Just how good do you need to be in order to play poker for a living in any online poker game? Well it all depends on what kind of living you are looking for. Let us use football as an example. You don’t need to be a Premier League footballer or to be able to play to Premier League standard to make a living playing football. There are thousands of footballers earning a living without every playing at the highest level and these are mainly players that the general public have never heard of.

Even non-league footballers can play the game for a living. This may not give them the lifestyle of a top player in the Premier League but a living is a living. So what I am trying to say here is that you certainly do not need to play poker at the highest level in order to make a living. This then means that you do not have to be a world class poker player to earn money at the game.

You may have seen my articles on my bankroll challenge where I proved that a player could make $1000/week starting from as little as $500 multi-tabling NL50 games. At the time of writing that equates to £600/week and seeing as there is no tax paid on poker winnings in the UK then it is tax free.

That is a yearly income of £30,000 which would equate to around £45,000 if you were making that kind of money in a regular job. That kind of income is about double what the national average weekly wage is in the UK and constitutes a good living when comparing it to the average population.

But yet it wouldn’t bring the life of the jet set and it wouldn’t make you rich but then again, the vast majority of poker players have more mundane goals than that. There is nothing wrong in aiming high but the vast majority of people never reach those highs. So in my opinion, your goals should be grounded in reality and if they are then your chances of playing poker for a living would be greatly enhanced.

If you restrict yourself to only playing poker against novice or intermediate players then you will find that there will be far more poker games that you can extract value from. For example at a level like NL50, many players will either be weak or be playing for rakeback and multi-tabling. This will then make them weak but in other areas. Any player who is playing numerous tables but also playing too tightly is going to be weak simply because they are rocky enough to be folding too much.

So the bottom line is that you don’t have to be a great poker player in order to do well from playing poker. As long as you don’t expect to make millions from the game and set yourself more mundane goals then your chances of success will be very high. Working on your game and becoming a very good player is not worth much if you only sit in games with very good players like yourself. What types of players do I like…..give me the fish in the lower stakes poker games any day of the week!

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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