Playing poker for a living: what is the truth about how much professional poker players actually earn when all is said and done? A few months back, Doug Polk, one of the best known faces in the high stakes circles, released a vlog talking about the realities of the life as a professional poker player.
The one thing that almost every poker player is interested in when they begin seriously playing the game is how much money they can make.
How Much Can I Make From Poker Tournaments? Lots of prospective poker players are always bugging me about how much an online MTT player can make. Firstly, how you make in tournaments not only depends on how good you are, but also how often you play, the stakes and the fields etc. Sep 30, 2016 Or if you spend $10,000 over the course of a year traveling to poker tournaments but only have an ROI good enough to earn you $8,000 worth of cashes during that time, you're technically 'winning. For instance, there are quite a few semi-retired players who grind out $20,000-to-$30,000 a year playing in small limit games. Also, you can't include a person with a full-time job who gets lucky. Why You Shouldn’t Play $1/$2 for a Living (Even Though I Do) 9. In places I will take issue with Red Chip Poker orthodoxy and disagree with RCP founders and coaches even though they are better at poker than me. It can be done. You can make a living playing $1/2 and you may be one of the small fraction of dedicated players who move. Here is how much money you can make playing online poker in 2020 (for the average person). Pros like myself will make far more than this. NL2 - $150 per month NL2 (blinds 1c/2c) is the lowest limit that you can play in online poker. The money isn't amazing by any means but the winrates are the highest here. Dec 10, 2016 One of the most asked about topics-how much money can you expect to make playing low to midstakes live poker? Specifically, the no limit texas holdem variety.
The top pros and tournament winners are making hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars a year, where as the majority of uneducated players (often referred to as “fish” by more experienced players) are losing anywhere from a little bit of money to a whole lot of money.
But if you’re doing research on how much money you can make playing online poker, then you likely are not a top professional, and hopefully you are not a fish.
Can you make Money playing online poker and how much can you expect to win?
The first thing that affects how much money you’ll make is what stakes you play at. All other things being equal, you can make more money the larger games you play. It’s obvious that a game with $10-$20 blinds has more opportunity to win money than a game with $0.01-$0.02 blinds.
Unfortunately, all things aren’t equal and the games get harder the as the stakes get larger. Being able to beat the micro limits is no guarantee that you can beat the bigger games.
Normally it is a case of finding a happy medium. A good stake level to aim for is $1-$2 No Limit Holdem. Tables at that level are usually tough but beatable. Many players are able to beat the games with a strong win rate while multi-tabling 5 to 20 different tables.
Bankroll Requirements
If you are going to play $1-$2 NL Texas Hold-em, you need a bankroll that can support playing at that level.
A common piece of advice that we give out is to always buy in for the table maximum. You might not be the big stack at the table, but you will be in a position where you won’t be easily bullied. The table max is usually 100 times the big blind, so a single table buy in would be $200.
Even if you are a winning poker player, you won’t win every single table you play. You will go on some winning streaks and some losing streaks. You will need a bankroll large enough to ride through a losing streak.
If you have read our Introduction to Bankroll Management then you will know that for recreational players we recommend only sitting down with 5% of your total bankroll so you would need 20 buy ins to play at a level. Therefore to seriously tackle $1-$2 NL Holdem you would need a bankroll of $4,000 (20 x $200).
You can get by with a smaller bankroll if you are willing to play with a higher risk of going broke, or are willing to fund your poker bankroll with cash from an outside job if you lose your initial bankroll.
If you multi-table you may need more than 20 buy ins to protect yourself from inevitable swings. Playing a large number of tables helps even out the fall of the cards, but it exposes your bankroll to problems with your play.
If you have a 20 buy in bankroll, and in general you play 10 tables at once, you could blow 50% or more of your bankroll in a single night. You need a large enough bankroll to protect you from runs of dead cards, as well as streaks of bad play.
A good rule of thumb is that you should have 20 buy ins, or 4-5 times the amount you play at a single time, which ever is more. Thus if you play 10 tables at one time, you should plan on having something like 40 buy ins (4 x 10) to protect yourself from going broke.
Hourly Win Rate
Think of Poker Cash Games as the normal job where you are paid by the hour and earn a certain rate per hour. In contrast playing Poker Tournaments is more like a salesman job, where you work for free (or very little) per hour but earn a lump sum every time you land a big sale (or Tournament win).
The single statistic that is most important to cash game players is the amount of money they win per hour. If you are treating poker like a job, and using that money to pay for expenses, then you want to get paid for the time you put in.
In live poker a good hourly rate was considered to be 1 Big Bet per hour.
Big Bet
1 Big Bet = 2 big blinds. The concept of a big bet is from the old limit version of poker and is equal to two big blinds.
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In online poker a player sees many more hands per hour. A full ring (cash) game online deals 60-80 hands per hour, compared to approximately 20 in a live human dealt game.
Additionally online poker players can play more than one table at once. Multi-tabling drastically increases the number of hands you play, and can increase your win rate. Because of this, hourly win rate for online players is usually reported as BB/100, or Big Bets per 100 hands (occasionally as bb/100, big blinds per 100 hands).
At $1-$2 limits, 3 BB/100 is considered good, but achievable, for a multi-tabler. 3 BB / 100 = $12 / 100 hands. If you assume you are seeing 65 hands per table per hour, this means a good hourly win rate for $1-$2 No Limit Texas Holdem is $8 per Hour per Table.
Multi-Tabling Can Increase Your Money Won
$8 per hour does not add up to a lot of money. The best way to increase that is to play more tables. Many people are able to successfully play 4 tables simultaneously. Some play 8-12 tables, and a few people claim to beat the game while playing 20 or more tables at the same time. If you can win $8 / table / hour across 4 tables, you would be looking at earning $32 / hour. Do that across 10 tables and you are up to $80 / hour.
The other big variable is how much time you spend per week playing poker. If you play 10 hours / week @ $80 / hour then you can earn $800 / week. If you play 40 hours per week it could be $3,200.
Software Tools such as Poker Tracker can greatly increase your ability to win playing multiple tables. Instead of having to remember how each of your opponents play, you can see their stats in a heads up display above their name. Find out their aggression to see if they are bluffing, or their steal rate to see if they are trying to take your blinds. If you are determined to give making money at online poker a serious shot, tools like Poker Tracker can pay for themselves in no time.
You Are Not A Machine
Poker is often described as a hard way to make an easy living. Although $3,200 a week is a lot of money, not every one can do it. To win that kind of money, not only do you have to be able to beat the other players, you have to be able to do it while splitting your focus and playing for hours on end.
Many poker players, after they have tasted the success of winning, have found that playing 40 hours of poker a week just isn’t sustainable for them. It is difficult to make good decisions hand after hand for that many hours.
If you play too long and lose your edge, you can find yourself giving back the money that you won earlier in the day. So if you want to try and make money playing poker, you need to find a system and schedule that works best for you.
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Whether you play low stakes cash games or tournaments there is a ton of opportunity to make serious money. Even the average lower limit players can make $30,000 per year without much trouble. The time and effort you put in will determine how far your poker bankroll will grow. The more effort you put in the more you get out of it. On average for cash game players at 50nl-1,000nl, you can see steady amounts piling in per month both from rakeback as well as from profit.
Most low to middle limit cash game players will make about $1,000 per month just in rakeback. That is around $12,000 per year extra that you get just for playing poker. Live poker players don’t see this extra money each month and it is a reason why online poker is much better than live poker. The opportunity for growth is better and you can simply make more money online than you can live. Even if you have a lower win rate playing cash games, $30,000 per year is very feasible and you should often times exceed that by a nice margin. Here is where you also come up with your strategy for beating bad poker players.
Low to Middle Stakes Tournament Players
Most low to middle stakes tournament players will put in 50 hours or more per week and some weeks not show profit at all. The reason for that is because of the natural amount of variance in poker tournaments. You could easily go 100 tournaments without a big score or more. Tournament players often make their money from big tournament wins. Even if there are only 15-20 big tournament wins per year that could easily exceed $100,000 or more. Tournaments are very hard and take a lot more patience than cash games. Playing low and middle stakes tournaments will turn out to be a good thing in the end. You can crush these games because this is where tons of fish are in the online game. The lower buy-ins attracts bad players, and you can capitalize on this by learning how to progress through tournaments and beat the weak online poker players.
Low to Middle Stakes Sit and Go Players
The sit and go players are overlooked online, but they are there. Heads up sit and goes are one of if not the most profitable game online today. The whole key to learning heads up sit and goes is practice. You have to know the correct play and since you are playing almost every hand, you have to know when to give up and when to push forward. Heads up matches are often won or lost by losing a coin flip, but up to that point you should have been able to build a chip lead, so it isn’t really what it seems. These matches can be grueling if you don’t find the fish.
Where to Start
To make money you should start off as low as the $10 level. Once you have had success there you can move up to the $20, then $33 and so on. These games will take you up as high as you let them. The range for what you can make per year will depend on how much mental stability you have as well as how well you can manage a bankroll. Some players will make $10,000 per year and some will make close to $200,000 per year. It depends on how much work you want to put in.
High Stakes Players
Win Money Playing Poker Online
The high stakes players have no cap on what they can make per year because when sitting in the right game you can make a ton of money in a short period of time. When sitting in the wrong games you can lose a ton of money in a short period of time. Most high stakes cash game players can easily win with a definite level of consistency over a million dollars each year. The high stakes tournament players should also walk away with close to a million. For tournament players it more so depends on if they win the one big tournament or two for the year. You can lose a lot in tournaments over time if you don’t run well. High stakes sit and go players will win hundreds of thousands more or less over time with ease.
How Much Money Can I Earn
The reason these players have success is because when a player wins a big tournament (like the World Series of Poker), they will always jump into try and beat high limit players. This will always be the case and the natural reason why sit and go players and cash players make more than tournament players. Also, they have more of an edge than tournament players do to make consistent money over time.