When you’re starting to play poker, there are so many new things and pieces of information coming at you every day that you might feel overwhelmed and often confused about what’s correct and why some information contradicts itself.
That’s why it’s important to first find one reliable source of knowledge and stick to it until you’re advanced enough to know what’s outdated and which heuristics carry more weight than others.
As with anything, there is no success overnight, so first we have to invest our money and time to master the craft before we start making money from it. Poker is a marathon, not a sprint, which means you’ll need endurance, persistence, and most likely hard work on your own character, because you will be faced with adversity and short-term unfair outcomes.
So let’s break down the phases of a poker player’s career and see what’s needed in each phase to progress and reach the next one..
The First Phase: Investment Phase
If your goal as a poker player is to make a living from poker, you need to start somewhere—and, like building a house, you’ll need strong fundamentals. That’s why it’s crucial to do proper research and find a legitimate source. The mistake players usually make is watching free content on YouTube or trying to copy what their favorite poker streamer is doing.
We have to understand that YouTube and Twitch are primarily for entertainment and shouldn’t be used for education—unless it’s a channel run by a top coach who uses it to promote their coaching. If we’re going to build a house for our family, we wouldn’t look for free materials on the street. We would buy high-quality materials and hire professionals to do the work, because we don’t want the house crashing down on our heads while we’re sleeping.
The other thing is that we don’t want to learn advanced strategies before we understand the simple ones, because often some reasons to do something will overrule other reasons. For example, there’s no need to randomize our 3-bets with marginal hands if our opponent is folding 80% of the time—we can just take the exploit and 3-bet with every hand.
Once we have a subscription to a top coaching site, we should study a lot and then play after studying, because we want to build ‘muscle memory’—or in this case, ‘brain memory’—for fundamental actions like c-betting, 3-betting, checking out of position, defending our big blind, opening from the button, learning ranges for each position, and focusing on mastering the most common spots, such as BB vs. BTN and SB vs. BB.
In this phase, we don’t care about profits—we’re just using it as a training ground, and we should start at the lowest stakes (1/2c online). We’ll need a monthly subscription to a coaching site, and most likely we’ll lose some money at the tables while we’re learning and gaining experience. Once we have enough experience and don’t have to think hard about basic things like position ranges and how the game plays, we’ll move from the Investment Phase into the Breakeven Phase.
This doesn’t mean we stop investing in education, but our net winnings will be around zero after subscription costs and table losses, meaning we’re winning enough to cover our education.
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The Second Phase: Breakeven Phase
Once we reach this phase, it means we can hold our ground at the lowest 1/2c online limits and maybe even make enough money to cover our education expenses. Our next step is to keep improving, and once we’ve played enough hands (100k) at the lowest limit, we can move up to 2/5c online and repeat the process (study, play, repeat…).
In this phase, our opponents will be a bit better than at the lowest stakes, but the game will still be very beatable. It’s okay to face some difficulty because you’re still growing as a player, and your main focus is development, not making profits. The main difference between this phase and the previous one is that we can always drop down in stakes, stop the money leak, and slowly win at 1/2c—then move back up to 2/5c to battle it out again.
The better the competition we face, the better we become as players. That’s why we want to play as many hands as we can at the highest stake that is affordable and that we have enough skill to compete in without taking big—or any—losses.
It’s also important to face adversity and go through a downswing in the early phases of your career, because it will show you what poker actually is. It’s not always going to be sunshine and rainbows, but rather a hard and unfair battle that—if done right and for long enough—will be worth it in the end.
If you can get through all these adversities and become a profitable poker player at a decent limit, there’s nothing better than playing a game that pays well and gives you so much freedom. You can play it almost anywhere in the world, at any time of day, without anybody telling you when and what needs to be done.
The path is long and covered with thorns, but walking it is worth it in the end.
The Third Phase: Winning Phase
Once we start winning at 2/5c over a decent sample (100k+ hands), it’s time to move up to the higher stakes, which are 5/10c. This is where players can start to make a living in some lower cost-of-living countries. If you play enough hands with a decent win rate and a good rakeback deal, you can make around $1,000 per month at this stake. The key is to continue studying hard and start increasing your playing volume.
Once we have extra money (more money coming in than what is spent on poker education), we need to keep doing what we’re doing and start investing that extra money into tools (HUDs, trackers, a GTO Wizard subscription, etc.). We should also start looking for a private coach who can speed up our learning process and guide us down the right path.
Private coaching doesn’t have to be frequent—maybe just once a month in the beginning—depending on how much money we’re making at the tables. The faster we can reach higher limits without skipping steps, while still gaining experience and not rushing the process, the sooner we’ll have more money to invest in ourselves and spend outside of poker.
So the winning phase is basically ‘Investment Phase 2.0,’ but we no longer have to use our own money from outside poker to keep progressing. Often, we’ll also have some extra pocket money to spend outside of poker.
Most of the things we did in the previous phases still apply in the winning phase, but now we’re self-sustainable. We just need to use the resources available to keep improving and move up in stakes.
The Conclusion
In the beginning, we need to focus a lot of our time on studying while also trying to implement what we’ve learned when we sit down at the table to play. We’ll have to maintain studying throughout our whole career, but the ratio of studying to playing will slowly start to shift toward playing. Studying becomes less efficient once we know more, and playing becomes more valuable as we start making more money at higher limits—so there’s an opportunity cost when we’re not playing and earning.
Becoming a great and profitable poker player is a dream that can give us freedom and can be very lucrative, but like becoming successful at anything worthwhile, it takes time. That’s why you need to have a long-term view and trust the process.
If you’re looking for reasons to play poker, here’s what some of the smartest investors, like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, have said about poker.
