Done with being a poker monkey

i'm sure you can refute most of your own points. but, indeed, the game is not fun to play with the sole purpose of making money lol.

Hi Timmaywin,
I read your post as "I'm not enjoying this any more"

I hope that you have a great enjoyable 2020, and if you feel like playing a hand or two now and again, you may find you enjoy it again.

Tomaloc is very wise when he says that

the game is not fun to play with the sole purpose of making money

Best wishes for a peaceful, prosperous 2020,
VS

Poker should be a fun game and indeed you need to like it. Otherwise quiting is indeed better.
Good luck this year with everything you are going to do.:gl:

Cheers,
SDK1987

I did not make thread to quit because I did not know if I will do, but I am not playing it few years already. I found trading, I am now so into it, because I feel there is much bigger money to be made. I am not wiining there, but I still have a hope.

From my experience poker looks beatable, but the effort to reward ratio started to suck once I started to earn so much in programming. Also eyes used to get tired much more than from programming - those small hud number were hurting them. If I make them big, there is no place on screen. In programming I can make fonts big enough size and still have enough room on screen.

In programming I am not my own boss, which is not so fun as with poker you can be. But if you really want, there are people who become their own bosses in programming also.

I sometimes would still like to gamble in some tournament, but it really sucks knowing that regs will eat me so thats how fish think. I would like to gamble against equal or worse pool than me

If I quit trading which I dont think doing soon, I am not sure if I would get back to poker - because of same - too low pay for effort required.
Maybe big tournaments are more fishy and have big pay? but really tough to get time for them to play like whole day.

If not caring about money, the pleasure of winning is super awesome, but can I really dedicate so much time for the pleasure and end up being poor instead of making ton of money.

I'm also a trader and enjoying it. Do like poker too, though ...

To me poker is fun and profits are a bonus. I do make money with poker, but wouldn't rely on it for an income.
Enjoy the game, not the dream of money.

Also fun to beat playmoney games

Thanks for the replies people.
Some of you said the same thing which I agree to regarding playing poker:

- Playing poker should be fun.
- Don't focus mainly on making a profit, you might be disappointed in the short term and even in the long term.

But I do think that playing poker is about making money.
I personally don't see the point in playing for play money (in theory you can just go all-in every hand and don't care).
Play money alone is not rewarding enough for me, money adds a value risk to the game, play money has no value to me personally.

For me, poker has gotten more dull and boring the longer I played it (over the past 12 years), the excitement of the game was a big part of the fun factor for me.
And in the end I'm just getting really tired of the competition factor in poker. How often do you hear about people calling other players fish or donkeys because they themselves have the "better" strategy.
People start to play like robots more and more, it is more like a fight for chips and as a result, the social factor of the game is diminishing as time progresses. (the social factor is also a fun factor for me)

And with the general poker player becoming better at the game, (not necessarily because they are smarter, but because they can simply copy a strategy they have seen in one of the million streams/ videos/ strategy sites out there) LUCK BECOMES A BIGGER FACTOR.
The biggest pots you win come from hands where you get lucky (to even hit anything, but suckout kinda hand preferred) with and your opponent calls you all-in with.

Concerning trading:

Originally posted by SPeedFANat1c
I did not make thread to quit because I did not know if I will do, but I am not playing it few years already. I found trading, I am now so into it, because I feel there is much bigger money to be made.

I don't think making money by trading is that easy either, like trading at the Forex exchange, that requires you attention all the time, and when trading stocks you have to keep an eye on the news and publications to make good investments.
Also, I think that people underestimate what big players or companies can do to cause spikes in a currency pair or stock value, which can't be covered by any strategy, making it a huge gamble.

To be honest, I don't understand how poker is considered gambling and trading Forex or Stocks is not

(they are both gambling activities and should be considered as such, although both of them concern different aspects where it doesn't make it 100% gambling due to the mathematical strategies that can be used to make a profit, more like calculated risks sorta speak)

The monkey story stands for both trading and poker, the client you use makes money regardless of you making money, by taking a percentage/fee from your money risk. In fact the is a book about this, which covers a group of people who were trading on a contract with money that wasn't theirs and were successful when they applied certain strategies. The story changed when they started trading with their OWN money, like the scared money story that goes for poker as well, making worse decisions when the risk is above your bankroll management.

I think that successful poker players or traders could start their own business instead and in the end gain passive income by letting other people doing the work for them.

Originally posted by Timmaywin
To be honest, I don't understand how poker is considered gambling and trading Forex or Stocks is not

(they are both gambling activities and should be considered as such, although both of them concern different aspects where it doesn't make it 100% gambling due to the mathematical strategies that can be used to make a profit, more like calculated risks sorta speak)

This is one of my favourite quotes:

Ambrose Bierce
The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.

May the odds be ever in your favour
VS

Nja, my latest Forex system runs at a fine ROI over 3886 testing trades on the 1 hour charts during 2015-2016 and 2019 (2017-2018 not tested yet)

Looks pretty promising to me ♦

And in the end I'm just getting really tired of the competition factor in poker.

I'm insanely competitive, sports, esports etc. I just need to know I'm better than someone.
Sometimes wonder if I'd be a total asshole or how many resources I'd have to spend on suppressing that side of me IRL heh

I guess not everyone's like that

the mental swings are not worth it, the player field is getting tougher and even is if you master the game or have a huge edge, this is no guarantee for winning at poker.

There never was, it's a big part of the game - poker's very unique in this that it's both high variance, skillgame AND a closed system (on -table variance is what I mean ofc sites can go under etc. but you can pre-empt that with BRM). Unlike trading, where you get Black Swanned all over the place.

I'm going to actually talk about this on https://forums.pokerstrategy.com/forum/thread.php?threadid=500767
- The Poker Mental game industry is built around injecting logic, changing your subconscious understanding of variance, taking breaks even hypnotherapy and various other techniques etc.

It's possible going TOWARDS the states you feel during the swings instead and learning just one skill - emotional flexibility and cognitive defusion. You can actually actively feel joy from the feelings tilt brings, go towards them and then do the right thing anyways with enough practice.

People start to play like robots more and more, it is more like a fight for chips and as a result, the social factor of the game is diminishing as time progresses. (the social factor is also a fun factor for me)

The way you socialise has changed. You'd have big brag hands and outplays before, bad beat stories etc.
Now it's a bunch of guys running a sim and spending hours and hours arguing about the interpretation and practical implementation vs real life people and pulling out concepts.

And then discussing mental game and life skills like sleep investments even supplements lol. Time sure have changed

I mean I come from academia and although the old school poker talk had it's charm, this is different, and imo even more fun than before, as there's always new stuff to understand. Although certainly painful initially before you can "think solver" and understand the software before you get to have fun. I felt the same in my international Economics class though heh. I guess this isn't fun for you.

EDIT: I'm talking about deep poker variants. It won't be nearly as much fun in MTTs and SNGs I guess.
don't quote me on this though, ICM donkey here.

By playing poker you add NOTHING to society, NOTHING to improve the world we live in, it's just chasing money, which in the end is very dull, selfish and hollow.

It's hard to enjoy the game if your primary goal is to chase money. Well at least short term money.

I think almost all long term pros realized that +EV life hours are equally as important as grind+study time. Purely because spending 1k hours/year on meditation, socialising, working out and self-development like reading, therapy etc. might seem like a waste in the short run,
But the alternative is
- burnouts where you both lose shitloads of money before you realize and then have to take long breaks
- having to quit altogether (happened to a LOT of people)

Thank you for the post by the way, gave me some nice input for Tuesday
- we'll focus on values and emotional flexibility quite a bit. If you swing by in chat as your last hurrah it'd be nice

Originally posted by SPeedFANat1c
I found trading, I am now so into it, because I feel there is much bigger money to be made. I am not wiining there, but I still have a hope.

I suspect that lower Sharpe ratios are attainable at trading than at poker, and trading/investing only becomes more profitable in absolute EV terms when the BR grows too large for low-mid stakes poker. The reason for this suspicion is that botting is totally legal in financial markets, and large corporations have far more resources for quant trading than individuals do, and therefore take the lion share of the profits that are left for grabs after the fees/rake.

It's as if your opponents were allowed to enter the same Zoom pool thousands of times (with their huge capitals!) while making Monker sims of ongoing hands on huge servers, and you were like a 4-entry semi-reg only armed with a tracker and a few superficial charts. In poker, operators ensure that stables have much less advantage over individuals, or at least, try to detect and punish for unfair advantage.

The final death throws of a poker player...

Originally posted by yadijavadi
The final death throws of a poker player...

Why did you edit your post?

You said something interesting about tilt, that poker is not the cause, and I agreed to that.

Remember, life is all about mindset. (Everything we experience goes through our brain filter)
Be sure to use this in your advantage by having a clear mind and confidence, the rest will sort itself out

I thought that post might bring someone to suicide lol...

Having a clear mind, remaining calm etc, is important in both poker and life. However, if you want to learn how to play poker what you need to learn is how to make decisions in Poker.

Most players spend all their time learning different strategies for different situations hoping that in similar situations they will know what to do. This does work but it’s not an effective way to learn. It doesn’t actually teach you how to make poker decisions...

You want to read my book mate. I mapped out a poker decision in full: first you think about x, then you compare x to y. I also mapped out the evolution of the mind from a rock through to a God. I found the cause of all irrational behaviour. Found the cause of all mental stress. I’d be famous if my logic didn’t cause demonically intense cognitive dissonance. Instead I’m hated by most.

You should be able to peel a free copy of that book from one of my threads, but the mods do keep deleting my threads so god knows.

There are as much reasons for people being bad at poker as there are reasons for people being good at poker. (and yes, good and bad are subjective terms)

There are losing poker players who do everything right in a GTO way and there are recreational gamblers who win big without really thinking (and everything in between these two).

Concerning the effort of becoming a better poker player: There are poker players who either aren't smart enough, creative enough or simply don't gain enough experience to learn from to be able to reach a winning strategy.

There are loads of reasons why a person can’t play football but you can sum them up with one sentence:

He can’t even kick the ball.

If you don’t know how to think through a poker decision it’s the same as a footballer not knowing how to kick a football.