Poker Overall.

Hi ZapOut

Your post is so important, I edited it to put in some breaks between paragraphs.
I find the wall-of-text format really hard to follow. I hope you don't mind.

Doyle Brunson in the 50's did not have any books, articles or strategy forums. He and a group of itinerant poker players went from place to place participating in a circuit of games.

He got busted several times -- both in the sense of losing everything and in the sense of being arrested. He got robbed several times. Over the years he put his kids through college and fed his family playing poker.

So yes, it can be done. He mostly did it by reading people, not cards. That skill is lost on the Internet -- although you can make some use of stats, and table history.

The mass-multi-tabling grinders take another approach. It reminds me of when I was selling life insurance. Each morning we sat in an office and called people on the phone. The insurance company knew that out of every 1000 phone calls there would be x sales. So if you want 2x sales, make 2000 calls. It is quite tilting to get told to "fark off" 2000 times a day. But the grinders know that even if they are making .76 BB/100, they will have 760 BB to the good after 100K hands which they can do in a week (I think)

It is also entirely possible that it is just variance.
Check this out:
http://pokerdope.com/poker-variance-calculator/

Look at the best and worst -- scary, isn't it?
Play with the numbers.
Put in 1 for winrate, 100 for Std Dev and run the simulation over 10 million hands.
The "worst" is break-even, the best is up 200K BB

Scroll down and look at the downswing/upswing graph. Yikes!

If your friend is an inutitive player, he may indeed be beating the game, but if he really doesn't know the theory, he may just be a fish on a heater.

Time will tell.

The more you play it seems, the more you acquire the intuition to do the right thing.

Best of luck,
--VS

Thank you Vorpal.
The thing is that time will show, he was already winning player 4 years ago.
Hes done with his job for a year now. Living good, better than ever before. So i believe he is not just on heater, he is on fire himself ! ♦
Also about this variance calculator.
Sure, you can calculate your variance with winrate and it will somehow look like the graphs show, but then again...
Your winrate changes alot, between 10million hands, even in 10k hands.
And that is just random graphic, it doesnt matter, if you are winning player or not, but your graph can be much different.
Poker depends so much on situations and player tendencies/personalities.
Also that, my friend, indeed doesnt know much when i try to tell him about theory what i read and he doesnt even want to hear, but thats the thing. He have his own theory, what he got from experience.
Also, he is playing online, without hud. Never even used it. 2-10 tables.
Also he doesnt even now what is ICM, and such basic stuff you know... But still printing money as casual.
That is so sick !