The potential problems arise when you hit this bad run straight away or very early on in your poker career. It is at this stage where you are still emotionally and psychologically at your most fragile because you have yet to achieve the results that will install confidence into you to continue through the bad times without it affecting your game or panic you into packing it in.

I cannot even begin to put a figure on just how many poker players must have been affected like this down the years. I sometimes wonder just how many potentially successful players and even budding professionals and World class stars have fell by the wayside all because they got off to a horrendous start very early in their poker life and packed it in because they thought that they were not good enough.

But this is a very serious obstacle to overcome because who is there to tell you that this initial bad run is just the variance of the game doing its thing and not because you lack the skills. It is because there is so much luck in poker that leads many people who are not connected to the game to conclude that the game is based entirely on luck and that trying to make a living out of it long term is an exercise in futility.

A successful professional player at a game like limit hold’em poker for instance will quite often achieve a rate of return somewhere in the region of about 2% on total turnover. This 2% edge is all that stands between a highly successful middle limit player from merely breaking even and recycling money and failing to make the game pay. Let us take a closer look at that figure of 2% and put it into some kind of context for a minute.

Let us say that we knew that calling heads in a coin flip would earn us money because there was some kind of bias on the coin that meant that heads arrived at a rate of 51% to 49% tails. This means that if we were to bet £1 on the outcome of 100 coin flips that we would win 51 and lose 49 out of every 100 flips on average thus winning £2 out of every £100 wagered (2%).

This result is created by having just ONE flip go our way and not to the other player. Take that one flip away and we would be breaking even….that is how close it really is in reality.

A sobering thought for many poker players is that this is actually what a VERY GOOD player has to endure so what price lesser players. To quote another analogy that also indicates just how fragile a winning players edge actually is can be seen in the game of roulette with a single zero wheel.

If a player places a bet on even chances then they are laboring under a 1.35% house edge. That’s right, if you stick to playing even chance bets on roulette then the houses only edge against you is that one solitary number (zero) in the wheel.

Take zero out of the wheel and it is a 50-50 proposition but placing zero in that wheel gives the house an edge of 1.35%. The edge would be 2.7% if the player bet on the numbers but this is reduced on even chance bets as the player gets half the wager back in the event of zero arriving.

This little analogy should help to underline just how slim a good poker player’s edge actually is. It is for this reason that you really should not play whenever conditions are not optimal. Look out for part four coming soon.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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