It's very different from MTG, where me and my friends would play for the thrill of it, spending whatever little money we had to play.

The easy test here is: would you play a poker tournament just for fun, if there was nothing at stake? Few people actually do it. The thrill in both cases actually is (or becomes) the money made/lost.

I didn't advocate playing only for the sake of making money. I suggested it because of how complex a game it is. How much time it takes to master. And because the potential rewards once you do are quite significant, which is a nice added bonus.

And I'm not sure when you stopped playing (pre black friday?) but I don't think there's a single point at which I've ever stopped improving. I know many heads-up professionals as well and not a single one of them ever stops learning and improving their game. Stagnation in poker is death. As such, I don't know why you feel like it was a lot of fun at the start but lost that later on. There is always another level deeper you can go.

The point of any game is to win. The metric that determines the winner of a game is different in every case. In poker, it's how much money you're making. But that doesn't have anything to do with the game itself. It merely depicts how well you're playing.

Learning to maximize expectation with true mathematical finesse while factoring in accurate opponent profiling and gameflow is one of the most challenging things I've ever had to do gamewise. I've played chess since I was 5, Counter-Strike very seriously for five years, WoW for the first 3 years before it went to shit, and have been getting into Go. And in none of those games have I achieved the level of mental satisfaction as I have from poker.

Edit: Was your stars alias RRiccio as well? Were you a cash player? You only have ~750 tournaments recorded on sharkscope.

To put in another way: most MtG players I know are still in love with the game 10 years after they started playing competitively, while nearly none of my poker pro friends still play or enjoy poker 5 years after we started.

P.S. Played mostly on PP, pre-BF, diff alias.

It's unlikely your $200 was a proper bankroll when you started, and it's even more unlikely that you or anyone else could consistently replicate these results (when starting out).

That said, I'm an ex-husng player, and played them professionally for three years, and I don't disagree with your overall message. Poker is a wonderful game, heads-up play is great and has almost no boring parts, and you can conceivably make a living at it if you put in your time and manage your money well.

How are the games these days? When I played it was primarily before superturbos, and I three-tabled $105s on FTP for just under a 60% winrate and 14% ROI.

I imagine the average player has really upped their game, though, and that the regulars these days would crush me on average--I'm rusty and the game has matured.

Those results are based on the following:

2,615 $3.50 Heads-Up Hyper-Turbos

1,605 $7 Heads-Up Hyper-Turbos

1,792 $15 Heads-Up Hyper-Turbos

16,715 $30 Heads-Up Hyper-Turbos

211 $60 Heads-Up Hyper-Turbos

I've also played a handful of MTT tournaments which are a miniscule part of sample size but which result for about $7,500 of that $12,500. I played the $880 Fraser Downs Fall Poker Challenge in Vancouver and cashed 3rd for $7,384. I also won $5,000 that weekend in one session playing pot limit omaha cash. So that is, indeed, small sample size, but the rest is not. Read on.

This isn't run good. Once you're up to a sample of around 5000 heads up hyper turbo games, your results begin to accurately depict your actual skill level. I've played 22,938 heads-up hyper-turbo matches since April with a 1.08% ROI, 51.80% winrate, and $6,063.56 net profit before rakeback.

And yes, I practiced perfect bankroll management. If you're not living off your bankroll, using a 35/50 buy-in rule (move up when you have 50 buy-ins, move down when you're at 35 buy-ins) is a good, aggressive system to use. If you are, 100 or 200 buy-ins minimum is best, depending on how comfortable you are with variance. I started with $200 which was ~57 buy-ins for the $3.50s on PokerStars. I'm now playing the $30s and $60s with a bankroll over $6000.

And yes, people can replicate these results. Easily. My results are, honestly, more on the weaker side among regulars. As for a beginning player, they could easily replicate these results if they actually studied. It's really not that hard to crush the $3.50s-$15s on PokerStars. You just have to think. Most people are there to gamble.

The games are excellent these days. Of course the overall player pool took a hit on Black Friday, but there is still tons of action. Hyper-Turbos have only gotten more popular, especially because the best players are booking some of the highest profits among all high stakes players each year.

As for a 60% winrate and 14% ROI at super-turbos, THAT is too small of a sample size. It's highly like you're a winning player with a great ROI, but you were on an upswing. You're ROI was likely in the 2.5%-5% range. The highest ROI I've ever seen was around 6% over 20k games (also someone hit 7.5% over 3k games but thats too small a sample). And yes, the average player is slightly better, and the regs have definitely improved as well, but fish are fish. The games up to $15s are very, very soft. The $30s are as well but you'll start to run into a lot more regs at that stake.

On top of that I think most US players play on iPoker skins (black chip poker, cake poker, etc.) which allow US players.

But yeah, all of them (apart from the Nevada/New Jersey sites) are technically illegal down there. Most professionals who didn't quit poker altogether and didn't transition to live either moved to Canada or some third world country with no taxes and cheap living to grind.

I played professionally a few years back, so this was my understanding of the law then, and I haven't heard of any changes:

It's perfectly legal, as a player, to play. Laws have been created that prevent banks from transferring money to and from poker sites.

When Black Friday happened, it was primarily because poker sites were committing fraud to work with banks to process payments.

There are still sites operating, however they take very, very long to process payments, limit cashouts to a point where professional play is not possible, and can suffer the same fate as the big three sites did on Black Friday.

All of my professional-playing friends quit or moved out of country after Black Friday.

You can bypass location restrictions with VPN, but you also need a foreign bank account and can be caught and have your funds seized.