Bad news first:
Unless you’re one of the very select few who have the smarts, the necessary love of the game, enough gamble in you and the almost super-human discipline required to make it to the very highest echelons of poker players, chances are pretty low you’re going to get rich off of this game. "It’s a hard way to make an easy living," indeed. This text isn’t aimed at teaching you strategies to become a better player. Its goal is to give you a realistic idea not of what it takes to be a successful player, but what it is to be one.
This may come off as cheating, but the road to being a successful poker player starts with you defining what you mean with "success." If the idea seems foreign to you, or if all that comes to mind is some vague notion of making a million bucks, then you may certainly still make money but chances are you still won’t feel successful. I should know; I used to fit the bill.
For most smart people who are willing to put in some work, there’s no doubt that there’s money to be made at poker, online or live. But where many seem to fall short (or rather, outrageously long) is in their estimates of how much money they’ll be able to make. And the final showstopper is when they run head-first into the near certainty that is the Peter Principle. For those of you who haven’t heard of it before, I give you the definition from Wikipedia:
"[The Peter Principle] holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their ‘level of incompetence’), and there they remain."
This is true for most organizations, and doubly true for poker. Clearly, the hierarchy is there for us; we have different limits and stakes. We can move up from $10 buy-in tables to $25 buy-in tables, from $3/$6 limit hold ‘em to $5/$10, and so on. What makes it doubly true for poker isn’t that we move up, though, it’s that we ourselves get to decide when we’re ready to advance. And how many people do you know that objectively and honestly can judge their own talents?
What gets poker players into even bigger trouble is that when we’ve advanced to our level of incompetence, we’re not just sitting there, like the archetypical government official that I imagine Dr. Peter had in mind. Now we’re losing money. And since most of us aren’t very good at assessing our own skill, it’s often the case that we stubbornly keep bleeding chips, blaming everything but ourselves – "bad luck," "rigged site," etc. – for our inability to win. For many, moving down in stakes is a last resort and often comes with our own pride as a bitter pill to swallow. Some refuse to ever move down (some even move up!), and simply go broke.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The fundamental reason this happens to so many people is because they have this notion of being winning players, as if that’s a digital measurement. They climb the ranks, but they don’t particularly know what they’re aiming for – just as long as they go up. In fact, for these people, winning money might not even be how they (consciously or otherwise) define success, but instead they focus on reaching new limits. Have you ever thought that way? Thinking to yourself that you’re shooting for limit X by, say, the end of next month? Isn’t that odd? Why have "moving up" as a goal?
Now, there is certainly evidence suggesting that people enjoy games that have levels. Look at any of the online multiplayer games, like World of Warcraft or EverQuest. You don’t even have to be that modern about it, look at Super Mario Bros! Their designers know exactly what draws people in; it’s that next level. Always reach for that next level. And amateur poker players, I contend, often view things in the same light. That next level. If I play this-or-that many hands at $50NL, I can move up. If I win another $200, I can advance. It becomes the end, not the means. And the big problem with having that sort of achievement as a goal is that the psychology of it may give you an anticlimactic feeling once you’ve reached it. So now you’re playing at a level with twice the buy-in you played for last month. What now – you’re done with poker? Or perhaps you have not thought about what you’ll do once you get there. Or, which my experience says is more likely, you figure that once you get there you’ll start to work towards the next level above that.
When I was fighting to move up the levels, I made money, no doubt, but I didn’t feel successful. I felt like I still had more work to do. Don’t get me wrong, challenging yourself is good. But when the only goal you have in mind is that next level, you’ve essentially undertaken the poker equivalent of Sisyphus’s punishment: just when you get there, you start over.
So in the end, it comes down to this: My suggestion is that you define success in a way that can eventually make you feel satisfied with what you have and where you are. Once I realized that I won’t be able to climb the ladder indefinitely, I also realized that I’m not going to be a hot shot pro at any point in my life. I’m not good enough. I never will be good enough. But the trick is that now I’m perfectly satisfied with beating the small stakes online games for some change here and there. I’m enjoying the mental challenge of poker while padding my paycheck a little.
In my book, that makes me a successful poker player.
And if you can do the same, find a reasonable and achievable goal, then hopefully you, too, can feel successful. The downside is that you will probably have to get used to the idea that in the end, your career winnings won’t buy you a tropical island. And maybe accepting an extra income of "only" $100 (or $1,000 or whatever amount you end up with) a month seems like you’re settling for less than you had hoped. But on the flipside, you can avoid the dangerous tendency of constantly striving to move up, and the Peter Principle will never apply to you. And you can feel happy about what you do achieve.
In my book, that would make you a successful poker player.
BLURB: Fredrik Paulsson occasionally manages to practice what he teaches, and you can read more about and from him in his blog
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This post was submitted by Fredrik Paulsson. You can find more more blog posts by Fredrik at fredrikpaulsson.blogspot.com.
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Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.
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