« Welcome | Main | Poker and Friends »
 | |
| Latest poker news |
January 20, 2004
Poker FAQ
Playing poker for a living is different from any other occupation in that when you tell someone what you do you are more or less forced into a half hour conversation explaining it. It is almost always the same few questions over and over again so here are the answers to them. Call it the Pro Poker FAQ if you like.
1. Is that legal? Yes. It is legal to be a professional gambler. In almost all states it is legal to place a wager though you generally cannot be in the business of accepting wagers with the mathematical expectation of showing a profit (such as a bookie or a casino) and no state can tell you what to do outside of that state. So even in a hypothetical state where all gambling is illegal you may still be a professional poker player (or sports bettor, or any sort of gambler) and you are breaking no law.
2. Is it legal to play poker on the internet? That is a very tricky question because no federal laws really apply to wagering on the internet. While it is a violation of the Wire Act to run an online casino (though some say it may not even be that) no person has ever, to my knowledge, been indicted for gambling on the internet.
3. Do you count cards? No. Counting cards is a way to win at blackjack, not at poker. And 99 out of 100 people who say they count cards at blackjack have no idea what it really means or how to do it. They think that paying attention to how many aces have been dealt qualifies. In poker the deck is shuffled after every hand so knowing what cards were dealt out the hand before is useless, unlike blackjack.
4. Do you always know what your opponent has? No. Such a thing would be impossible. I probably know about what strength my opponents hand is much more frequently than 99.99% of poker players, but even still it is not nearly all the time.
5. Do you always win? No. I probably win about 2/3 of days when playing regular games, and substantially less than that at tournaments.]
6. Are your games like the ones on TV? No. The people you see are tournament professionals, as ordinary ring games are not exciting enough to make it on the television. Most professional poker players make their living playing ordinary ring games where you may buy in as many times as you like for as much as you want. In tournaments there is a limit to the amount of chips you can buy (usually just one buy-in but sometimes more) and all players play until one of them has all the chips. Tournaments are much different than ring games, though I would say that the best players in the world are probably not the ones on television, but the ones who play ultra high stakes ring games. A few players (Doyle Brunson, Jennifer Harman, Phil Ivey, and a few more of last years WPT contestants) excel at both forms but most players seem to excel at one or the other. One is not necessarily better than the other but I suspect the top ring game players probably make more in the average year than the top tournament players. That is only on average though, as the largest poker tournament payout is now over $2.5 million.
Posted by themaroon at January 20, 2004 9:21 AM