10 years as a live pro, mostly 2/5, approaching $1 million lifetime profit, AMA

Hey great results and consistency. I read your first post and skimmed a few questions but haven’t read them all.

Did you mainly play the best hours like evenings and weekends? What would you estimate your hourly was for Friday and Saturday nights at 2/5?

Have you considered moving in the past in order to play juicier/bigger games? I understand with your gf now probably not feasible.

Have you ever been staked for tourneys or cash? I suppose it isn't worth it given your financial situation to get staked for something like 5/10 would have to be higher.

Ever delve into private games? If so how did that go?

Came back after a long layoff and I saw there are some posts on this thread, so I figured I would give a little update and answer the questions

Life has been good, have had some positive things happen personally that have lead to me playing way less poker, but I’m still on pace to have about a $100K year working 25-30 hours a week 😀

I did move for poker during my career. I didn’t include specifics in my post because I want to maintain my anonymity the best I can, but suffice it to say I’m living in a good part of the country for poker and I’m happy I did it.

I’ve never been staked for cash, in fact I don’t think I’ve ever played a hand of cash where I didn’t have 100% of myself. You are correct that it would have to be a unique opportunity for me to do it. If I somehow had access to a juicy 25/50 game or something, I’m pretty confident I could sell pieces without much issue

I’ve definitely sold action in tourneys though. It’s way easier because of the transparency of the results, and also because people are very inclined to buy pieces of live tournaments for the sweat of a big score.

Being staked for live MTTs with makeup though sounds like a special form of poker hell, and I would never ever do this to myself haha.

Never really played private games. Hard for me to get invited.

When I was single I would definitely try to play most of my hours during peak times, but certainly not all of them. I believe in having a good work/life balance and I’ve played plenty of hours at all times of day, and all days of the week.

And the thing is, I don’t think games are necessarily a ton better on weekends. While traffic will often be at the highest, every reg feels compelled to play those days, so it’s not uncommon at all for me to be in a fantastic game on a Tuesday night, and really reggy games on Friday

I don’t have to speculate, I can tell you which days I’ve made the most per hour over like a 9000 hour sample at 2/5, and you might be surprised by the answers. I think there’s a lot of randomness to it, and you shouldn’t read into it too much. From highest hourly to lowest:

Thursday
Friday
Monday
Wednesday
Sunday
Saturday
Tuesday

Highest is $106/hour on Thursday, lowest is $33 on Tuesday. Again, I really don’t think you can read too much since each day is only like a 1000 hour sample on average (naturally I’ve played some days a lot more than others)

The best thing you can do if you have flexibility is to stay in good games as long as you can, and if games suck, maybe go enjoy your life a little and do something else. Obviously this isn’t always possible if you have real responsibilities, but if you’re single and responsibility free, this is the way.

Good to see you back. I don't know if you have seen it, but 2+2 now has a "ask me anything' sub-forum listed in the side bar under the Poker News and Discussion" section.

You could ask the mods to move this thread there and likely get more interaction.

What live poker tracking app do you use? I'm trying to find something simple that doesn't bog me down with too many features.

What was your biggest aha moment in poker in terms of getting better at the game?

How well do you think an online 100NL reg with a 6bb/100 winrate would do at 2/5?

I use poker income pro, I’ve always used it and am happy with the product.

Hmmm, biggest aha moment is hard to say. I feel like my career has been a series of small aha moments. Learning how to play pretty balanced as a baseline (which I definitely was not when I was a winning pro, in say, 2016), and understanding *why* you deviate so much at 2/5, that was a big change that made me dramatically better.

One of the biggest improvements was perhaps realizing how much I was punting in certain ICM spots in tourneys. Pay jumps and stack configurations can alter your ranges in such dramatic ways, it definitely is one of the coolest aspects of tourney poker

As for how well an Nl100 winner is gonna do at live 2/5, I’m far from the right person to answer that, since I basically have never played online cash.

Shot in the dark, if you’re winning 6bb/100 online, you may be winning like 6-8bb/hour live, assuming you learn to make the crazy adjustments and exploit plays that are necessary against clueless casual players. But I could be way off on my estimate

I saw that I made this thread almost exactly a year ago, and I figured it would be fun to give an updated image of my 2/5 sample, which is what I included in my OP

Looks like in that time, I played 1068 hours of 2/5 and made about $100K, increasing my career hourly pretty nicely

I’ve actually been hitting fairly close to $100/hour at 2/5 for a couple of years now. Do I think that is surely sustainable? Perhaps not. But I do suspect something around $70-85 is reasonable.

This is not including high hands and other promotional winnings, which beef up my total income pretty nicely. I also played some 5/10 and some tourneys in the last year (small profits at both), but I’m not including that, as to have a more direct comparison with my original post

Definitely well over $1 mil lifetime now!

If you ever get to commerce remember that weird trappy backraise is basically a standard fish play with AK now. THOSE KINGS ARE GOLD!

Yeah I definitely would never fold against a random on the road. There is a subset of my player pool that drastically undervalues AK though and they will never make the big backraise with it

Great thread, really appreciate your contributions and thoughtful answers.

What do you tell people you do? Have you experienced judgment and stigma as a poker pro?

I currently have a business thanks to family connections but I used to play pro and always had a hard time telling people what I did, such as on dates, at parties, and talking to relatives. Few people seem genuinely interested and many seem to think “that sounds degenerate” and “what a waste of life”. That was part of why I quit, but I was of course also fortunate enough to have other options given to me by family.

I play the pipe organ

1 do games above 2/5 regularly spread where you primarily play? if so, then what keeps you from playing them?

furthermore, what would you say were the barriers that you were able to cross going from 1-2 to 2-5 that you aren't willing/trying to cross at 5/T+ and how much of a gap is there between 1-2 to 2-5 to 5-T?

2 have you looked into other forms of advantage gambling?

3 what aspects or study (you don't need to get into specifics if you don't want to burn an edge, but i'd prefer a "no comment" to some bs) did you undertake that you think helped your game the most

4 what do you tell people you do when they ask you for the first time

as far as options for transitions, i agree very much with spyu's sales suggestion - that's a line of work that can pay very well to those who excel at it and since it's often mostly commission basis the barrier to breaking into it is lower than other careers as taking a chance on someone and whiffing isn't too costly - for a lot of companies, the highest paid people are their top salesmen because their earnings are uncapped and they are usually appreciated more by the higher ups because what they bring in is tangible - what joe the engineer or laura the marketer actually contribute is unknown but the sales guy who decided to cold contact a prospective enterprise sale and bring in a 6 figures of sales from them each month is going to get all the credit

Best post I've read in this thread so far.

It's obviously true of any clock-in/clock-out job, but those also come with the advantages of a clock-in/clock-out job.

Poker is one of those jobs where the time, effort and resources that go into physically being at the "office" doing the "job" itself is only the tip of the iceberg. There's all the studying, travel, networking, and of course the amount of capital parked in your bankroll.

But even just the tip of the iceberg requires you to be clocked in for 1000+ hours a year with less-than-astronomical-potential for your rate in most any realistic setting.

It's like a clock-in / never clock out job? Hotel California ass occupation.

Sorry, I guess I should have a question. This part of OP jumped out to me the most:

"Prior to these casino ventures, I was working quite a lot of hours at multiple low paying jobs and just hustling for anywhere from 50-80 hours a week."

Would it be accurate to say you have a greater-than-average work ethic, particularly compared to other live pros? Was the adjustment to the poker work routine a tough adjustment, a breath of fresh air, or more of the same?

How "in control" of your success do you feel? Do you always feel like you can grind/study through any rough patches, or does existential tilt start to creep in at all during breakeven stretches?

Outside of poker, I’m almost always honest. Like with my girl’s family, I always am very forthcoming, answer their inevitable questions, and almost always they are interested in and happy with what I have to say. I’ve always been pretty good at articulating what I do, how I derive an edge, how cash games aren’t really that swingy relative to my net worth, and so on.

In the poker room, I’m played around with lying, but honestly I play with the same people all the time, they know after a while that I have to be a pro. So for many years now, I’ve gone with honesty, and I try to just change the subject or get them to not harp on it.

Occasionally someone will really latch on and ask a bunch of questions, and I just answer them politely and (fairly) honestly.

Public games above 2/5 run “sometimes” but certainly not regularly. And I do play them some now! I’ve probably played a few hundred hours of 5/10 in the last few years. Not crazy volume, but I have no issues jumping in a game

The problem is, a fair percentage of the time, I’ll look at the lineup and it really isn’t that good. On a given day, I might estimate that my hourly would be about the same in the 5/10 as it is in 2/5, but with probably 4-7x the swings.

There’s an argument for just always getting in there, battling, and trying to push myself and my career as much as possible, but sometimes, it’s just as simple as “I don’t feel like leaving a 2/5 game with 6 fish to go battle the other 4-5 best regs in the room”

As for 1/2 to 2/5, I never really ran into any hiccups. It felt like 2/5 players were almost as bad as at 1/2, and I crushed pretty much as soon as I moved up. Certainly there are more regs, but overall the fish are still really bad, and the rake isn’t as soul crushing at 2/5 as it is in lower games.

But at 5/10, it’s pretty common for half, or more than half, of the seats to be taken by people who have pretty solid strategies. They’ll have leaks and imbalances, sure, but the skill gulf between 2/5 and 5/10 has always seemed massive to me, on average

Obviously sometimes an amazing 5/10 game consisting of mostly 2/5 whales pops off, and of course I’m in there if I can get a seat!

2. I’ve never seriously looked at other forms of AP. I know for card counting you need a massive roll and it’s still a small edge, and all the other little hustles that I’ve heard about over the years just never interested me.

3. I think I’ve definitely given some insight ITT on this. It’s hard to point to 1 or 2 specific things that really revolutionized my game. I’ll try to give a few bullet points off the cuff here

-Earlier in my career, just talking tons and tons of hands with people at my level, or a little better, helped me to understand different ways of looking at the game (even some that I thought were flawed) and I fixed plenty of leaks this way.

-I haven’t done extensive solver work, but I’ve definitely done SOME, and I think that was helpful for really understanding what proper strategy looks like at equilibrium, and it helped to shape my thoughts on *why* I make such drastic deviations at live 2/5. It also helped me a lot in choosing sizings based on different textures. I remember watching a bunch of Nick Petrangelo videos years ago that were pretty eye opening

-Understanding what you’re targeting and what you’re trying to accomplish with every decision point you make. It sounds super simple, but a surprisingly small percentage of players, even winning players, can coherently explain why they made all of their decisions. Quiz yourself on some of your murkier spots and see how well you can make sense of your actions.

4. As I said to the first guy, I generally opt for honesty these days!

I think my work ethic is above average, but not crazy. Most years over the last 7 or so, I’ve definitely averaged less than 40 hours a week playing.

Poker has completely and utterly changed my life. The jobs I worked before were bad jobs for little money, and I am full of gratitude for finding this path.

I believe I would’ve found my way in something else eventually, but poker success came to me quite expediently.

I feel very in control of my success. The only time that wavers is if I play a lot of tournament volume. Tournaments are a completely different animal, especially if you’re playing big fields, I’m pretty confident in saying I will never fully rely on tournaments for money.

With cash, 2/5 and even 5/10 downswings constitute such a low % of my net worth that they really just don’t bother me.

If you make good money over 10-15 years and invest diligently and intelligently, you should be on a path to being a millionaire. My s/o and I are on that path, so downswinging a handful of buy ins is just no big deal at all.

Also, without trying to sound like a braggart, I crush these 2/5 games so hard that any kind of losing or break even stretch is exceedingly rare 😃

thanks - very interesting

i don't play much anymore but it was abroad where games were always really deep with either microstakes available at home games (most home or bar games were the equivalent of 0.10/0.20 blind but people still bought in for $300 but then when people played higher it'd be like $10/$20 so i never experienced the process of moving up in stakes but instead just playing whatever was availabe in lineups that i thought i could beat and that often meant borrowing money from someone to cover the buyin one night at a 25/50 game at someone's apartment where if i had a bad session i'd be in a terrible situation followed by a .10/.20 game the next night at a bar

i always struggled with telling people what i did, mostly because they didn't believe me because i'm such a space cadet irl that most people thought it was a cover and i was just some trust fund kid dumping his parent's money - much like how nik airball, alan keating, bilzerian, and helloitslynne profess to be professional poker players but everyone is convinced he's a rich trust fund guy just losing his parent's money but unlike with me they actually are just trust fund kids living out a fantasy and dumping piles

Is being a poker pro really something trust fund kids fantasize about being? I am sort of a trust fund kid but poker pro seems to be something that’s always been looked down on in my circles like it’s something shady. I know of drug dealers who pretend to be poker pros to wash their cash but not trust fund kids especially not ones from a good background.

1.3% of americans do not need to work due to having a trust fund - that seems like a very small number but think about how many doctors you know and then realize that's more people than there are doctors

now many of them still work and live normal lives because that's how they want to live, but many don't and become the idle rich

the idle rich don't ever want to say at social gatherings "i don't do anything" as that's really embarrassing, so they'll often lean heavily into a hobby as their identity

you'll hear someone tell you "i'm a photographer" and they'll show you their work where they went to the amazon for one shoot, an active volcano for another, then egypt and north pole - but even they are selling their photos, it's not enough to cover their travel expenses to get those shots and they are selling them just for the brand recognition they get when they can say at the party I had the nat geo march cover photo last year

they are not going to introduce themselves as "i don't need to work but i really like traveling and taking interesting photos"

so a lot of the idle rich who are drawn to gambling and casinos will try to parlay that into "i'm a professional" in order to save face and some do a very good job of it - take allan kessler, someone who lives off his multi-millionaire sister and loses money every single year

but because he presents himself not as a degen loser scumming off his wealthy sister but as a professional poker player he gets a lot of podcast invites and articles written about him - he can go to a party and tell people he's an advantage gambler and people who look it up casually will be fooled

so obviously when the choice is "i'm an unemployed degenerate scumming off my family" vs "i'm a professional poker player" you know which one they'll take every time

also, poker is obviously not the norm, the most common variants are artists, ngo/charity, and academia, etc

this doesn't mean that some drug dealers etc don't also try to use poker as a way to hide their true source of income and perhaps nik airball is actually the meth king of southern california and not just a trust fund brat cosplaying as something else

Based on your answer here and your prior declaration of living in the East, you either don't live in the Northeast or made a great effort at disguising the fact that you do live there. Somehow I'm leaning towards the latter. So. How are the 2/5 games in Atlantic City, Foxwoods, and/or other spots in New England, Live Pro?

You’re correct that I don’t want my exact location to be public. I will concede that I’ve played in the New England states very little, my only times in AC were during tournament series, and during those times, I found the cash to be pretty good at Borgata

whats the place in USA to live if u want to access nature like real forest , real lakes , etc. and requirement is to be able play holdem at a casino. Ideally 2/5 running daily and not like too much of small town vibe (not sure if small town vibe is bad in usa) but like foreigner friendly etc. job opportunities and so on . No need to be big city either! Cold climate is okay . As long as not like super hot / humid .

The first place that jumps out in my mind is Black Hawk, Colorado. I know you said no small town vibe, but you’re like 40 minutes from Denver, it’s possible you could find somewhere in between the two (I’m not intimately familiar with the area, even though I’ve been there a couple times). I understand the 2/5 is soft, and Colorado is beautiful, it’s one of THE states for outdoor stuff obv

My second answer is any number of places in Cali. Another spectacular state for outdoorsy stuff, with just tons of 2/5 and 5/10 in the decent rooms throughout the state. Rake is higher, CoL is higher, but the players are bad enough to mitigate it. Playing 5/10 in Cali feels a lot like 2/5 in other parts of the country

You might have more options in the Pacific Northwest but unfortunately I don’t really know much about that region

Thank you so much!

Amazing thread! I was really inspired by your story. I have a few direct questions that could help me a lot on my journey:

Have you ever considered getting staked to play higher limits in private games? With your win rate, I imagine it wouldn’t be difficult to find backers.

Have you always been this disciplined, or did you ever have any ‘degen’ leaks in the past (like gambling, drugs, or women)? Do you know any succesfull long term reg with bit outside of poker leaks?

Do you ever feel conflicted about taking advantage of losing players? I recently developed a stronger connection to my religion, and I sometimes struggle internally with seeing clear gambling addicts lose their money consistently while winning players take advantage from it. Have you ever thought about this side of the dark side of poker?