If my math is correct, if you can beat this game by 3BB per 100 and you add in the cash equivilant of the FPPs you will earn, you will make more than $4k a month and a little over $50k a year.

80 hands an hr per table = 320 hands per hr
320 x 6 hrs/day x 22 days/month = 44240 hands a month

44240 x 3BB/100 = $2654.40 a month

Playing this many hands you'll be Supernova in around a month, maybe 6 weeks tops. At Supernova you'll make a little more than 3 FPPs per hand...we'll just say 3 per hand.

44240 x 3 = 132,720 FPPs a month

You can trade 132,720 FPPs for T$2113.68 which can be traded for $2029.13 on sellyourseat.com

$2654.40 + 2029.13 = $4683.53 a month = $56,202.36 a year

Plus if you do this you will become Supernova Elite in less than 8 months...just from 1-2 LHE. lol Not only will you earn FPPs much faster but you get the other perks that go with it. Hello WSOP ME freeroll, Atlantis freeroll, WCOOP freeroll.

56k isn't great, but its not bad for working 6 hours a day. Is 3BB per 100 reasonable for a solid player who has read and can apply SSHE? Can somebody do this and not go complely insane? I'm thinking 3 2 hour sessions, 5 days a week is doable. It'll give you plenty of free time to think of other things besides poker. One could even do this while going go school. Of course its not a career...you wouldnt want to do this for more than a couple years before you moved up and played for serious money, or moved on and got a real job. But it would be a great gig for a while.

Am I missing something? I know if there is a flaw somebody here will expose it. And I'm not saying I'm going to do this...the wife would never let me. Just thinking about what is possible.

rake sir, rake. and the fact that you assume you can beat 1/2 sh or full ring lhe for 3bb/100. I can't imagine that's sustainable w/rake, even w/out. The games would have to be reallllllllllllly fishy imo. They say up until 5/10, rake has a big effect on you being a 'winning' player or not.


And yeah, that much lhe @ 1/2 would drive people crazy. Especially if you're doing that as a full time gig, you'd be moving up the ranks pretty slowly.

do not try it. trust me. keep playing and wait until you can beat 5/10 and play for like 20 hours a week.

1) you probably cannot beat it for 3bb/100 playing four tables 30 hours a week. if you can you can almost certainly win higher.
2) you will get burnt out quickly.


not that ive tried or anything....

Well, you start correctly by clarifying the big IF - IF you can beat the game at 3/100.

IF that is true, you can make money at it. 3 is really killing a game though, maybe 2 is a reasonable goal. That is already factoring in the rake, so fine.

Then I think you are assuming high FPP on every hand. There will be quite a few hands at 1/2 with no points. So again, maybe estimate that a little lower.

I do like you idea of 3 2 hours sessions, 5 days a week. If you're not beating the game at 3/100, but 2 or 2.5, it's not a big deal to play another 6 or 10 hours a week.


BUT, burnout. Lack of real people interaction. Carpal tunnel syndrom etc... Being able to beat the game and play 10-12 hours a week is a nice supplement to your day job income, but not a replacement at these levels. Like anti said, if you can beat 1/2 that bad, move up. Beat 2/4 at 2/100 and you'll make more money.

It's significantly harder than it sounds to play a ton of hands on a regular basis for a long time. I quit my job and I've played fewer hands pretty much every month since, lol.

Seriously though, if you're beating 1/2 for 3 BB/100, you shouldn't be playing 1/2.

i did it starting @ 3/6

and


you shouldn't do it until you can do 10/20 imo. And i do 6tables+ : /

Right now I'm making just barely shy of 2 per hand at gold star. At gold star you get a 100% FPP bonus. At Supernova you get a 250% FPP bonus, so I think its safe to say you'll make at least 3 per hand.

Also with the way the FFP structure is set up, I think you can earn them slightly faster at 1/2 than you can at 2/4. At 1/2 the rake needs to be $0.40 but at 2/4 it needs to be $1.00. Plus I think the 1/2 games are quite a bit softer than 2/4. More people play 1/2 so table selection is better. At 1/2 full ring usually 3 people at the table have a clue, at 2/4 I'd say that number is 6 or 7.

Yes the rake takes a lot from you, but the FPP rewards you get is like having rakeback. Even if you only beat this game for 2BB/100 it might still be worth our time. I see guys doing this right now. There are 3 or 4 guys on PS that always seem to be playing 1/2 a lot more than this...playing like 8-10 tables for several hours every day.

Play on a site that offers real rakeback and constant bonuses.

A rough guestimate from memory, FPPs equate to max 30% rakeback when you're Supernova, and it's significantly worse below that, like Goldstar is like 10% or something like that.

On somethink like AP, you get 30% RB to start, THEN you have bonus which is pretty close to another 30% on top of that, AND you get ARPs (same as FPPs), which you can make up to 3x the base depending on your VIP level, AND you can trade them for cash. All in all, it works out to roughly 80% RB, depending on your limits and VIP level. This data is from my experiences at 3/6, 1/2 will be significantly worse on AP, but still better than Stars, oh, and it's SH, which generates a lot more rake, and obv you pay more, but get more back.

If it means anything, when I decided to play cards full-time, and didn't want to deal with the stress of playing high, I beat the Party 3/6 games for ~2.7BB/100 over enough hands that it was probably very close to my TrueWinrate. Until I started drinking heavily enough to warrant a self-imposed personal rehab, I was beating it for 3+. This was without rakeback, or any consideration of Party Points.

The caveat here is that there probably aren't any games even remotely approaching the level of juiciness you'd find at Party 3/6 tables before the US shutdown. That might have been the softest any online limit game has ever been. Like, ever. I was usually 3 or 4 tabling with poker tracker fired up and running. And I am not an elite player.

Wang

Yeah, it's pretty much like comparing apples and oranges, talking about Party circa 2004, and the average online poker game these days.

This might be the next challenge. The patience/boredom factor is a big one though. I would have to agree that getting the rakeback and the bonus is the way to go if you are going to play levels this low. And if you can sustain that win rate the moving up is a better option, just my 2 cents.

I found my flaw. You can't trade tournament tickets you buy with FPPs for $T. Today I bought a $215 sunday ticket for 13500 fpps...support was nice enought to give my points back though after I emailed them.

Zach how soft are the games on Absolute compared to PS? I'd think they'd be just a bit tougher because there are a lot of guys like yourself doing what you described.

A couple of big problems with this.

1) You've already identified it, but FPPs aren't really like true rakeback. If you're gonna do something like this, you'd need real rakeback. Maybe FullTilt or Absolute.

2) It's simply not possible to beat 1/2 (or really any level for that matter) for 3 BB/100 over a sustained period of time. Maybe back in the glory days of Party (read 2004-2005), this would have been possible. But, I believe it still would have been highly unlikely at 1/2 where the rake would cut into your winrate so much that this would be nearly impossible.

3) This is probably the most important point. Before anybody tries to play poker seriously as a means of income, you need to really examine yourself and find if you're capable of dealing with it mentally. How will you handle a sustained losing streak? How well do you handle tilt? Ask yourself these questions, try to determine if you can keep tilt from hurting you. Trust me, I killed my roll with a downswing coupled with some pretty bad tilt sessions and some serious loss chasing. The mental aspect is really the biggest key to any of these schemes to make money at poker.

I haven't played on Stars in a while, but they're definitely soft. It's strange, they went from being a site known for their tough tables, to being one of the softest sites online in like a matter of a few months.

Note though, that I haven't played 1/2 in a long time on there. I'm mostly referring to 2/4 and 3/6, I can't imagine they'd be that different.

i beat the 2/4 at Full Tilt for around 4bb/100 for almost 20K hands

20k isnt huge, and if youre trying to do this full time 20k is almost nothing, but i think my winrate there is impressive.
of course, now th e 2/4 there has tightened up more than the 3/6 and 5/10 games usually.

Actually, I agree with Rise here. A winrate of 3 bb/100 may not be common, but it's certainly possible.

I have my doubts that 4 BB/100 is possible over a significant sample though, like 200k hands, for example, with the state of the game today. Like others have said, it was possible, and has been done in the Party hey days, but I really don't think it's possible now.

So lets move from 1-2 to another level. What would people say can be grinded out on 30-40 hours per week? Or is Limit not a place to grind out at levles lower than 10-20?

it is a great place, so long as you are bonuswhoring along with it. there's no reason someone can't grind 30-40 hours a week of 4 tables at 2/4 LHE and make $800+ week without playing much better than breakeven.

you should be playing all the crypto sites, WSEX, all the PSO sites available, and anywhere else you can find an available table, like Prima, AP, etc.

It isn't necessarily an optimal situation, but for non-americans, you should be able to make $1000/week for at least a couple months just playing 4 tables of 2/4 LHE for 30-40 hours a week at 0.5bb/100 or so.

so if you are even a little better than break even, the bonuswhoring and rake back allows someone to play and make, with a smallish bankroll, more than they can make coming out of college with their degree.

While gaining a bunch of weight, neutering your social life and slowly driving you insane. Still no worse than most other jobs though.

LOL - sad but true.

So all I have to do is pull my 2/4 game up a notch, move to my condo (currently under construction) in Costa Rica (where you can apparently live on $500 a month) and I'm good?

Freedom 35 here I come!

well, short-term the answer is yes, though long-term almost certainly not.

if you can scrape together $1000 or so after college, it is a nice way to spend a year or two after graduation to relax, party and not work, without going into debt.

very approximately, i'm pretty sure you can conservatively average 1.5bb/100 at 2/4 LHE over 40000 hands per month (about 35 hours/week and 4-tabling) in bonuses and RB. thats about $550-600 per week, USD, tax-free. many sites are closer to 2-2.5bb/100, and with a winrate, that number could easily be doubled, to $1200/week, and that's only 4-tabling full-ring.

oh if I was only 20 years younger!!!

lol spoiledmuch?aments. thats more money than a lot people make in a month. maybe even most people.

nice way to spend a year or two indeed.

oh, i definitely agree. I just mean when you take into account:

1 - the empty years might look questionable on a resume
2 - while our early 20's don't earn much, we won't earn a lot in our 40's and 50's unless we earn a little now. if you put off that for 5 years, you're lowering your future earning potential as well, very often significantly
3 - if your expenses are small, and you can earn $30/hour, there isn't a lot of motivation to play 30-40 hours per week. I've found that if I can pay my expenses in 10 hours/week, I'll probably only play 10-15.

I know none of that is breaking news, but felt it still needed to be said.

When you consider that it is tax-free (ex-students can imply they're still students for tax purposes or whatever), even a conservative number of $600 per week is a lot closer to $1000/week that none of us could hope for, if you are actually willing to put in the hours, and effort into bonuswhoring.