Grinding Poker For A Living

Whereas no-limit cash games dominate the live poker scene, the common availability of SNGs online offers another way for a hard-working, better-than-average player to make a living at the game. But grinding SNGs for a living can be just that – a grind – so understanding the format’s nuances and quantity of play required is vital to success. And even then, believe me when I say that the old saying is so true: 'poker is hard way to make an easy living.' It actually isn't nearly as glamorous as it sounds and there are many long hours spent grinding small edges in tough games. With all that said though, poker still provides a good opportunity for some people to make a good side income. A Grinder’s Rules of Thumb for Online Survival So, you’ve decided that you want to try to grind out a living playing online poker? Good luck to you in your quest! Be forewarned that it’s a difficult road, and a lot of players can be great at poker but still lack what it takes to be a successful, day-in/day-out grinder.

(After you read this post, you might want to check out my follow-up to it here.)

I tell a lot of people not to play large-field online MTTs for a living. I’ve always thought that the variance is just way too high for most professionals to trust their livelihood (and sanity) to large-field MTTs instead of cash, smaller-field MTTs, or STTs. But, admittedly, I’ve given this advice without any direct evidence to back it up. I’ve been meaning for a while to see what the numbers say, and this post will be a tentative first step.

Ideally, what I’d like to do is do a nice controlled study where I pick a few representative players based on past results and use their results over the next few months as my data. (Alternatively, I could take the results of one of the large backing groups. If anyone who backs 20+ people would be down to share some information, let me know.) But, that requires more motivation than I’ve been able to muster, so I decided to do a much rougher study: I grabbed Shaun “SFD” Deeb’s tourney results from OPR (with Shaun’s permission) and played around for a few hours. Here’s what I found:

I used Shaun’s results from January 2009 to present on Stars and FTP. I filtered for buy-ins between $55 and $216 and included only NLHE tourneys with at least 181 entrants. OPR doesn’t record rebuys, so I removed rebuy tourneys. This left 3,049 tourneys with an average buy-in of $119.72 in which Deeb earned $294,027 with an awesome ROI of 81% and an ITM of 11.5%. Obviously, not many people can play or run as well as Shaun Deeb, but these results provide a starting point.

Say you are Shaun Deeb, you really do have an ROI of 81%, and you’re going to play 1,000 of these tourneys. What are the odds you make money? What are the odds you make at least $50k? Etc etc. Here are the results of one thousand Shaun Deebs each playing one thousand tourneys:

In particular, Shaun loses over a 1,000 tournaments sample about 13% of the time, and he makes less than $50k about 35% of the time (with an EV of about $100k). Of course, the upside is pretty good too–He makes over $200k about 14% of the time and over $300k almost 4% of the time.

Here’s the same data for a larger sample of 3,000 tournaments:

Over 3,000 tourneys, Shaun wins about 98.6% of the time, and he wins over $150k over 82% of the time. He made over $900k once in my 1,000 trials ($915,134) and over $600k about 6% of the time.

But, say you’re not Shaun Deeb. I can make a lower ROI player by simply taking Shaun’s distribution and lowering the payouts. (For an ROI of x, multiply the prizes by (1+x)*0.554 .) This isn’t very accurate, but it’s good enough for my purposes (especially since Shaun has a low ITM%). Here’s the 1,000 tourney histogram for a 20% ROI player:

As you can see, the situation is way worse. This player loses about 45% of the time and loses over $50,000 about 7% of the time. That’s pretty terrible, but maybe things get better with a larger sample? Here’s the data for 3000 Tourneys:

A 20% ROI player will be a loser over a 3,000 tourney sample almost 26% of the time. That’s much higher than I’d expected, and it’s the sort of number that should scare the shit out of prospective and current MTT professionals–If you want to play MTTs for a living, you better either put in a ton of volume, play really well, or be prepared to be a slave to variance (and nobody’s actually prepared for that).

Here’s lots of data for lots of situations (sorry for the ugly formatting):

There’s obviously a lot of information there, but some things jump out. In particular, life totally sucks if you’re a 20% ROI player. Even if you play 5k tourneys (which would be a decent sample for an entire year), you still have a 20% chance of losing money and a 38% chance of making less than ~60k. That totally sucks. Anyone except a true tourney god is more likely to lose over 100 tourneys than to win, which also sucks, and even a great tourney player has a decent chance of losing over 1k+ tournaments or to make only half her expected earn over 5k tournaments. Of course, the upside is good too, but the risk of losing money should be pretty scary to professional MTT players.

I should mention that this data lines up pretty well with my experience. I know a lot of professional MTT players. Losing months are incredibly common for them, and losing years happen fairly often. Years where they way underperform their expectations are typical. So, I hope people consider this before deciding to play (or continue playing) these for a living. People who are really good at MTTs, willing to put in tons of volume, and have huge bankrolls and strong stomachs might be better off playing large field MTTs professionally, but there aren’t many of those people. I think for the vast majority of people, it’s not a good idea (even for those who play very well).

You can find more data and some discussion about the distribution here and here. In future posts (probably coming soon, but I’m not making any promises), I’ll compare this data to cash games (both NLHE and PLO), STTs, and small field MTTs (i.e. 45s and 180s). I’ll also look into how stuff like this affects backing. So, if that stuff interests you, stay tuned or whatever. You can follow me on twitter if you want to know when my posts go up, or just subscribe to my RSS feed.

I've spent about five years playing poker for a living, almost exclusively. Admittedly, I was never a crusher of epic proportions, but I held my own and my living expenses were not too high so I was doing OK. However, after about three years of online grinding, I got tired of sitting in front of the computer screen and wanted to try something different.

Moving to the live grind

I live in a relatively small capital city with just about half a million people, so as you can imagine, the selection for a live tournament grinder is fairly limited. However, when I made my move, there were two casinos offering poker action almost every day of the week. These tourneys would usually attract anywhere between 20 and 60 people.

It may seem like it wasn't worth it, but the rake was fairly small and the live players at the casino were, for the most part, horrible players. The tournaments staged were crushable for huge ROIs so based on what I saw at that point, I decided to give it a go.

Grinding Online Poker For A Living

My reasoning was that I'd go out and mingle with people while still doing what I loved and maintaining a healthy income. It certainly sounded way better than spending every day in your room, away from everybody and everything. Like most plans, this one sounded way better on paper.

Sometimes poker grinds you

Grinding Poker For A Living Person

What I failed to consider from the very onset was the fact that I was, by nature, an introvert. I never particularly craved to be surrounded by people or noise; it was more a case of me not really knowing what I wanted.

On the financial side of things, everything was pretty much as I anticipated. In fact, from the very start I went on a heater winning quite a few tourneys, which basically ensured that my roll, which was healthy to begin with, would be more than enough to cover any possible downswings.

The social aspect of the game did not go as well. First of all, most people are poor losers. It is not really that much different online, but online you don't have to deal with their outbursts. Live is a completely different story.

Grinding Poker For A Living Well

What I came to realize after a while was that at almost every final table, I was surrounded by the same people and most of them didn't really want me there. You could say that I shouldn't care; after all I was, by all definitions, a professional. But I did care, especially since the whole point of switching to live was to try and feel better.

Another thing that really ticked me off was all the aggressive characters. Considering that the buy-in for these tournaments was quite low and that we all basically knew each other, the amount of trash talk and threats from some of these guys was just unbelievable.

The reality of it all

Probably you won’t have to deal with most of this in big casinos around the world. But I was where I was and I wanted to give it a shot. After about six months, I had a lot of cash on me (for my standards at least) but I was feeling more miserable than ever.

I played a bit longer, but eventually just gave up on the whole idea. It wasn't really worth my while. There were some great guys out there, most of whom I still talk to from time to time and see when I play a live event, once in a blue moon.

The whole point of this story is not to discourage anyone from trying a live grind. Everyone will have a different experience depending on so many factors. But don't let all the fleshiness you may see on TV or on social media fool you.

Grinding Poker For A Living

After all, it is called a grind for a reason.

Grinding Poker For A Living Trust

Ivan Potocki is a veteran Titan Poker player who was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and spent part of his childhood under war conditions. He studied English language and literature and discovered Texas Hold’em while in college. After working different jobs he turned to poker full time and this serves as his main source of income. You can follow him on Twitter: @ivanpotocki