| Make Sure You Have a Fallback Option |
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| From the Editor - From the Editor | |||
| Written by John Wenzel | |||
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It’s Good for Your Game, and Your Life There has never been a better time to be a poker player. Whether you play live or online, you can easily find honest games at all stakes levels, and you don’t have to worry about getting hijacked on your way out of town. And ever since the poker boom began about five years ago, there has been a lot of easy money out there. Today there are some very average players making nice incomes, and even turning pro. In fact, on many websites – and in brick-and-mortar rooms, too – you can often be a winning player with little more in your arsenal besides patience. But the easy money won’t be there forever. Fish gradually get better, go broke or quit the game. No matter what venue you play in, it is a poker truism that games get tougher over time, and when you factor in the House rake, I can assure you that there will come a time when average players will no longer be winning players. The problem is that today, with so much dead money out there, average players think they are great players. This makes them obnoxious and annoying, which is bad for us. It also makes them think they know it all, so they stop learning and growing as players, which is bad for them. The point is that you are dreaming if you think there is an endless supply of free money out there over and above what the websites and real-world casinos are taking. Fortunately, the boom isn’t close to being over. There are huge untapped markets in the Far East and Latin America – even Africa. There will be a lot of fish fried before the well runs dry, but anyone who has played poker for half a decade or more can tell you that the games are getting tougher to beat. The dangerous part of this is that today’s average players (and those who simply having been running well for a year or two) think that they can drop out of school or quit their jobs and make poker a lifelong career, and for most, this will not be the case. When I look to the future, I don’t see massive numbers of successful full-time pros. Instead, I see what I saw in the ’90s: Broke, middle-aged railbirds with no source of income haunting the poker rooms, begging for buy-ins. The answer is to not overrate your skills, keep learning and improving, stay humble and most of all, have a fallback plan. Don’t think poker is going to be your sole source of income your whole life. Have something else going for you. Your game will be stronger for it. John “Johnny Quads” Wenzel Editor-in-Chief
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| Last Updated on Sunday, 17 May 2009 17:43 |
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