Answering questions about poker while traveling (tl;dr)

[LionelHutz00]

Warning: Serious Business
For the past two and a half months, I've been backpacking around Europe, mostly staying in hostels. In hostels, you tend to meet tons and tons of people. Of course, one of the first questions that people ask you is what you do for a living. I've gotten lots of different responses when I've told people that I play poker on the Internet for a living: some negative, some positive, a lot curious. People ask a lot of questions about it, and I'm usually pretty happy to answer them. I've kinda developed a few stock answers to common questions, and today I started to write them down, and it's pretty much turned into an essay. I figure that I'll post it on 2p2 and see if other people agree. I'm not sure which forum to post it in, but I've decided to put it in Poker Theory and to x-post it in BBV where it will quickly be buried (loltrafficaments). Mods if you want to put it in a more appropriate forum, be my guest.

btw, I'm basically an 8-tabling SSNL grinder

You're playing on the Internet: How can you bluff?
A bluff isn't as big a part of the game as TV and the movies would make you think. It's still important but it's very much romanticized. Matt Damon looks across the table and sees into the other guy's soul: he determines whether the other guy is bluffing solely by observing him. And he's a hero to the audience because he has this innate preternatural ability that we admire.

But the truth is that when someone makes a bet, and you're deciding whether he's bluffing or not, his physical expression is just one of the many pieces of information that we have in front of us. We have every decision that he's made in every hand that he's played at this table. We know how he's played in similar hands in the past. We know how he's played this hand. We know what type of player he is: similar players make similar plays. Has a similar player made a bluff in a similar situation? We have thousands of pieces of information in front of us: and a good player takes all of that information into account when making a decision.

When you play online, you're robbed of your opponent's physical expressions. But it's just one of the many pieces of information at our disposal. Bluffing is still a powerful tool online. And there's still a lot of skill in determining whether an opponent is bluffing, because it takes a good player to recall and properly analyze all of that information that's at his disposal.

Is it exhausting to play? How many hours a day/ week do you play?
Yes. It's not like a normal job where you can take little mental breaks: go on autopilot; stare off into space for 30 seconds. It's easy to do with a typical desk job. But playing online poker, you have to maintain constant concentration. Because a momentary lapse, and you've just lost a couple hundred dollars. You can't break concentration and if you feel your concentration begin to wane, it's a good time to quit playing for a few hours. I can rarely play for more than two or three hours without stopping. It's hard work and it's very draining.

And then that's where discipline comes in. You must be disciplined within the particular hand that you're playing and you must be discipled in your decisions of whether or not to continue playing.

Humans are naturally curious. If you have a flush draw, it's tempting to call a bet, even when you know it's a bad decision, just to see if that flush will come in and let you scoop a big pot. A lapse in concentration makes poor decisions within a hand more likely.

Even the best players don't always have an edge. When you lose your concentration, when you're tired, when you're on tilt, when your mind is elsewhere, even the best players don't have an edge. It's important to have the self discipline, and the self knowledge to be aware that you're not playing your best game, and then to quit playing for a while.

~5 hours a day, 6 days a week.

Why not play live?
You can make more money playing online and playing live can be very unpleasant.

A winning player has an edge for each hand. It's an average. Say, at this particular table, against these players, at these stakes, you'll win $.50 per hand. The more hands you play, the more money you make. You accumulate money by playing lots of hands. Because of the nature of online poker, you can play a lot more hands per hour. At one table, a typical online game will deal twice as many hands per hour as an analogous live game. Plus online, you can play more than one game at a time. I usually play 6-8 tables at a time. Some players play as many as 20. If I'm playing eight tables and each table is dealing twice as fast as a typical live table, then I'm playing 16 times as many hands per hour than if I was playing live.

It's a little bit more complicated than that, because you'll typically play much higher stakes live than online. A .50/1 game online plays tougher than a 5/10 live game. So your winrate per hand will be higher live than online, but in my experience the increased volume outweighs the greater winrate.

Poker is a unique game and in my opinion, one of the reasons that it's so popular is that it indulges some of our worst characteristics as human beings. People are naturally selfish, nasty, cruel and utterly unsympathetic, at least we have those tendencies at times. Society squelches these tendencies. If you act selfishly, cruelly, etc, then nobody will like you. So the poker table becomes an outlet for these tendencies. Poker is a game in which it's not only acceptable to be selfish and cruel; it's expected.

People who come to the poker table to indulge their selfish urges are very nasty when they're there. These are not fun people to spend time with. They nitpick. They are abusive toward dealers and other players. Harsh vibrations all around. Plus, they smell terrible. These guys play long sessions to try and get unstuck. They order pungent Vietnamese food and eat at the table with their hands (I've spent a lot of time at Commerce and the Bike ldo).

When you play online, you avoid this: your opponent might call you a [censored], but the nastiness doesn't come through. You can always turn off your chat or block an opponent's chat. It's easy to casually ignore the nastiness. Selfish tendencies are still indulged but the bad stuff, the toxic waste, is eliminated.

And it's similarly easy to ignore people with a gambling problem. All poker pros are callous to a certain degree, but winning a guy's last few bucks and leaving him to beg for bus fare home is hard to ignore. Playing online sweeps the problem under the rug. And maybe that's a bad thing, and maybe I'm a terrible person for gambling for a living and cannibalizing the poor souls of people who can't gamble responsibly. But ignoring the problem helps me sleep at night. I guess it's my turn to be selfish.

Why are most people so bad at poker? Why do they play for significant stakes if they're losing players?
Most poker players think that they're very good. Most are very bad. Poker is a strange game. As human beings, we have a method to how we learn to play games: Trial, Error, and Feedback.

(my apologies to Ed Miller for stealing this concept from SSH) Imagine that you've never played basketball before and you want to learn how to shoot a basketball. You take the ball and you throw it at the rim. The ball falls way short of the rim. You say to yourself that you didn't shoot hard enough. So next you shoot the ball as hard as you can and it flies ten feet over the hoop. OK too hard. Let's try and put it somewhere in between. And eventually, through this process of trial and error and feedback, you'll get to where you can consistently get the ball near the rim. This is how humans learn.

If you use this approach to learn how to play poker, you will be a bad player.

In poker, a particular decision and the result of that decision are only loosely tied together. You can make an awful decision and still win. You can make excellent decisions and still lose. And it will happen a lot. A player makes a mistake and still manages to win that pot: the player keeps making the same mistake over and over again. He doesn't realize that he's making mistakes. And he keeps playing, keeps making mistakes, keeps losing.

Poker isn't like chess. If you suck at chess, you'll know it right away because you'll always lose. Not poker. It's a game of skill, but unskilled players win all the time. And the fact that bad players win sometimes is what makes bad players think that they're winning players. It's easy for a bad player to deceive himself into thinking that he's a good player. This is why bad players keep playing, and why they play for significant stakes: they think they're good at the game.

You must be pretty good, huh?
I don't think I'm very good. It's more that everyone else is so bad. There are lots of people better than me.

[TheCutter]

Nice forum to post this in.

[MotorBoatingSOB]

this doesn't belong in bbv, but it is a great post

[LostMyCaseMoney]

What setup you using to play on while backpacking? Was thinking of doing this next year.

[Mrage]

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this doesn't belong in bbv, but it is a great post

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[HomerJay]

wat are the top 3 portuguese sitcoms?

-great post.

[Duluth]

Graphs plz

[LionelHutz00]

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What setup you using to play on while backpacking? Was thinking of doing this next year.

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ugh, i've got an awesome dell laptop w/ a 17" widescreen and 1920x1200 resolution and i've barely played at all. internet connections in europe tend to suck and i time out constantly on most connections, even in internet cafes. i've basically been on vacation for the past 2 months and my poker game is probably really bad at the moment.

[LionelHutz00]

I also posted it in poker theory, but it hasn't gotten any responses since, you know, nobody reads that forum. i considered posting it in the el d forum but i've been boycotting it since i'm not on the list, lol elitaments.

[flipdeadshot22]

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I also posted it in poker theory, but it hasn't gotten any responses since, you know, nobody reads that forum. i considered posting it in the el d forum but i've been boycotting it since i'm not on the list, lol elitaments.

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didnt see that one coming from 46 miles away