I'm not really a vp player but I do enjoy reading this board.
I was wondering if any of you ap players have played much live poker?
I have a regular job but poker is my hobby and I have been playing profitability for about four years now. I play 1-2, 2-5 no limit holdem (NLH). I used to play both live and on the internet until the poker sites got shut down.
You can make some money playing poker if you study and are serious about the game.
I just wanted to find out the consensus of the vp player regarding live poker.
Live poker as AP
If you learn to play well, live poker is a much better deal than video poker. In vegas, a good 1-3NL player can make about $20 an hour and a 2-5NL player can make $30 an hour. And the bankroll required is about 1/10 that of video poker and the variance is about 1/10th as well.
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--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "kb5zcr" <thetiminator@...> wrote:
I'm not really a vp player but I do enjoy reading this board.
I was wondering if any of you ap players have played much live poker?
I have a regular job but poker is my hobby and I have been playing profitability for about four years now. I play 1-2, 2-5 no limit holdem (NLH). I used to play both live and on the internet until the poker sites got shut down.
You can make some money playing poker if you study and are serious about the game.
I just wanted to find out the consensus of the vp player regarding live poker.
Well, a lot of that depends on what you value and where your strengths lie. When I first moved to Vegas in 2005, I had moved here with the intention of playing live poker. My bankroll was only what I could get as a cash advance on my credit cards, so I was playing just 5/10 to 10/20 limit. I found promos at the Luxor that allowed me to make an average of $18/hour playing 2/4 limit even with a $4 rake, which obviously had less risk than the straight up cash games I was playing and for just slightly less expected hourly.
But quickly after turning that into a career, it felt like quite a grind. I started looking into other opportunities that would give me an advantage. Eventually I decided on video poker.
For me at least, vp was a better fit. I liked being able to absolutely quantify my advantage. On a poker table I could only work from a guideline of experimental average. I might average $x/hour, but I knew that depending on the table composition my expected advantage would vary (and while I'm not sure if it has ever happened, I might even have negative ev if the competition was strong enough). But with vp, I could know what my expected advantage was (approximations on promos like drawings are less precise, but you know what I'm getting at).
Add to that the fact that I could play up to 2500 hands/hour given that right machines/games versus 35 or 40/hour on a live table (where I'm folding a large majority of them pre-flop), and I found that vp FELT like less of a grind than the slower paced live game.
While the vp landscape is certainly changing, I'm sure that I would not have made seven figures by this time had i not made the switch to vp 4 years ago.
Personally, I was always more of a mathematical player, so I always enjoyed Sklansky's books. While I believe purely mathematical players can make a long term profit playing poker, I realized that I was probably not maximizing my profit potential because my psychological game was less developed. This is the same reason why I think a Sklansky-style player can expect to have positive EV in the WSOP main-event, but they are not likely to take first.
Realizing my niche was numbers, I chose to remove the human aspect and decided upon vp. While it may certainly not be for everyone, it certainly was right for me.
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--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "AK-SAR-BEN" <tomskilv@...> wrote:
If you learn to play well, live poker is a much better deal than video poker. In vegas, a good 1-3NL player can make about $20 an hour and a 2-5NL player can make $30 an hour. And the bankroll required is about 1/10 that of video poker and the variance is about 1/10th as well.
It's always a good idea for people to broaden their skills, and this certainly applies to casino advantage play. I have seen several people that I recognize as advantage VP players that have migrated into live poker, especially as VP opportunities in my local area have dwindled considerably over the last few years. This includes myself.
Live poker requires a different set of skills compared to other mainstream AP games such as VP or blackjack. Those games (at their basic level) are all about memorizing and recalling charts of information, along with scouting for good games. Live poker requires a lot of on-the-fly adjustments. Adjustments to the style of game, to individual players, stack sizes, etc. You constantly have to make decisions based on incomplete information.
One can study and practice on the computer and be a very good VP player almost immediately. That's not likely to be the case with live poker. The learning curve for live poker is much longer. On the other hand, the complexity of the game should contribute to long term profit opportunities, because many players just won't ever get very good.
EE
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--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "kb5zcr" <thetiminator@...> wrote:
I just wanted to find out the consensus of the vp player regarding live poker.
Before i got into AP VP I moved to vegas to play poker for a living. I only had experience in spread limit holdem as far as live play went, with a lot of NLHE experience online. It took about 6 months to adjust and it was somewhat costly, not in the sense that I lost, but I just didnt deviate that far from break even, which doesnt pay the bills. I realized that reading books and trying to find a style based on authors suggestions just wont work, you need to find your own based on your experiences, not others. I quickly learned to go from super tight AA-JJ type starting hands to hyper aggressive when the situation dictated it.
For the most part though live poker in vegas is easy if you can learn to avoid the other good players, just flop sets, play straight and flush draws (to the nuts), and avoid getting your stack in with 1 pair until you are very experiences, and you should do fine.
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--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "kb5zcr" <thetiminator@...> wrote:
I'm not really a vp player but I do enjoy reading this board.
I was wondering if any of you ap players have played much live poker?
I have a regular job but poker is my hobby and I have been playing profitability for about four years now. I play 1-2, 2-5 no limit holdem (NLH). I used to play both live and on the internet until the poker sites got shut down.
You can make some money playing poker if you study and are serious about the game.
I just wanted to find out the consensus of the vp player regarding live poker.