough and have established games where you can routinely make enough to pay your bills - great. But I don't think many poker pros are playing $25/$50+ profitably without putting in a ton of hours at lower stakes. If you can do that playing less than 40-hours a week or less, good for you, but I doubt that's normal. If you're just starting out trying to become a pro, it's going to be a huge time commitment.

I see a lot of people complaining about how hard it is to be a pro - yeah being a pro at anything is hard. Do what it takes, or choose a different career.

Americans and their tipping culture is so funny to me. How about just paying your employees enough not to starve?
Yea when your detached house is one year's salary and your gas is half a dollar per liter (two pints approx.), and now whenever I travel anywhere in the world the white guy is seen as an ATM that has to tip... tragic

How about we ask everyone in live strategy to post the rake promo and at least 1 tip?

Everyone agrees: the rake shapes strategy massively.

My main game was 20/40 plo at commerce casino and 10/20 nl. I played almost every day. Used to be good friends with Gman/Garrett. Used to play against AndyStacks back when he was a big fish. Brian Kim was the best player in the NL game imo. You can claim I'm making **** up but I am not. Woke up around 10am drive to the casino and played until at least midnight. If the game kept going and was super good I would drink a coffee and play up until noon the next day then sleep in and take a day off. I don't know why you all act like its so hard to just grind. It's a game! Korean Linda from NoCal played 500 hours in June one WSOP.

Also I'm using my real name anyone who grinded high limit in 2010-2018 in LA knows me.

Your feminine scarf culture makes us chuckle as well

^^^^^^ spot on. anyone who disagrees is wrong or maybe just doesn't love poker.

Ideally higher stakes, higher hourly, and put in volume too. But yes I agree smart work is huge thats why game selection is so key.

When I said hard work I meant smart work + volume. I don't mean grunt physical work.

The long term solution for poker is to host your own game rake free, but who wants to clean up beer cans, and where shall everyone park?

I don't think "everyone" agrees that rake shapes strategy massively. I think if you're playing in a game where the edges are that tight where rake theoretically makes a difference, you're probably playing at a game where the stakes are high enough that you aren't worried about the rake. If you're playing Perfect GTO Dude, then yeah rake is going to matter a ton. But Perfect GTO Dude isn't playing $1/$2 in Nowhere, USA and if Perfect GTO Dude is visiting family or something and decided to splash around the $1/$2 table, he probably is whaling about and not really playing his A game.

I'd say that in general, if people are aggressively adjusting their game to account for rake in a $1/$2-$2/$5 game, they are probably making a mistake because if you start loading in what mistakes the population routinely makes in these games, those EV mistakes greatly exceed the rake and the computer would exploit it. Solvers nit up in higher rake scenarios because solvers are playing solvers. If you go in and start nodelocking things that real $1/$2 Vs do, the computer is playing more aggressive and playing way more hands than GTO baseline. It boils down to against a perfect player a solver has to be defensive. GTO solves are based upon having a skill edge of precisely zero because its the same player on both sides. When you nodelock and there is a skill edge, (the opponent makes a defined mistake) then the solver doesn't have to be defensive, it can exploit and it will aggressively exploit.

Well, my role in these arguments is usually to take the claims completely at face value and show how it’s a drop in the ocean to prove what’s being claimed.

One pro or 10 pros or a 100 pros doesn’t a profession make. There are 800,000 electricians in the US and they make over $2.5mm lifetime.

People make a big fuss about whether a player CAN make more than the median income, but tell me what the median 2p2 poster has made lifetime. It’s 4 figures at most, and more relationally it’s a negative number. Has the top 10% of posters made 2 years worth of an electrician’s salary? I’ll take the under. Daniel Cates isn’t a billionaire, smdh. (Or if he is, it sure as **** isn’t off of grinding!)

Tbf, some of this comes down to a semantics argument about what “viable” means and all that. I hope you know no one’s making the case that pro poker players literally don’t exist.

Anyway, someone living in Vegas running up a bankroll during the poker boom so that they have the capital to play high stakes now isn’t even much of a counterfactual for anything that’s been said (apart from implying you’re a larping pathological liar with BPD 😃 )

The same guys who can’t win much money now wouldn’t have been able to win during the poker boom either. They wouldn’t have had the information and would have sucked just like everyone else.

And I agree 99% of those thinking about trying to become pro shouldn’t. Definitely not small stakes NLHE. Be an electrician. Work at the supermarket… but if you won’t take no for an answer follow the advice I gave earlier in this thread.

Lastly, one generally doesn’t choose to be a professional poker player. It happens naturally when you’re obsessed with the game and winning enough to support yourself and building your bankroll to a point you can keep playing.

This is America. You can get ahead of the rat race without running a business here.

Why would someone doing great at a job be paid a similar to hourly as someone going threw the motions. Tipping culture rewards the skilled and focused.

300 hours is nothing. It’s less than 10 hours per day. I thought you poker dorks were supposed to be good at math.

Whatever you say man. (On my 14th straight hour today at 38 years old)

Doers do.

I don’t know or care whether it’s skill or game availability or rake creep or what but the numbers speak for themselves on how many poker pros, especially Americans have emerged since the bubble burst.

ok and you did that for ~4500 days consecutively? come on man

Also seems to be the euro capital of the U.S. I bet the 14 a hour has something to do with that as well and it being in an upper class area.

still genuinely believe its bc extreme privatization. handful of "regs" got high 6 / low 7 figures in ev and 0 for everyone else. can say that doesnt apply to lower stakes guys but its obvious removing whales from the ecosystem trickles down through the whole economy

If I was awake for those 12 years I was at a poker table and I don't sleep that much.

I agree. Especially when so many keep chasing NLHE instead of transitioning to PLO.

The trick is to be 1)American 2) social/likeable
Then you will get the invite
Beware of all home games though. Avoid them like the plague

Can't blame the games for going private when the Euro leeches come in and contribute nothing and tank every hand and don't say a word to anyone.

i dont think this is true at all. if you are a winner, regardless of how social you are you don't really continue to get invited to anything in my experience unless you bring people (raked games notwithstanding)

i dont blame people for running games, i blame poker room management for enabling / aiding it. less clear who to blame for the demise of online (particularly us facing) but believe the apps etc played a huge role in that too

but also skill increase blah blah

poker, live at least, is significantly less egalitarian and meritocracy based than 20 or even 5 years ago. i expect that to increase exponentially until either nothing above like 2/5 or low cap 5/10 5/5 games go or poker rooms make a change to protect their regular games (gl w this)

So again I think it's time to take stock of all the ways we agree on the merits, and the only difference is whether it's an inspiration or cautionary tale.

Like sub and I are saying you can only be a pro poker through some Faustian bargain, and you're quite literally saying you've had no life other than poker (not making personal judgments). I agreed with (most of) your first post and still do so let's take stock of that.

And aside from the "Is it a good way to spend your life" perspective, we're getting into the semantics of "viable" again. Everyone I know who has done what you're suggesting for so much as a few months crashed and burned (there are the fortitudinous few who made it to a few years, no one that I know who made it decades). So unless your argument is that social science is quackery and 99.999% of people are just pussies, I think it's safe to say on any individual level that even if someone is a 1-in-100 level hard worker/on the spectrum/whatever else, they are still almost certainly not going to be able to hack it.

Maybe it's just 'cause I'm a Bravo fish, but I feel like people have been saying for 10+ years that NLHE is going the way of stud and limit, and now that it's 2025 (and we've come out of a pandemic and everything) I look around and just don't see it? On a basic, empirical level, it just seems like the people who've been saying this were...wrong?

I don't doubt PLO's profitable (maybe even significantly more profitable than NLHE) and I'm happy for you that you jumped aboard at a good time and got good and have all the invites to all the big juicy games, looking through both the Bravo and online lobbies, I gotta say "learn PLO" seems like a woefully insufficient rebuttal to me suggesting that it's harder to find games and grind up through the ranks these days.

There could also be a culture clash going on. I feel like everyone from LA talks a certain way about professional poker that makes me feel like LALA land's gonna LALA land. At least half the non-strategy advice I've ever seen DGAF give has proven to be an alien transmission as I've worked my way through med-high stakes and semi private games over here in anonymous city. It appears whatever advice you have on nicking a slice of the Aflac/Lopez has limited applicability out here in the real world.

I had a girlfriend and poker friends and would go out to get drunk once per week. Was it ideal, no? I should have exercised more. But I don't see the massive sacrifice. I wanted to be at the poker table. Games were sick and I wanted to be earning. In my 20's I was hungry AF and games were amazing.... I am not telling others they should do this. In fact, I am telling them they probably shouldn't. Do something else with your life. If you're on forums debating IF you should, the answer is NO.

If aspiring "pros" think 40 hours a week of playing poker "full time" is a lot then it absolutely is not right for you. You'll only have less motivation the only you get. Like I took all of 2022 off when I was overseas. I did get tired of the constant grind. But in your 20's you are supposed to be ready to conquer the world. 10 hours a day playing poker really is not much if that's your full time vocation.