Is Poker for Everyone?

I was reading 2+2 the other day (the most famous poker forum, for the few that are unfamiliar) and found myself in the PGC thread of a low stakes grinder. 

This person has been playing on and off for many years, and despite what appears like quite a lot of effort (from all the posts and threads over the years), he still hasn’t reached a point where most people would call successful. He still plays low stakes and last year had a total profit of $3053.86, despite having poker as a full time occupation (all this information is public on 2+2).

Motivated by this person’s story, another user at 2+2 made the following post as a reply to the PGC thread:

That made me stop and think for a while. 

Do you actually need to “have it” in poker? Or can anyone achieve success with enough hard work?

My opinion about this has changed many times over the years. 

I remember when I started staking other players. This began back in 2019. 

At that time, I was crushing midstakes zoom games on PokerStars and Bodog. My winrate was above 5 at 200z and almost 4 at 500z, over large samples. 

I had a few private coaching clients at that time, and eventually I started offering them the opportunity to start a staking deal. I would provide bankroll and coaching, and we would split the profits. It seemed to me like a perfect win/win situation – my students would make more money, as I would put them to play higher stakes than they would play on their own, and I would also make more money, because with equity on their winnings I would earn more than doing hourly coaching. 

I was really excited about it, and I also had the utmost conviction that, with enough training, me and my partner (shoutout to Zinhao, co-founder of Metagame Staking) could turn those students into midstakes crushers just like ourselves. My belief was that In a few months we would have an army of students beating 200z and 500z games for 4+bb and everyone would make lots of money. 

The underlying assumption that lead me to conclude this was possible was the fact that I believed that everything that separated a grinder from making 6 figures a year with poker was their technical capacity. If I could just teach them everything that I know (and I considered myself a pretty good teacher), then there would be no reason why they wouldn’t reach the same results as I did. All we needed was enough training. 

Despite our efforts, however, this vision did not materialize. 

Over the following years, we staked and coached over 250 players. We invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in research and coaching. We studied the game from the inside out. We built a complete Gameplan, a blueprint containing precise instructions on how to play postflop in every node of the game tree to exploit population. We invested in psychological support for our players. We put them to play in the best sites, in the best tables. 

Now, this is not the part where I’ll say it all fell apart. Because that would be lying. The business is very profitable and we’ve made a lot of money along the way. And if we made money, it means our students made money, because we only win if they win. 

That being said, that initial expectation that everyone could turn into a crusher in fact didn’t come true. What we saw in reality was the complete opposite – even with the amount of investment we were making; even when doing a criterious selective process aiming to maximize the chances of success by only taking in good prospects; despite all the structure we had put in place – most people still didn’t become crushers. Only the top few % would ever get past the 6 figures barrier.

I use the 6-figure income as a benchmark because I believe it’s a universally accepted metric to say “you’ve made it” in poker (and perhaps 99% of careers). Of course it’s possible to make more in poker, even 8 figures. And it’s also true that many people can live very comfortable lives with 5-figure incomes, specially in less developed countries. Here in Brazil, if you make 50 thousand dollars per year, that puts you in the top 1% of income for the whole country. Quick Google tells me that the Top 1% in the US make $819k a year. Quite the difference.

Putting the exact benchmark aside, what I observed was that my initial expectation was really, really off. I could keep coaching people for years, giving my money for them to play, paying for their therapy sessions, paying analysts to do population analysis and build exploits, you name it – and still only a few percent would ever achieve results comparable to what me and my partner were able to achieve. 

Looking back at that time now, 5 years later and with much more experience both as a player and as an entrepreneur, I can see how my expectations were absolutely non sense (lol). 

To my more mature self, it’s 100% not a surprise that things turned out the way they did. 

Even if it was possible to teach 100% of everything that I knew to someone else (which is actually not possible), the technical aspect of the game is only one of the variables that determines success. 

Throughout these last few years, I was able to witness stories of students of all different kinds. Some people “didn’t make it” because they already had the money they needed (some had very rich parents, others were in their 40s/50s and had built wealth elsewhere) so when poker got hard they didn’t have as much desire (or incentive) to keep pushing. 

Other people didn’t make it because they didn’t have the money they needed. They were under insane amounts of pressure for results because they had to pay rent in 8 days, and they were 40 buy-ins in makeup, with no cashouts in the horizon any time soon. They couldn’t live like that, and had to find a conventional job that would give them a bit more safety in the form of consistent pay checks every month. 

There was a guy once who seemed to have all that it takes. He was really clever. He was also young and seemed hungry for success in poker. He was in his early 20s, had few responsibilities and was in love with poker. The optimal package. But at some point his girlfriend got pregnant. As he was still not making much money with poker, he turned to his old job at a bar to be able to provide for his new family. Poker became tertiary in his life. 

What became clear to me over the years was that, yes, only a few % will find substantial success as a poker player (again, 6-figure benchmark…many people making 40k/year probably consider themselves very successful, and rightfully so). 

But what also became clear to me was that a lot of the people struggling for a long time had specific circumstances that made their poker journey very difficult. 

My Poker Journey was very, very easy. I started it when I was very young, at 22 years old. I lived in my parents house, so didn’t need to use my poker earnings for anything. 6 months into my first year as a full time poker player, I asked my father for his credit card because I needed to buy a new SSD to find space for all the PioSolver sims I was running. 

I was able to focus solely on poker, and nothing else, every day of my life, for 2 years straight. The only thing I would do other than think and breathe poker 24/7 was to hang out with my girlfriend for a few hours a week. 

I was a naturally calm person; even cold you might say. It’s difficult for me to get upset, angry or anxious. I never tilted, never made big impulsive mistakes, never chased losses, never gambled. 

I also had in my favor the fact that poker aligned 100% with my personality. I’m an introvert, and a big nerd. Spending hours playing a game and then many more hours studying that game was heaven for me. I loved every second of it.

And I was also blessed with above average genes for math and logic. Was always at the top of my classes at school with relatively low effort. Always enjoyed studying on my own, to the point my parents never had to ask me to do it – I just did it voluntarily, for pleasure. 

Not so surprising that Poker went well for me in these circumstances. It was almost as if everything that could possibly positively align for me, did align for me.

I’m saying all of this to make a statement that I’ve made many times over the years, and is actually quite controversial and unpopular. 

One time, someone asked me in an Instagram questions box: “what’s the biggest difference between your most successful students and the rest?”. 

My answer was Luck.

Safe to say my partner didn’t like my answer much xD Me, the owner of a Staking company, a business that only makes money if people decide to put a lot of effort into poker, saying publicly that the biggest earners in our team were lucky.

Hopefully you understand what I mean with this, though. By lucky I’m not saying these guys just made money because they ran hot at the tables, caught more nutted hands than everyone else, or won more flips than their fair share. It’s not about that.

It’s about realizing that the people that eventually make it to the top had all sorts of IRL positive variance in their way to the top. 

You can’t control what genes you are born with. You can’t control what country you were born in. You can’t control how wealthy, supportive and understanding your parents are (or were when you lived with them). You can’t control what type of education you’ll get for the first 18 years of your life. You can’t control your personality type. You can’t control your genetic predisposition to anxiety and depression. You can’t control which people you will eventually meet and connect in your life. 

And yet all those things have a significant impact in your probability of success. 

My answer to Is Poker For Everyone? is…Yes. But with a big caveat.

Do I think anyone can achieve substantial success in poker? The answer to this is an unequivocal yes. 

It’s basically the same as saying “The chance of any given person achieving success in poker is higher than 0”. It would be too much in my opinon to say that someone has zero chance of success, as it’s impossible to prove such thing. 

Now, does everyone have equal chance of success? Absolutely not. Some people are just way luckier than others, and there is nothing no one can do about it. Some people are born smarter, in better families, are raised with superior education, are more prone to specific activities than others, have less struggles during their lives, have less mental health issues, are less impulsive, more analytic, can focus for a longer time, have better intuition for math and logic, are less risk averse. The list goes on.

One of the best advices I believe I can give to someone pursuing poker as a profession is don’t compare yourself to others. Your journey is your journey. And that’s all that matters.

It’s very easy to feel like you are “behind pace”, or that it seems like others have it much easier. Well, unfortunately its very likely that someone in fact has it much easier than you. The universe is random and some people were dealt AA in the preflop game of life. And that’s exactly why you shouldn’t compare yourself to them.

Just like you would in a hand of poker, try to maximize the expected value of every decision that you make in your life. If you want to pursue poker and make it as a profession, then fucking do it with all your heart. Funnel your energy and your time into the things you can control, nothing else. It’s true that perhaps you won’t find the success you expected, but that’s life. What would be the point of living if everything that we tried had 100% chance of success? 

I’d argue it would not be a life worth living. 

Give it your all. Focus on what you can control. Learn from your mistakes. Get better every day. 

That, for sure, is for everyone.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.
Until then – don’t play the game. Play the Metagame. 

Saulo