Am I Making a Good Bet? Part 8: The Most Important Bet

In this series have discussed a wide variety of gambling situations, and discussed whether you are making a good bet.

In general, good bets have positive equity. On average you will be a net winner. In some situations you can figure out exactly what your expectation is. You have a flush draw, and your opponent goes all-in. In other cases, you can only approximate it. You have a flush draw, and you move all-in. You have to guesstimate how often your opponent will call. Before revealing what is your most important bet, let’s look at a short poker biography.

Our hero is a somewhat nerdy 22-year-old student at a prestigious East Coast university. He is in the process of getting an undergraduate degree in economics. Then he plans to continue on with an MBA, and to pursue a career in business. He enjoys games, and was a master strength chess player. He also played poker with friends and family.

When he turned 21, he started going to Atlantic City for weekends of poker at the Borgata. He is studious by nature, and after a moderate amount of study, he became a steady winner in the $2-$5 no-limit games, making around $30 per hour. During his Christmas break, he travelled to Las Vegas. There he won a super satellite to a $10,000 tournament. His good fortune continued, when he made a deep run and cashed for around $250,000. While on the plane returning to the East Coast, he began to contemplate becoming a professional poker player.

Whenever you make a major change in your life, you are making a very big bet. Examples of this include not only switching careers, but also making the decision to get married and have kids or to move to a new city. You would like to choose whichever path has the highest expectation. But how do you measure or compare the expectation of living in New York City, the suburbs of New York City, or a small coastal city in Oregon? Will it be more satisfying for a married couple to have two kids and live a quiet domestic life or spend their money on themselves, traveling and indulging some extravagant whims?

Now let’s return to our hero, who is thinking of becoming a professional poker player. My feeling is that in the current poker environment an intelligent, disciplined, cash-game professional can play a typical 40-hour week (he also needs to spend at least 10 hours a week studying), and make somewhere around $100,000 a year. If I widen the range, and say the average will be between $50,000 and $150,000, I would expect to cover most successful pros.

There are also a lot of players who can’t do this for a variety of reasons. The two main downfalls are lack of discipline and ego. Lack of discipline manifests itself in disastrous periods on tilt. Ego manifests itself by attempting to move up in stakes until you are playing with players who are better than you are. (A lot of very talented players, who you have seen in high stakes action, are now out of big action and substantially in debt.) It is much tougher to estimate how well a similarly skilled player should do in tournaments. The juice is very high in small tournaments, and the volatility is huge in big tournaments. If you play in an event with 1,000 entrants, and you are twice as good as average, you’ll win once every 500 tries.

Notice that I also said, “in the current environment.” Over the last 20 years poker has evolved at a very rapid rate. In the US, the success of online poker and the Moneymaker effect, opened up the game. Suddenly there was a vast pool of new players. It became very easy to earn both online and in live games. Then there was an explosion of learning tools – books, magazines, software, videos, and access to watching the best players play for high stakes. There was also Black Friday, and the effective demise of US online poker.

The learning tools meant that existing players were improving rapidly and the death of online poker meant that the player pool wasn’t being refilled as rapidly as it had been. It suddenly became harder to win. It is impossible to predict what will happen over the next 20 years. Players will definitely continue to improve. More jurisdictions are allowing card rooms to open. This brings in new local players. I had hoped that international Internet poker would be legalized in US fairly rapidly after Black Friday. That doesn’t appear to be, if you’ll excuse the expression, in the cards. Especially, considering incoming Vice President Pence is staunchly anti-gambling.

I would say to our hero that abandoning his career plans to become a poker professional would be making a very bad bet. Most competent accountants, doctors, and lawyers make substantially more money than most poker players. They are also immune to running bad or going on tilt. Tech geniuses, super-successful bankers, hedge fund managers and Wall Street guys routinely get bonuses that dwarf the earnings of the most successful poker pros. For example, the disgraced president of Wells Fargo, John Stumpf, will probably get to keep the $130 million of bonuses he received.

Choosing poker as a career is, to me, like choosing acting, painting or writing. There are a tiny few who achieve incredible success. There are a moderate number who grind out a living. There are the majority, who struggle to survive. If you really love poker or acting or writing or painting go for it. You will be happy doing something you love. If you are doing it to get rich, forget it. That would be making a horrendously bad bet. ♠

Steve ‘Zee’ Zolotow aka Zebra is a very successful gamesplayer. He has been a full-time gambler for over 40 years. With two WSOP bracelets, over 50 cashes, and a few million in tournament cashes, he is easing into retirement. He currently devotes most of his Vegas gaming time to poker, and can be found in cash games at Bellagio and at tournaments during the WSOP. When escaping from poker, he spends the spring and the fall in New York City where he hangs out at his bars: Doc Holliday’s, The Library and DBA.