I’m going to answer a different (maybe more helpful) question than the one you asked:
Q: As a noob, what’s the quickest way to become better than breakeven, then better than breakeven including the rake/seat charge?
A: Find a way to play against the worst players you can find, or at least players worse than you. There are likely some tough games near you; avoid those. They might be some soft games; play in those.
Game selection and exploiting opponent weaknesses can easily turn a player with a grasp of the basics into a winning player.
I've long decided that this is basically the only skill in poker. OK, that's too trite, but it dominates all other skills.
If you can play even a little bit - eg you know some hand rankings and don't get too drunk - you're better than some players, and you can find a game you can beat.
If you're the 20th best player in the world, but instead of looking to play against weaker players you yearn to challenge yourself against the best, or in general if you move to bigger and tougher games every time things are going well, you will lose money in the long run.
It's not quite that simple in practice. You might be one of the worst players in your local cardroom, so your only winning move is not to play. Or you might be one of the best, but you don't travel to other games, so you win in spite of your self. I've seen so many people like this! If you play on the Internet, however, that's effectively not possible.
Game selection is the most important way to make money in poker, but the stronger a player you are, the more games you can select from. Isaac Haxton is a top pro player who only plays only tournaments that cost $10k+ to buyin to, and recently discussed how this works on a recent episode of the Thinking Poker podcast by Andrew Brokos. He actually recommends against tournaments for less experienced players aiming to make money since smaller buyin tournaments have large fields and thus large variance, but the "high roller" tournaments have smaller fields which make variance more reasonable.
The bigger point is that while playing against worse players is an important skill if you want to make money, poker is still a very complex game with a high skill ceiling similar to a game like chess. If you're good enough, even pro players are "worse players" and you can "select" those games. Though admittedly even the high roller tournaments require some "recreational" businessman players for enough pros to be willing to play it for it to run.
Solver study has become essential for the vast majority of top pros, which Haxton also discusses in the podcast, and I mentioned my project in the space in my other comment.
For people actually trying to make a living playing poker, it isn’t enough just to find a game you can win; the game also has to return enough per hour to make it worth your while. Even if you can reliably win, but only $5 an hour, it isn’t worth your time. There is an opportunity cost to consider.
It’s true that playing against bad players will increase your win rate but it’s also true that if you study and improve you will also improve your win rate. It’s not true that there’s no point in studying since you should only play against bad players, because “bad player” is relative to your skill.
The podcast episode I recommended is a long time pro player interviewing another long time pro player, whose widely regarded as one of the best players ever, so I think these people know better than the HN comment section of “well 20 years ago I read one sklansky book and a year ago I played a 2/5 game and didn’t win much so poker is pointless unless you play idiots”
> The bigger point is that while playing against worse players is an important skill if you want to make money, poker is still a very complex game with a high skill ceiling similar to a game like chess.
I used to strongly agree with this (skill ceiling is so high that large edges can be found if good enough) but no longer believe this is the case - I think the edges are much narrower now in the top levels of the pro scene, much of which I'm sure is due to the rise of solvers and the game being closer to "solved" now than it was even 5 years ago.
There's a lot of complex evidence for this, but without going into too much, the degree of scumbaggery in pro scenes going on is usually a strong indicator. When edges get small, pros tend to get a little scummier to get ahead.
There's also the psychological aspect of continuing to play in those soft games even when the other players know they are losing.
A guy I dealt to for years was known at the table as Hillbilly. He had a manner that just disarmed some other players. He wasn't an amazing player, but he was a lot smarter than most people assumed, and you wanted him at the table because he was fun to chat with and you thought you could beat this disheveled, ol' country boy.
When you lost to Hillbilly, it was just bad luck. When you won, it's because he's a simpleton, of course. But somehow, he always had a pretty big stack of chips in front of him.
A lot of pro players have this edge, too; just the right personality to get other people to believe their superiority, ignore their discipline, and "go on tilt" (make suboptimal decisions)
Agreed. I think the same strategy also applies to a given table or night: only play hands where you have good cards. It's a good strategy for beginners
If you mean at the live casino, for low stakes (2/5 or lower), you only need one tip: find a starting hand chart from any strategy site, book, platform, whatever. Follow the chart. It will be very tight out of position and loosen up in position. Do not deviate. If you follow it, you will be the tightest player at almost any table.
You should now be a winning player. Most decisions will be easy. Any post-flop improvements will start to mint money.
Other players will note how tight you are and still give you action. They cannot help themselves.
I was a pro player for a number of years, just to give context to this advice. Start with playing very tightly, be instantly profitable, and add skills from there. And please, please, please, don't talk about poker strategy at the poker table.
The other half of this (the "Most decisions will be easy" part) is knowing rough odds.
Four to a flush on the flop? One in three chance of getting it. If a lot of people are in the hand and the flush looks like it would be the best outcome, stay in.
Same with an open-ended straight, and you should know whether others could have a better straight draw than your own.
If you see a bunch of random crap on the flop e.g. no straight draw or flush draw or high cards? If you have high pocket pair or two pairs, get aggressive as everyone else is either drawing (and you want them under the profitability threshold of 3+ other players in the hand) or playing a hopefully lower pocket pair or very ill-guided low two pairs (so watch the big blind or historically loose players).
You can usually calculate in your head how many of the unseen cards need to be somewhere to beat you: Suppose I have the best two pairs on an otherwise unspectacular board. My opponent needs a pocket pair to beat my hand. I have 8 opponents, usually a pocket pair is dealt 6% of the time. Even if I sum all the percentages---mathematically wrong but worse than the truth---it's less than 50% chance SOMEONE has been dealt a pocket pair, so I don't have to feel bad about staying in.
If you can do this quickly and make it look like you are acting impulsively or inexperienced, more money will bet against you.
I'm not semi-pro but I would expect spending hours with GTO solvers and other poker training software will play a large part in it. The idea is to get quick feedback on how well you are judging difficult situations.
Some people also have to spend a lot of time working on emotional regulation to avoid throwing good money after bad.
> emotional regulation to avoid throwing good money after bad
I was once interested in going pro, and I landed on some advice that said to go to a poker house and fold every hand for 3 hours. Poker has very high variance, and you can easily have 3 hours of hand shuffled poker and not get a single playable hand. That was when I realized I didn’t have the emotional regulation to play properly, especially, since part of the exercise was to throw away the strongest starting hand even if you are dealt it during this exercise. Also, that was about the time I realized that poker is generally an extremely boring game, with the very occassional periods of high emotion.
It did teach me a lot about going on tilt though, it’s very easy to throw away a lot of profit after a big loss.
You need to be good at deciding which cards to hold and which cards to throw away. You need to know when to get out of a game, and when you should really go out running. Also never count your money while you are playing. You will have time later. But to be realistic the most that you can hope to is to die while you are sleeping.
There’s lots of training sites and a lot of opinions about the best one/way to do this, but I think doug polk’s website upswing poker caters to a broad range of skill levels and is the one I’d personally recommend (warning though the site itself is awfully designed). Nothing is really free out there I’m aware of unless you spend a lot of time discussing things in poker forums, which I wouldn’t personally recommend.
The Raiseyouredge free course is a good basic/starter course to gain a beginning level competency of modern fundamental strategies of today’s tournament poker. Note that most of these types of courses/sites do mainly focus on tournament poker. Raiseyouredge has an excellent rep, especially in the online scene.
I have a friend who's self-studied up to a pretty good hourly rate within ~2 years. The main thing he does is tons and tons of time studying solver outputs.
In this particular case I've just directly looked at the friend's pokertracker data, which includes rake values and then you just add rakeback to get the total. It's harder to cope oneself in an online setting where there's just a precise recording of all results.
I think you can safely assume that unless someone is part of the absolute poker elite, they are unlikely to be earning anything near the median software engineering income. It’s not impossible, but it would require access to some unusually soft high stakes games, and while such games do exist, they are typically invitation only.
I was a complete blackjack noob until a few months ago when I got interested in my states online casinos.
I would check literally every position (even obvious ones) to see the expected value for each decision and quite quickly built up an intuition when I was playing without the aid (the live dealer games sometimes move too fast to input and get results back in time).
Now its like second nature and only in rare situations do I double check my judgement.
noob to "semi pro" isn't the jump you are looking for. To get to a level even remotely close to 'semi pro' would require thousands of hours of playtime.
you just need to grasp the basics.
Phil Gordon's Little Green Book and The Theory of Poker (Sklansky) are common recommendations.
I do own "How to Decided" but haven't read it yet. I will say that "Bets" and "Quit" are both easy reads and are high on value and low on noise. That is, even if you have play poker you'll get something out of both.
She holds a World Series of Poker (WSOP) gold bracelet from 2004 and used to be the leading money winner among women in WSOP history, and is still in the top five as of April 2023, despite being retired from poker, last cashing at a tournament 2010.
I'm currently full-time on a project dedicated to helping people understand how to apply solver strategy to win at live games. I generally avoid the term GTO in favor of "theory-based" since GTO usually refers to equilibrium strategy, and generally you want to study equilibrium but diverge to exploit your opponents.
You can check out my project which includes a preflop trainer at:
I also have a lot of strategy articles that explore how to use solvers to understand live cash games, and I also just started posting Youtube videos that do solver walkthroughs of high-stakes LA cash games.
I'm also doing some unique things like spaced-repetition which none of my competitors do, unfortunately very few pro poker players have heard the term so it's not a selling point to them but HN crowd tends to have heard of it.
In terms of where to start, I'd recommend where the game starts, which is preflop, and incidentally where my product starts, which is a preflop trainer that helps you study equilbrium-based preflop charts using spaced-repetition. It's currently about 90% free with only one set of charts paywalled (BB defend).
I'm actively developing both postflop content and a native mobile app, though the current app is a responsive web app that should work well on your phone.
I also have a Discord with a lot of professional live players that I've attracted via my content marketing and I'm happy to answer followup strategy questions there.
Some good books I'd recommend that are more modern:
Modern Poker Theory by Michael Acevedo
Play Optimal Poker by Andrew Brokos
Grinder's Manual by Peter Clarke (pre-solver but basically the most exhaustive guide to every concept pre-solver)
I went to Vegas for a weekend, won the Wynn classic, and final tabled their main event the following night. Poker is simple, just be the best player at all the tables. How to get there, bankroll management.
