--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "AK-SAR-BEN" <tomskilv@...> wrote:
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> If you learn to play well, live poker is a much better deal than video poker. In vegas, a good 1-3NL player can make about $20 an hour and a 2-5NL player can make $30 an hour. And the bankroll required is about 1/10 that of video poker and the variance is about 1/10th as well.
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Well, a lot of that depends on what you value and where your strengths lie. When I first moved to Vegas in 2005, I had moved here with the intention of playing live poker. My bankroll was only what I could get as a cash advance on my credit cards, so I was playing just 5/10 to 10/20 limit. I found promos at the Luxor that allowed me to make an average of $18/hour playing 2/4 limit even with a $4 rake, which obviously had less risk than the straight up cash games I was playing and for just slightly less expected hourly.
But quickly after turning that into a career, it felt like quite a grind. I started looking into other opportunities that would give me an advantage. Eventually I decided on video poker.
For me at least, vp was a better fit. I liked being able to absolutely quantify my advantage. On a poker table I could only work from a guideline of experimental average. I might average $x/hour, but I knew that depending on the table composition my expected advantage would vary (and while I'm not sure if it has ever happened, I might even have negative ev if the competition was strong enough). But with vp, I could know what my expected advantage was (approximations on promos like drawings are less precise, but you know what I'm getting at).
Add to that the fact that I could play up to 2500 hands/hour given that right machines/games versus 35 or 40/hour on a live table (where I'm folding a large majority of them pre-flop), and I found that vp FELT like less of a grind than the slower paced live game.
While the vp landscape is certainly changing, I'm sure that I would not have made seven figures by this time had i not made the switch to vp 4 years ago.
Personally, I was always more of a mathematical player, so I always enjoyed Sklansky's books. While I believe purely mathematical players can make a long term profit playing poker, I realized that I was probably not maximizing my profit potential because my psychological game was less developed. This is the same reason why I think a Sklansky-style player can expect to have positive EV in the WSOP main-event, but they are not likely to take first.
Realizing my niche was numbers, I chose to remove the human aspect and decided upon vp. While it may certainly not be for everyone, it certainly was right for me.
