NL 1/2 Making a living?

[LottaNirvana]

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Everyone fails to realize the fact that how young people are raised today they have no sense of responsibility and discipline. Therefore success is difficult for them.
They lack in ethical character and maturity.
This is not a putdown just reality.
When your raised without structure in your life you have no foundation.
I know there is decent money to be made at N/L but it takes a rare breed that can put it all together. [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]

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I'm NOT young and I have "no sense of responsibility and discipline."

So .... At least I HAVE something.

[LottaNirvana]

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.....In all seriousness, folks, there are some decent replies in this thread, but the horrible grammar is hell on the eyes and brain.

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It sho is.

[Dima2000123]

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Dima,

You are a clown. Stop.

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Huh?

[Dima2000123]

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Wow, you sound like every really bad live player I have really met. I am positive AK is one of my most profitable hands live and online, in 1/2NL and 10/20 NL..

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In my experience, it is a strong hand online, because you don't have multiway pots. If you don't flop anything, you can still take it with continuation bet. In multiway and even family pots, it's easy to flop a second best hand with it. The only saving grace is that you also stack off someone who doesn't know that AT and AJ are trap hands (but then again, knowing that someone could very well have a dominated ace might induce you to make a bad call).

[Dima2000123]

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However, most 1/2 NL games I've been in really are crushable, and I have crushed them to the tune of about $25-$30 per hour.

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okay, I keep seeing some pretty ridiculous figures tossed around here.

Lets assume 33 hands an hour...which I suspect might be high for some live NL games because some of the decision-making can take a long freaking time....but lets just assume people are actually moving the game along decently.

$30/hr at 1/2 NL would be 15 big-blinds or 7.5 PT big-bets per hour, right? (PT doubles the big-blind for the win-rate on NL).
And at 33 hands an hour then this would be 22.5/100 hds, right?

I don't care how bad the opposition is.
At 1/2 NL I just don't see 22.5/100 being very realistic (especially considering rake and tips).


If it's a slower table of 25 hds per hour than to win your $30/hr you would need a win-rate of 30PTBB/100.

Seems to me that hoping for/counting on even $20/hr at 1/2 NL could be a stretch.

This is not to say that some of the players claiming to have won $30/hr haven't actually done so. But over a 3-6 month period perhaps they didn't have the kind of crappy stretch to really cut into that win-rate.

And players who give vague figures for their win-rate such as "usually won $25-$30 an hour" are often-times just approximating and are possibly being a bit generous and perhaps even thinking, "well, I'm going to take out that day I dropped $700 because that was so ridiculous it shouldn't even count."


The other side-topics in this thread seem kind of silly to me.
BTW - I'm 36. And I do know how to use the internets.

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I don't know what is the realistic long-term win rate, all I can say is how much I won over a small personal sample ($2900 over 110 hours). It's not physically possible for me to get a 100,000 hand sample, although given the incredibly low variance of a reasonably tight player at soft 1/2 NL table, a reasonably credible sample is a LOT smaller than online-only player would think. I may be running hot, but I also know that I would never make plays that resulted in poor players handing over their $200+ stacks to me. It's very easy to underestimate how easily some players get stacked with hands that are just bad hands, and not coolers.

What your computations fail to take into account is that in NL live ones can be parted with their money very quickly, and are all the time. (In fact, that's why I don't think NL will last, it doesn't hustle donkeys nearly enough). Your math would make a lot more sense for limit game, because no matter how bad you are, there is only so much you can lose by making a "mistake", and thus your losing rate is mathematically limited (and thus a win rate for a good player is limited as well). Your bad play is going to catch up with you in the long term, but on average it's going to take a while. In NL a good player can rape a terrible one in one hand, and there are a lot of terrible players in live 1/2 NL.

[Dadswell]

Playing 1/2 NL live is a horrible idea when you can 12 table 200NL online for 3BB/100 getting over 1000 hands an hour.

[Dima2000123]

One last comment for people who are fixated on BB/100 figure. Did you take into account that the game plays bigger pre-flop in relation to big blinds? Typical raise in 1/2 NL is $12, while online it would be $6. There are also at least twice as many people in the pot on average, and probably closer to three times as many. Obviously those extra people aren't drawing dead, but they're putting their money in while behind, and I'm guessing that a good player wins 50% more money just because of those extra players that shouldn't be there. This rough calculation already multiplies the BB/100 statistic by 3 in relation to online. Is 8-10BB/100 possible online if you're playing just one table where half the people are bad or worse?

[MrMore]

Over 3112 hours of live play, in the past two years, I've come up with this rule of thumb for pretty much the best possible win rates in live NL (I say best because I'm usually the best or tied for the best in the games I play, not because I'm great, but because I play lower limits AND don't put up with more than one other good player in a game). These hours have been earned in the 1-3 at Viejas, the 2-3 and 5-5 at O'11, the 1-2, 3-5 and 5-10 at Pechanga, the 5-10 at the Commerce, the 5-10 at HG, the 2-5 at the Palms, and 1-2 at many different Vegas casinos.

I would like to hear from other players with significant hours if this rule of thumb holds up for them.

I think it probably shouldn't hold up so well in bigger games, and should add that my 5-10 sample is only 237 hours.

My rule of thumb:
Sum of the blinds x 5 (x 6 in Vegas)
or
10% of the typical buy-in
whichever is LESS.

This would be $15/hr in 1/2, which may seem low to people with 110 hours, but 110 hours just isn't much. Also, the thread is about playing for a living, and when you play for a living, you should probably put in 25-35 hours a week (any less and you're being lazy; any more and you defeat part of the point of playing for a living, which is to lead a non-work-slave's life, and risk burnout), and when you play that much (don't even think about more) you'll find your game slipping a bit.

I should also add that I think that the Vegas games, because they rake rather than drop, are probably $8 an hour cheaper, although my win in them has only so far been $3 an hour better in 1/2 ($6 better at the Palms), which may mean that the games are tougher, though not enough to make them worse spots than the CA games generally.

I include the "10% of the typical buy-in" rule because some games, most notably the Commerce 5/10, have low caps, and this added rule seems to work well as an adjustment for that. But basically, I thing the sum of the blinds x 5 (x 6 for Vegas) works pretty well. My results, broken down by game, and especially by casino, are not a series of results exactly supporting this rule, but summed up and smoothed out they pretty much do.

[IndyGuy]

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I would like to hear from other players with significant hours if this rule of thumb holds up for them.

My rule of thumb:
Sum of the blinds x 5 (x 6 in Vegas)
or
10% of the typical buy-in
whichever is LESS.

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Interesting formula. I don't have the "significant" hours you're wanting for confirmation, but I will chime in that you nailed my winnings on a recent trip to Vegas with this formula. Obviously I'm well short of you on hours, but from what I did play, your formula is dead on.

And I wasn't running much better/worse than normal (lost some big pots in addition to winning some), so my guess is that it would probably hold for many more hours for me as well. If anything, my rate would probably go up as I became better at game selection and adjustment.

[Dima2000123]

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This would be $15/hr in 1/2, which may seem low to people with 110 hours, but 110 hours just isn't much. Also, the thread is about playing for a living, and when you play for a living, you should probably put in 25-35 hours a week (any less and you're being lazy; any more and you defeat part of the point of playing for a living, which is to lead a non-work-slave's life, and risk burnout), and when you play that much (don't even think about more) you'll find your game slipping a bit.

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Actually, $18/hr sounds about right in general (I'm assuming AC is more like Vegas than like CA). Another factor that should be considered is that people like me who play for fun play when other people play for fun, which means we play in softer games than usual. You just can't have Saturday night level of softness all week long (this especially applies to AC, where the commuter/tourist ratio is probably much higher than it is in Vegas).