What % of people who play poker can make a living from it alone?
istbno
Rock Star
Platinum Level
Only a small percentage of poker players can make a living solely from playing the game. Estimates suggest that around 5% to 10% of players consistently profit in the long run. The majority who attempt to play professionally struggle with the variance, skill level required, and the discipline needed to manage bankrolls and make consistent, strategic decisions under pressure. To achieve success in making poker a career, players not only need to excel at the game but also manage their earnings like a business, focusing on financial planning, studying game theory, and continuously improving their playing skills.
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LukeSilver
Rock Star
Silver Level
I think two things are getting mixed up here
1. making money from the game
2. making a living from the game
been autistic I am not always great at putting things politely so I will just say it straight if you cant make money from the game when trying I question your ability to function as a person.
There is a reason most people do not make money from poker its because they dont play or study poker that much. You do not need to be a mathematical genius or have a world class memory to make a profit from the game.
Firstly if you only ever played free rolls and just open shoved every hand and had zero skills you would make a profit. However I will assume free rolls are not been counted in this discussion because everyone knows that.
If you are playing 50 cent sit and goes or mtts the standard is bad because few if anyone is putting serious effort into studying the game hard to make <$1 an hour. If you therefore study the game a bit I would expect you to be profitable at micro stakes. If everyone studied hard at all stakes yes it would be very difficult.
If your talking about making a living well firstly it depends what a living is, I saw one person on these forums or maybe it was another forum claim they need $200 to live off a month. that would be easy to do, on micro stakes. here in the UK I would say you need about £2000 a month to support yourself which is $2500 a month which is a lot harder to make. Assuming you play for 7 hours a day 20 days a month this would be $125 a day or $17.86 an hour.
That is a lot harder and I assume there wont be a lot of people who can do that. However how many people actually make the effort? if we made a poll and trusted everyone to be completely honest assuming they were for the sake of argument we all know there would be a strong correlation of time spent studying the game compared to profit per hour.
its certainly more then 1 in 50,000 been profitable at the game, making a living well that is impossible to say, because there will be plenty of people that just play occasionally like maybe an hour a week or even a month. what I will say though of all the names that I see regularly online or who I know play regularly (regularly been defined here as more then a few hours a week) the number of those that do it for a living is way higher then 1 in 50,000 but I would say less then 10% for sure.
1. making money from the game
2. making a living from the game
been autistic I am not always great at putting things politely so I will just say it straight if you cant make money from the game when trying I question your ability to function as a person.
There is a reason most people do not make money from poker its because they dont play or study poker that much. You do not need to be a mathematical genius or have a world class memory to make a profit from the game.
Firstly if you only ever played free rolls and just open shoved every hand and had zero skills you would make a profit. However I will assume free rolls are not been counted in this discussion because everyone knows that.
If you are playing 50 cent sit and goes or mtts the standard is bad because few if anyone is putting serious effort into studying the game hard to make <$1 an hour. If you therefore study the game a bit I would expect you to be profitable at micro stakes. If everyone studied hard at all stakes yes it would be very difficult.
If your talking about making a living well firstly it depends what a living is, I saw one person on these forums or maybe it was another forum claim they need $200 to live off a month. that would be easy to do, on micro stakes. here in the UK I would say you need about £2000 a month to support yourself which is $2500 a month which is a lot harder to make. Assuming you play for 7 hours a day 20 days a month this would be $125 a day or $17.86 an hour.
That is a lot harder and I assume there wont be a lot of people who can do that. However how many people actually make the effort? if we made a poll and trusted everyone to be completely honest assuming they were for the sake of argument we all know there would be a strong correlation of time spent studying the game compared to profit per hour.
its certainly more then 1 in 50,000 been profitable at the game, making a living well that is impossible to say, because there will be plenty of people that just play occasionally like maybe an hour a week or even a month. what I will say though of all the names that I see regularly online or who I know play regularly (regularly been defined here as more then a few hours a week) the number of those that do it for a living is way higher then 1 in 50,000 but I would say less then 10% for sure.
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LukeSilver
Rock Star
Silver Level
yeah at the start there a really big deal but after a while they just blend in the distance. you realize that there are many ups and downs and the results on any play session dont really matter its the average. the time to worry or take things seriously is if the bad luck doesn't stop and lasts say 7 play days in a row because then you have to question if it really is bad luck or something has become unstuck or enough players have adapted to you and you need to go back to the drawing board so to speak.
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Cooking
Legend
Loyaler
I saw many people saying 10% of players can make a living from poker, but this number is too much in my opinion. Of course no one knows the number, but I think is even less than 5% because being profitable is different than being a professional player.
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member401988
Guest
sometimes it seems that poker is so simple and you can make money with it, but when I keep playing, nothing happens...
Matt_Burns88
Legend
Bronze Level
Probably a similar % to that of the number of professional footballers (soccer players).
There about about 15 senior football teams in my town. One is "semi-professional", but in reality only a handful of their best players get a few quid a month and they have full time jobs. The rest is completely amateur where players pay the club in order to play.
The nearest professional club is about 15 miles away where the full squad earn a living playing football full time, but they're hardly living the life of luxury. The majority of the working population of that town are probably earning a lot more than they are.
Then about 25 miles away is the closest Premier League team, where even players that struggle to get into the first team squad regularly are paid tens of thousands of pounds a week.
How many amateur teams are there between my town and there? 100's maybe even 1000's. Those are your losing poker players.
How many semi-pro teams are there? Maybe 15? They are your decent recs/regs who win a bit, maybe make a half decent side income.
How many pro teams are there? Two, possibly 3. They are your grinders who live off poker, but you don't hear too much about very often.
How many Premier League teams are there? One. This is your elite, high rolling superstar.
So, that was just a very long winded way of saying somewhere in the region of less than 1% are actually a living from playing poker.
There about about 15 senior football teams in my town. One is "semi-professional", but in reality only a handful of their best players get a few quid a month and they have full time jobs. The rest is completely amateur where players pay the club in order to play.
The nearest professional club is about 15 miles away where the full squad earn a living playing football full time, but they're hardly living the life of luxury. The majority of the working population of that town are probably earning a lot more than they are.
Then about 25 miles away is the closest Premier League team, where even players that struggle to get into the first team squad regularly are paid tens of thousands of pounds a week.
How many amateur teams are there between my town and there? 100's maybe even 1000's. Those are your losing poker players.
How many semi-pro teams are there? Maybe 15? They are your decent recs/regs who win a bit, maybe make a half decent side income.
How many pro teams are there? Two, possibly 3. They are your grinders who live off poker, but you don't hear too much about very often.
How many Premier League teams are there? One. This is your elite, high rolling superstar.
So, that was just a very long winded way of saying somewhere in the region of less than 1% are actually a living from playing poker.
Captainine9
Visionary
Bronze Level
Also, not many people have the option to do it
Sunz of Beaches
Whot a Donk
Platinum Level
Why should that player number on gg count as an example of who can make a living off poker and who cant? This is just a number that shows how many seats are occupied on GG. Its not even the real number of players afaik.
If u can somehow see who is playing for a living solely based on this number then please let us know how 🙂
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M
member401988
Guest
you are right bro I totally agree with you!!!!!!!It seems to me that poker is very similar to a casino, you can win for a long time, but then luck turns away from you and you lose everything,
Kinalha
Legend
Bronze Level
less than 10%
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LukeSilver
Rock Star
Silver Level
So it would be ill advised for me to give information out which could potentially identify my screen names. purely because responsible gambling legislation is a big thing in the United Kingdom and I have mentioned been autistic on these forums. I am not saying a site finding out that I am autistic would lead to a ban just that I dont know if it could so i am careful with that.
expanding on things though a lot of making decent money is about game selection. For example I am not sure if I could beat $10 nl cash on stars. Cash games online are nortoriously difficult compared to all other formats. The standard on stars has been the second toughest standard I have come across online behind only ACR.
So It may well be possible that many better players then me have given up due to failing to beat $5 NL on ACR. hard for me to say that because I have not touched cash on ACR.
so if you gave me a $500 bankroll I could play and struggle to beat $5 games on ACR or I could go and play dons or spin and goes on party or just small stake 5 and 10 mtts and grind up the roll with ease.
Times of day can make a difference to for example if your playing on party you can have a harder time at $1 spin and goes at the wrong time then you would have at $10 spin and goes at the right time. Now I mean this would be extreme but if you picked the best time for the $10 and worst time for $1 would not be unrealistic.
focus on the reg/rec ratio in any games you play.
Currently I am on zero hour contracts with a few work places and play online poker so I am kind of a fusion between doing poker for a living and on the side etc.
I think there are several challenges to the future of online poker,
1. sites changing the rake structure games and promotions and this is continiously getting worse for the player
2. government legislation around responsible gambling popping up in multiple places and putting limits on how you can gamble
3. the economy and inflation this is happening everywhere worse in some places then others
4. Bots
I would probably say you could go from 4 to 1 for order of biggest threats if you want to do this for a living I fear eventually bots will kill it, but one thing I have noticed over the years is it is getting harder and harder to make the same amount, but due to inflation that amount does not go as far. if you can make 30k a year right now the likelihood is that you will be able to make 25k a year or less in 5 years time but wages and inflation have gone up. One would hope poker winnings would eventually rise with inflation but this has yet to be the case I have never seen that yet.
I am not going to tell you that only 1 in 100,000 or 1 in 50000 people would be able to make a living from online poker if they put in reasonable effort as it is today. I would strongly expect that the figure would exceed 30% possibly even 50% just most people dont take it seriously or put in the effort. However I cannot rule out that in the future with all the difficulties the industry faces it may well be the case that only 1 in 50000 can make a living from the game with a serious effort.
Of course if your future looks likely to be been called stupid and a ret**** whilst working a min wage job that a trained chimp could do, and you know that this work will always be readily available to you even if you were to take 5/10 years out to play poker professionaly then why the hell not go for it.