This Pro Thinks Making Money at Poker is Easier Than Ever

Would you dismiss a poker professional that says it’s easier to make money today playing poker than ever before? Most of us would look for the punchline to what is surely a cruel joke as conventional poker thinking says the games are getting tougher, the edges are getting smaller and a career in poker remains a possibility, but only to a the most talented players who are willing to work very, very hard to get there. However, when it is ‘DNeg’ himself making this statement, we are always intrigued by what Daniel Negreanu has to say.

Daniel posted a long blog post over at his website Full Contact Poker where he went into great detail discussing whether it was easier to make money in the old days. Immediately you need to place the context of what Daniel means by ‘the old days.’ For many of us the poker boom started in 2003 where an abundance of new players entering the poker world every day meant that even a solid grasp of strategy gave you a huge edge over the average player at the time. In his blog post Daniel is talking about the 1990’s, when poker existed but not as we know it.

So is Daniel seriously saying the games are easier today? No, he isn’t. In fact Daniel is saying the exact opposite. Daniel states very early in his article that there is a harsh reality to poker today that we simply must be aware of if we are to have any hope of surviving and flourishing in the modern poker games. He says:

In the 1990’s the playing pool was far smaller than it is today. You sat with professionals more often and you had fewer tables to choose from. There was no online poker available, only live poker where the most popular game was Limit Hold’em. You were lucky to play anymore than 25 hands per hour which meant that there was no way you could achieve a high volume of hands played quickly. This slowed your ability to earn more quickly and to accelerate your learning curve.

Today, online poker allows you to play as many hands as you can handle. Daniel says:

Another interesting point. Back in the day you would have to sit on a single table and play against other professionals to secure the hourly rate you needed. Today you can play 10 tables of $2 - $4 (presuming you are a winner at these stakes) and play more hands to reduce the swings and get the same hourly rate. Playing against a single table of pros is harder than selecting good tables and grinding against poorer players so in this scenario, the online options is better.

Getting better at poker in years gone took much longer. Daniel uses the accepted logic that you must invest 10,000 hours into a pursuit in order to become excellent at it. More on what excellent means in a moment but in online poker today, playing the equivalent of a live 10,000 hours at 25 hands per hour would take a fraction of the time that it would have taken in the 90’s playing live, ticking over at a comparatively painstaking 25 hands an hour.

So the good news is you can get excellent more quickly today right? Sort of. The definition of excellent in each era is relative to the era itself. Being excellent today means playing at an exceptionally high level that Daniel concedes is necessary to stand any chance of surviving. Being excellent in the 1990’s meant being good enough for those games. You only ever need to be good enough, but what that means in practise differs massively when you compare the standard of play now to the standard of play in the 1990’s.

Despite the requirement to be better, Daniel points out throughout his blog post that poker players have it far easier today in terms of having the tools at their disposal to assist them in getting better. We have plenty of materials to learn from in a variety of formats and we have easy access to poker games whenever we want to play. We do not need to travel around for action like the pros of the 90’s needed to do. We can also take online courses, we can use software to review hands and we can select good tables.

But not everything is easy. If you play 1,000 hands per hour it is simply impossible to analyse each hand in sufficient detail to draw out the learning benefits you would have gained from analysing each of the 25 live hands per hour you played in detail back in the 1990’s. Again, everything is relative.

Daniel’s final point leaves us with something to think about as we head back to playing poker.

The moral of Daniel’s story is clear. With hard work and dedication you can go a long way today utilising the many learning tools at your disposal. You can have a reasonable expectation that with hard work you can become a far better player than you would have been in the 1990’s. What Daniel is also saying is that you should not cut any corners because to have any hope of success in online poker today, with the games so much tougher now than ever before, you need to be better anyway. There are more places to go and information to absorb that will take you down the path towards fulfilling your poker potential. Places like online poker coaching websites, poker forums and poker videos like the massive amount of great videos available for streaming here at PokerTube.

To suggest that Daniel is saying the games are softer than ever before is to misunderstand Daniel’s entire post. The games themselves became softer during the poker boom but have tightened up again and then some. The responsibility to yourself is to get better. This is becoming more and more important as the standard of play improves year on year.

Daniel might admit that he is teasing us a little bit. He knows we want the poker boom back and by saying we’ve never had it so good, that’s not strictly true and he knows it. There was a time that the games were softer and soft games meant profitable games. But maybe it’s not so bad today, if we work hard and put in the effort. I think that is the point Daniel was making, we cannot expect to have it easy from now on and it will only get tougher. We must accept this and get to work.