Poker and the Beginning Trader
- Thread starter FanOfFridays
- Start date
very nice post, NIK.
i think the same old 'poker player ivy league athlete rocket science' profile that hot money worships is a major league farce. no, it's more stupendously idiotic than that. can i be any more adamant?
any or all of those characterstics can be great. they can belong to a great trader or a useless 'prima donna.' most likely the latter.
a great trader can be made of anything. mostly, it's an inner pursuit.
poker seems like a fun way to explore risk, reward and uncertainty. it can be great game about life. practice ought to make one's mind very sharp. but even great poker players can have egos that destine them to be a nuclear meltdown waiting to happen.
egos are bad for markets. but you can make money fading them.
i think the same old 'poker player ivy league athlete rocket science' profile that hot money worships is a major league farce. no, it's more stupendously idiotic than that. can i be any more adamant?
any or all of those characterstics can be great. they can belong to a great trader or a useless 'prima donna.' most likely the latter.
a great trader can be made of anything. mostly, it's an inner pursuit.
poker seems like a fun way to explore risk, reward and uncertainty. it can be great game about life. practice ought to make one's mind very sharp. but even great poker players can have egos that destine them to be a nuclear meltdown waiting to happen.
egos are bad for markets. but you can make money fading them.
agreed that through poker we can explore trading-related concepts such as the ones you mentioned. I believe that the pro poker players are the ones that can operate above the level of ego for a longer period of time than the majority. Of course there are lots of stories of great players melting down and we even see a few on the wsop telecasts. But only a few.
I played in my first live tournament last week and in a word, wow. It is so much different playing live poker and so much easier, for me at least. With the opponent sitting right in front of you you can get a much much better read on situations. Also I find that although there is tons of bad play, there is less of a chance that you are going to get sucked out on really badly because people know that if they make a totally ridiculous call, they will have to flip them over with the entire table watching. Aggressive play, especially when you sense weakness, can really pay off because people will lay them down.
Placed 3rd, if you can believe it, and made $1000, $60 buy-in (2000 chips), rebuys for the first hour ($40 for 4000 chips if you have 0, or $20 for 2000 if you have less than 2000) and a $40 add on after one hour (4000 chips). Some guys must have rebought 5 times. I took the add on just because I felt like I had to have the maximum number of chips in front of me.
A couple of questions I do have -
1) Is a 20% rake very high for a tourney like this (about 80 players showed up, so there were 8 tables to start)?
2) Do guys always take the add-on no matter what your stack looks like at the first break?
1) Was it 60+12, or of the 60, only 48 went to prize fund? Did they rake the rebuys too? Sounds a bit high but maybe their expenses were high too.
2) Whenever the per chip cost of the add on is so low compared to the what it is at the buy in, definitely. Maybe not if you already have such a gigantic stack that 4000 chips is nothing, but that's unlikely to ever happen. See Tournament Poker for Advanced Players by Sklansky for discussion of this kind of stuff.
Seems a little steep to me but its really a matter of how you think you measure up against the competition. If I got in a tournament with 80 guys I would figure that I had about a 50% chance to make it to the money.
It was $60 and apparently $48 went to the prize fund - and yes, they seemed to rake the re-buys too. I should have taken a closer look at the numbers because they had broken the initial buy-ins and re-buys and add-ons down on one of those erasable marker boards. What I saw was a 'total money' figure. They then showed this figure 'minus 20%'. I think that the total money figure was the buy-ins, re-buys and the add-ons. To tell the truth, I was trying to do the math in terms of their costs and since they are only doing this one tourney on that day in this industrial space, their expenses were probably pretty high. Had to have 8 dealers to start, plus the space, plus comp drinks and food, maybe even equipment rental, plus their profit.
Yeah, I have HEFAP but I need to get the tourney book. 10 guys at our table took the add-on. As you can tell, this means that everyone at our table kept re-buying all the way through the first hour. No one who busted out simply got up and left
easyrider... yes, I am trying not to get overly excited about the idea that I could actually beat these games on a regular basis. As in on-line, the play I saw was pretty bad. Nice payouts though, if you can get in the top 4. I'll have to play a few more before I can get an indication of how well I can expect to do on an ongoing basis.
Thanks, guys.
u got a good attitude it sounds like and this should serve you well. A buddy was playing in a tournie and he needed to get to third to be ITM so I urged him on, and he says "I don't want to finish third I want to win it". Something wrong with that. Goals to win are great but if you make a return each time that is equally good and we all know how "success breeds success", for innumerable reasons. In fact aiming too high in the beginning could result in disappointments that 'could' affect one's LT progress
I finished 5th in an online against 135 players this weekend. Only my second tournament, but I'd prefer live games also.
Amazing how similar it is to trading.
Ice
I was never very successful with trading. After my laughable early attempts at "investing", once I discovered the idea of short term trading for a living, I was very attracted to it. But I was always hindered by the lack of a decent bankroll and needing to have a full time job during normal market hours.
I already described in this thread how I got started in poker, and my thoughts about how the learning process is so much more costly for trading than for poker.
Well, the day job finally started to suck so bad that I quit last February, and have been supporting myself by playing poker online since then. I play 4 tables at once, 5/10 limit Hold'em, for about 30 hours a week. My goal is to keep moving up in limits every couple of months, and to put away as much money as I can.
I don't know how sustainable this will be, so I keep the idea in the back of my mind of using the money I make to start a business or to get back into trading. If I do, I know the discipline and bankroll management ideas I learned from poker will come in handy.
do you ever play on Full Tilt?
if not where do you play as I am looking for some new venues to try...
.... my problem with online is my belief that the RNG is rigged to create action into the R by inexplicable draws and suck outs far beyond what one might see in live games even over many days of play, and thus it makes handicapping the strength of your hand much more difficult. They do this to increase their rake IMHO.
Do you ever find this to be true? If so, how can one counteract this and do you find BBs to be a much more serious problem in playing so many hours, i.e. how do you handle the drawdowns (beats)?
gg
Ice