Real talk Jow Forums, how does a normie john doe get into online poker? Any dedicated poker players here?

thanks man

Don't play online poker; the barriers to entry are too high and the margins between skilled players too slim at current
If you want to make money playing poker the best thing you can go is host a home game with high stakes and bad players
Target people for whom $1000 means very little eg doctors, lawyers, ceos
They are all bored and desperate for a reason to be out of the house and drink
Play texas holdem to start and then introduce pot limit omaha
The variance of PLO will get the gamblers addicted
Your long term overlay if you know what you're doing is bigger too
Set the game up with smaller blind/stack ratio and encourage drinking and overbetting
If you can get this running 3 nights a week it can be your livelihood

Regarding live play, are there any alternative benefits for someone who doesnt know how to play to put in the work to learn to play? I was thinking maybe if you could get good enough to not lose money you one day it could come in handy like say
- a way of networking with rich people with more money than they know what to do with
- or maybe if you ever need to clean some dirty money
- or maybe if you need to "lose" some money(like make it disappear so you dont lose it in a legal battle or courtroom) and if you already had the preexisting reputation of going to game sometimes it wouldn't raise any red flags that you "lost" money.

you can't afford to play with those people without a sponsor OP, you would need to be able to win

i bet on fights professionally and make 100 thousand dollars a month. not even memeing. follow my instagram @thebettersclub instead of this poker shit

I am reluctant to post stuff like this because to be honest I don’t want a bunch of people to get better but here’s a great way to make everyone in the game you play ins life a living hell if you don’t care they will dislike you and you won’t be included in their poker comraderie.
1. Buy in short. $200 in a 2/5 game $400 in a 5/10 game.
2. Play an extremely nitty non spew but also tricky or trappy style. This means I will limp reraise in games where people are over tired or over aggressive guys have position on me. I’d do it with AK AA KK A4s JTs against a guy you play agaisnt all the time and hates you and raises too light vs you in these spots etc. you get the idea. I would just always shove preflop or open large enough it would be retarded to call. I would do this with a lot more hands on the button than other positions.
Once you have a full stack you can continue playing a tight strategy and still exploiting the “pain threshold”
with your preflop strategy. I would continue to use this unusual preflop strategy with a full stack for two reasons. 1. Your opponents are bad at poker, but they are still probably functioning adults who have formed some reasonable strategy. They will notice you are playing very tight preflop and you will be telegraphing the strength of your hand when you open which will not be often because most players open too many hands and call too much and no level of skill will overcome this contrary to popular belief. you’ll be denying good odds to good players and giving bad odds to the cab driver types who won’t fold and will want to “get” you. Also the good spots where a couple weak players limp and you open something else on the button, your bluffs will more often go through.
Don’t tip unless their is a flop. The other players will notice you don’t tip after you continuely steal on the button and start to hate you.

Not true. Ive made alot of money in online poker and all the friends I made on the tables are now pro and play live now for the most part. They tell me live is a fucking cakewalk comapre to online. My advice to you is grind out online poker till your atleast profitable at 50nl then you can absolutely crush donks in live games.

many thanks man, i know it sounds silly but i just want to play wsop and be there atleast the last man cashing out so that i can have my name there.. just for the sake of it

Im like your perfect audience,
really enjoyed the post, didnt have a fucking clue what half the words mean.

I play online full time on Ignition and if you cant beat these games you probably just suck ass. I'm honestly surprised you can even make a living playing live 1/2.

Theres a free MIT course on basic poker theory, go through that then play some 2NL on any site. As you get better look at instructional videos, pay for a training site (Upswing/Run It Once), and eventually get some coaching and get used to a solver (PIO/Snowie).

Why would you ever buy in short to a live game? OP/Anyone in this thread, please dont do this. Buying in short minimizes your options, which eliminates the skill edge you have. If you are truly better than your opponents you'd want to have as much money as possible in front of you so you can use your skill to your advantage and make the most money possible in every hand.

Ok but don’t play like this in a tournament just to be clear. Also sit and think sometimes before you act, is someone raising or betting a lot and you can see easily what hand you are afraid they have? Guess what. That’s the hand they have. Here’s another bit of advice: People won’t think you’re bluffing if you Hollywood. But it takes balls to sit and think a long time before making a huge bluff. One more thing, when Doug Polk and his heads up specialist buddies got crushed by the latest AI (it smashed them all for a massive win rate) it played very conservative preflop and had a tendancy to let the entire hand develop to the river before pulling the trigger on a big bet or raise. This is because it could more adequately put its opponent on a hand that it’s bluffs could fold out and also serves to trick its opponents more often when it had a big hand as well as control the size of the pot when it wanted to protect its stack. Just something to think about how it applies to your own game and why this strategy exploits even the “best” in the world.

Yeah but he’s seeking advice as a new player. This strategy exploits that most players play too loose preflop. As a new player when he has a full stack it will be from already winning. Obviously what you are saying is true but this is how I built my money up and it was easy.

I think you're confusing whats made you profitable in live games. Its the fact that you're just a better player than anyone else at the table, not your random limp/raising strat. Ideally you want to raise and be aggressive against live opponents, put as much money in the pot as you possibly can against bad players. Even basic poker knowledge will let you beat 1/2 and probably 2/5, I think having an open limping strat will be +EV overall but -EV compared to just raising and playing a standard game.

Lol pls don't do this

OP here is exactly why I’m telling you to play live instead of online. Instead of playing against this type of person who is clearly good, play against drunks/degenerates, also people play completely different when bored and not multi tabling zone poker or whatever. Also tilt and leveling themselves become an issue for a lot of players live.

Yeah the limp reraise move is good in very specific situations only is a good point. I didn’t really intend to emphasize it in the way i did.

Why not just explain why this strategy doesn’t work well vs. the current meta of a typical live poker game? I think OP would then be inclined to take your advice more seriously and it wouldn’t be just a shit post

Playing online is really the only way I'd be comfortable recommending someone learn. Instead of having them sit down with $200 at a 1/2 game, have them sit down with $2 at 2NL online.

But long term I agree, live is way more profitable. I just moved to Vegas and its insane how much worse live players are, the issue is that when you grind poker you understand that volume is key. I can play 400 hands/hr online but only 20/hr live (or 20 MTTs/day as opposed to 1 live), so the ability to really grind it out is gone there.

So much random advice here.

OP it all depends on where you live. Regardless, do not attempt to make a living playing live cash. 1/2 is pretty much impossible to beat in the long run unless the games are absolute nuts all the time which is rare nowadays, 2/5 you need a bankroll of about 20k to withstand the swings and I can guarantee you will not be able to. The game sucks your life away live as you waits for big pairs for hours and hours only to see everyone fold when you raise or someone flops a set on you and you lose a full buy-in like that.

You will be sitting for hours around actual true degenerates, people with real actual gambling problems. Chronic alcoholics, random poor people, drug addicts, etc. You'll fold for hours, wake up to KK then some random guy that sucks at the game will wake up with AA, you'll get it all in, lose, and ask yourself "Why the hell do I play even this game?"

But there is still hope. Small buy-in online MTTs are your absolute best bet for making long term money with the game for a multitude of reasons. If you get sucked out on (which happens all the time), you'll lose $5 for the buy-in to the tournament instead of a $400 buy-in at cash. Small buy-in MTTs are soft, you get a lot of chips to play poker with, and the prize payouts can be surprisingly good depending on the tournament (1st place can range from $500-$1500.
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Here is the site I've been using, you can start of with a small bankroll of $50 and run it up playing $3 buy in MTTs. If I helped you with this post, I'd appreciate if you used my refer link. You can always just google bovada if you don't wish to use it. So good luck and have a nice day. :)

TLDR; Don't ever attempt to play live cash for a living, don't play online cash for a living, stick to small buy in tournaments and move up when your bankroll allows it.

bovada.lv/welcome/P453ABE0/join/?extcmpid=rafcopy

isnt online poker illegal in US?

Online is infinitely tougher than live. The skill level of a $1 MTT is similar to the $140 Aria daily.

That said, Ignition/Bovada is the softest site that Americans can play on. I have heard good things about Global as well.

You’re probably right but I think it’s too hard to play well when the result will be winning .50 an hour or something. If he has a thousand dollars and a reasonable job he can play super nitty at 1/2, but imo he’s better off moving to 2/5 ASAP even if it means buying in short, at this level the rake will be less of a factor removing money from the game. Also while I think there are some very bad players, most players are competent but have leaks, and most of those leaks are preflop.

It's not illegal to play online poker, its illegal to run an online poker site except for New Jersey, Nevada, Delaware, and recently Pennsylvania. I've been playing online poker full time for the last year or so as an American.

I agree, and probably a mix is right. Play some 2NL to learn and then some 1/2 live to actually make money once he progresses.

Good post and probably good advice. I just dislike tournaments and enjoy cash games so I can’t give tournament advice. Also while true this is leaning into the pessimism a bit. You will also have hot runs where you win tons and tons every time you play for periods of time.

I don’t know how you do it. I can’t stand online especially when it’s user like ignition. I played lots of online poker probably over a million hands on party, paradise, pstars, full tilt, bodog etc etc etc so many poker sites I can’t even think of them all. It just seemed to get bad a couple years ago but maybe it’s better now, it just seems way to stressful and I don’t trust it enough to play any stakes worth playing. I lost a lot of money when lock poker exit scammed

That is true, it's great to run up a wall of chips at a cash game but someone can blow a chunk out of that wall at any moment. The sheer and true randomness of cards is unfathomable, supposedly there are 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ways to arrange a deck of cards. Assuming a full ring of poker uses 26 cards (18 player cards, 5 for board and 3 burns), you can imagine there are about half that number of ways to deal poker. Some guy can probably mathematically run good his entire life even though he plays awful poker. I've seen such people like this at my casino. You can argue that in the long run everyone is dealt the same bad beats, coolers, hot streaks and cold decks but IMO the long run cannot be hit in a lifetime.

I've only really been playing poker for 2 years (and professionally for 1), so I missed the black friday/potripper era. I think its completely reasonable to be skeptical about collusion/bots/superusers on ignition - but I have made a few thousand from that site and always been paid within 24 hours.

Mentally its nuts, until recently I exclusively played MTTs which are incredibly high variance, and downswings are prolonged. Basically I would lose money 80-85% of my sessions but the times I'd be up money it would be very large 4-5 figure scores far outweighing the losses. Cash games are still high variance but nowhere near MTTs, but you do lose that thrill of being at a final table with tens of thousands of dollars up top, you just kind of grind out a few hundred bucks a day. I just moved to vegas and playing live has helped a bit with the mentality, playing daily at the Wynn/Aria/Bellagio is pretty fun - but I've only been here a few days at this point. I'm playing the Venetian series in a few weeks and of course the WSOP in June, so hopefully I bink something :).

Very true and wise words

Are you playing poker full time? I have a dog walking biz that takes about 25 hours a week and I find that the $700 a week I make takes a lot of the pressure off and is pretty necessary from past experiences. It can be hard to generate $0 a week towards expenses and your overall net worth goes down from a down swing unless you have deep pockets.

I am playing full time but I'm definitely rolled for the stakes I play. Having some sort of other income would be ok but I doubt there would be anything that would be worth it beyond what I make at the tables. But you're right, even beyond the financial part of it - downswings are killer, you question everything about your game.