Many of you will realize when you read my articles that they are different to many other poker articles out there. They are more business like in nature than many other articles which discuss more general poker concepts and hand strategy. Do not get me wrong here, there is nothing wrong with hand strategy but that does have a finite limit. You could in theory become one of the very best in the world on a theoretical level but yet your earnings could be minimal if you repeatedly sat down in tough games.
But yet someone who could play 20 tables at NL50 on various sites could be making $100/hour with rakeback. A forty hour working week would net $4000/week and $200,000/year. Let me tell you that there are not many poker players in the online poker games pulling down that much money. But in order to get to that level then you must become at one with variance. One such way in which I coped with this personally was by studying financial day traders and stock market specialists. You may wonder what in heavens name this has to do with poker?
Well on the stock market then there is a large amount of random noise that speculators and traders find very difficult to combat. There is also a lot of short term manipulation as well by the big institutions that try and fade traders out of positions when they panic. So what this means is that irrespective of your level of expertise in the financial markets, you will never be able to perform winning trades all the time. So what professional traders do is to have a complex money management system in place that basically protects them from huge losses on any one trade.
Basically what this means is that a professional trader with a ratio of 50% winning trades to 50% losing trades could make an awful lot of money simply by making sure that the average winning trade made more than the average losing trade. So if they average $1000 on their winning trades and lost $700 on their losing trades then they would be certain to make money having a 50% ratio of winning trades. This simple mathematics is in poker too and everywhere you look. The best traders have strike rates more than 50% just like the best poker players do and is why tight-aggressive is such a strong poker style.
Let us say that you made $50 on your average hour in pots won playing online but you also lost $50 in lost pots and blinds. This may seem as if all you are doing is breaking even but yet this is where the real power of rakeback comes in because if you are generating say $51 an hour in rakeback for the site and you have a 33% rake deal then you are making $17/hour playing poker even though you are not winning on the actual tables. This is $680/week playing forty hours and not peanuts.
