Winning poker guide: Step 1 - Who is working

Well, as I said before in my recent blogs, results from now are completely banned from my blogs, my forum posts, my chats. So if I can't focus on my results, it does beg the question what is left for me to strive for. Well obviously, I'm aware that if I play well results will happen. You see I've been a believer of sorts that you have to play like the biggest genius in poker history to really beat games, and it will only get worse as opponents get more educated. The fact is it's not true. Think about sites like Cardrunners and their effect on poker. The training sites are improving players, no doubt and they have improved me a lot. But who goes there? Well if you listen to poker podcasts, everyone is going there. So lets look at some numbers. At any time there are well over 100K people on pokerstars, maybe half that on Full Tilt, and another 50-100K spread over all the other sites. So maybe 500K people playing online poker overall. Some are new and destined to play 1 month and quit, others are regs grinding 10 hours a day, fair enough.

So then look at the video sites. As at 6 months ago cardrunners had 10K members. That could be 20K now with all the publicity, but I can't see them being any more than that. Other sites may be doing well, but I'd expect a lot of crossover, maybe 5K of those guys are also on Deucescracked and another 5K are only on DeucesCracked. So lets so over 50K of players are members of video sites, which I think is high overall. So out of the 500K, we currently guesstimate 10% have ever seen a decent video on poker. Lets say for argument sake another 50K have participated in forums quite a bit too, making 20% of players more educated than just being self taught.

Now there is the obvious hole in that logic that it's very likely the 1c/2c players aren't on the video sites as much as the $2/$4 guys are. It's also safe to assume more players on the side of the smaller stakes. But with that I'd argue a lot of the 50-100K of "educated" players are just casually watching videos or surfing BBV forums rather than sitting down and logically working out poker problems for themselves and understanding what moves to make when.

The problems lies in that there is the big success stories, and there are the known tools of how to crush poker all out there. So you see mbolt1 go from a $30K per year job, to a $100K/month poker career. You are inspired, how did he do that? Oh he joined Stox, watched the videos, now he's $100K/month. Wrong. He worked, and worked, and worked, and worked. He networked, he worked at his game, he learned ways to avoid losing money, he succeeded. Isn't there a lot of work behind most success stories? Yes, there is. Now most people feel the inspiration, but most do not work hard enough to become an inspirational story. And yes some are becoming the competent grinders on Full Tilts $1/$2 etc, but most are not as good as they think they are. And while they manage to be better than break even, their work ethic, ego or tilt hold them back.

I will continue with a thread about tilt, that may very well include the essence of how to win at poker in my opinion.