People will simply ask you point blank how much money poker players make. So here is the quick answer: Good poker players in small stakes online games like 1c/2c to 50c/$1 will make between $600 and $5000 a month. Good poker players in live games like $1/$2 to. The answer to this is yes, it is undoubtedly possible to make significant money from poker, day in and day out. It is not uncommon for poker players to win several thousands of dollars per night from high stakes poker. There are plenty of poker pros that are not seen on tv, but making a living with the average full time poker player earning.

BetOnline Accepts players from the USA, and has soft games compared to Pokerstars and Full Tilt.

How Much do Poker Players Make?

A number of new players interesed in poker want to know how much exactly poker players can make – or at least what they’re getting into. The truth is, there are so many factors that will determine how much you make in poker. When talking about how much players make, we must first distinguish between professional and recreational poker players. Professional poker players are well known to make $1- 10 million per year by multi-tabling online poker and playing in the live event tournament circuits (WSOP, EPT etc) each year. Tom Dwan, for example, is a 23 year old poker player and makes around $5 million per year in online poker alone.

Recreational Players:

Amateur poker players on the other hand can’t expect to make anywhere near this. Although it depends on the stakes involved – and how often you play, amateur poker players tend to make anything from zero to twenty thousand dollars per year. I put the limit at twenty thousand dollars because at this point amateur players become (or are considered) professional. Your typical student poker player (and anyone else who plays a few hours per day with good knowledge of the game), can make up to five thousand dollars per year playing online poker (from my own experience anyway).

I need to make a quick point here, and tell you that approximately 85% of online players actually lose money playing poker. This is mainly because they don’t adopt the correct poker strategy, however this is still a shocking figure when you consider just how many people are hooked to online poker each day!

How Much Do Professional Poker Players Make?

Phil Ivey is the world’s best professional poker player. At the moment, he’s makes aproximately $1-5 million a year through playing both online and live poker. His current lifetime winnings from the WSOP along extend beyonf $7 million.

However Ivey’s net earnings don’t stop there, because like football, poker players often receive heavy endorsements from major marketing brands. With respect to Phil Ivey, he’s also been involved in a series of side bets with players such as Andy Bloch for the latest 2009 WSOP. The prop bet between Ivey and Bloch recently, was worth over $15 million if Ivey won a 2^nd WSOP bracelet. For the sake of readers’ interests, Ivey has also wagered over $70,000 on coin-flips in his life; and has previously bet over $200,000 on a single game of golf. I bring this up as an interesting example of just how rich these poker players are…

Deciding Factors

When asking how much poker players make, the figure largely depends on how good you are, how often you play and where abouts you play (including the stakes involved). A large proportion of online poker players make $50-$100k per year. Others – many of whom are still relatively unknown, can easily make $200,000 per year. An good NL100 player, for example, can spin up to $80,000 per year in online poker.

Live tournament events on circuits such as the WSOP, EPT and Aussie Millions also earn alot of these professionals (like Phil Hellmuth) most of their money. Current prizes for doing well in major tournaments such as the WSOP and WPT can be anything up to $5 million. In the last WSOP tournament Hellmuth won $6 million. For readers unfamiliar with these tournaments they can usually last from a few days to 2 weeks at most!. In comparison to Wimbledon (where the winner in tennis receives about $1 million for several weeks work), you can see how much more money there is in poker.

What Percentage of Players Make Money in OnlinePoker?

It’s estimated that 85% of online poker players lose their money. In addition, 15% break even, and only 5% actually make any money consistently. However when looking at profits, you have to understand that the majority of these players, I’d guess around 50% at least, don’t read strategy; and this is why they lose their money.

The question how much do poker players make depends most upon the stake they play. Similar to any business or industry, the larger you invest, the more you gain. If you are playing $200/$400 No Limit Holdem, than winning 5 big blinds a day will make you $1,000/day.

The problem with playing such high stakes however, is that they require large bankrolls. At $200/$400, you’re going to need a total poker bankroll of 100 buyins of $40,000 – that’s $4 million in total. Unfortunately, for most people, they’ll need to earn a large enough bankroll at smaller stakes until they’re able to enter higher stakes games. Most professionals however started their career playing smaller stakes such as $1/2 and building their way up, so it’s not completely impossible. My friend Andy started to learn poker back in 2003, and he now earns $100k/year online. Basically, the better and the more often you play, the faster you’ll rise through the stakes and make money. Tom Durrrr Dwan started with a $50 bankroll and in under 5 years turned that into a $10 million bankroll.

How Much Can New Poker Players Make?

This answer depends on the stakes and bankroll you play. However for new poker players who’ve just learned poker strategy and are playing online for the first time, I’d recommend playing the $0.05/0.10 No Limit Holdem tables. On these tables, I doubt you’ll mke much more than $10 per day profit, however after a few weeks, you should be good enough to try the $0.10/0.20 No Limit Cash Tables, which will earn you about $20-50 profit per day. If you continue like this, grinding up the stakes, you’ll begin to start making lot’s of money online.

BetOnline Accepts players from the USA, and has soft games compared to Pokerstars and Full Tilt.

Related articles:

1. Where are you pulling these facts from? Most seem like estimates off the top of your head.
   Also you should have done some calculations before you published this article.

• $400
• $2000

Many different paths carry first-timers to the poker table. Some come to poker via other card games, while others find poker after having sampled other gambling games in the casino such as blackjack, craps, or roulette. Sports bettors also sometimes wander from the sportsbook over to the poker room and find themselves in a game — and perhaps find poker intriguing thanks to the sports-resembling competition the game provides.

Those who stick with the game do so for many reasons as well, although most are motivated by the prospect of making a profit at poker. Especially those who win at first — which happens quite a lot — will keep playing to try to win more, with some even being encouraged to think about winning a lot more and perhaps even to become professional poker players.

But while poker is a game that rewards skill, luck plays a role, too. Those who initially win at poker likely do so in part because of getting dealt good cards, hitting draws when they need to and avoiding others' hitting theirs. Only those who take some time to learn poker strategy and gain experience are usually able to sustain that success over longer periods.

In other words, the short answer to the question 'Can I make money playing poker?' is obviously that you can, but you also need to be willing to put in the work to increase your skills and have an advantage over your opponents. The fact is, while it's certainly possible to win at a single cash game session or go deep and win a lot in a single tournament, only a small percentage of players remain profitable long term, and invariably those players are better skilled than those who do not.

Let's look a little more closely at the question, however, by asking a few other questions addressing factors that will affect the likelihood of your being able to make money at poker as well as how much money you can make.

1. What is your win rate?

The generic term 'win rate' is used to refer to how much someone is winning at poker over a given period of time or hands played, although in truth the term is also used when referring to how much a player is losing, too. A player with a positive win rate is profiting at poker while a player with a negative win rate is not. Calculating your win rate is done differently in cash games and in tournaments.

In cash games, a win rate is usually expressed as the amount won per hour or 100 hands. In no-limit hold'em or pot-limit Omaha, the unit of measurement is often converted to big blinds — e.g., in a $1/$2 NLHE game, making a profit of $10 = winning 5 big blinds.

Meanwhile in limit hold'em, stud games, and others with fixed-limit betting the amount won is usually measured by the number of 'big bets' it represents. For instance, in a limit hold'em game where the small bet is $2 (preflop and flop) and the big bet is $4 (turn and river), a player who makes $100 is said to have won 25 'big bets.' (Somewhat confusingly, both 'big blinds' and 'big bets' are often abbreviated as 'BB.')

Meanwhile in tournaments a win rate is usually expressed as a player's 'return on investment' or 'ROI.' Divide your profits by your expenses and multiply by 100, and you get a percentage representing your ROI. For instance, if you spend $200 in buy-ins and cash for $220 total, your ROI is $20 (the profit) / $200 = 0.1 * 100 = 10%.

Obviously if your win rate or ROI is negative, you aren't making money playing poker. But even if you enjoy a positive win rate or ROI, you need to consider other expenses related to playing poker and look at whether or not your winnings are exceeding them. If it costs you $10 in gas every night to get to and from a poker room and you're only averaging winning $5 per session, your win rate is positive but you aren't making money. Or if you spend $10,000 over the course of a year traveling to poker tournaments but only have an ROI good enough to earn you $8,000 worth of cashes during that time, you're technically 'winning at poker' but losing money overall.

The biggest point to take away here is that if you are interested in making money at poker and don't keep track of your wins and losses, start doing so right now. Find out what your win rate or ROI is, take into account other possible expenses associated with playing poker, then you'll see whether or not you are making money at poker. You'll also likely be encouraged to sharpen your study of the game in order to try to increase your profit if you're winning (or to become profitable if you're losing).

2. How much do you play?

Another question to ask when addressing the larger question of whether or not you can make money playing poker is to consider just how much poker you're playing.

If you're strictly a recreational player who only joins a home game once per week or who plays online poker for an hour or two here and there, you can still win at poker but only a limited amount. Also, those who play poker only sparingly aren't necessarily gaining experience and knowledge that will help them build their skills and win more consistently.

A number of serious players who put in a lot of 'volume' at the tables are able to increase their profit steadily even if their win rates are somewhat low. Most tend to consider cash games a more reliable way to make money at poker given the higher variance of poker tournaments.

If you think about it, in most poker tournaments only the top 10 or 15 percent of finishers enjoy any profit at all, so it logically follows that the majority of players finish out of the money most of the time they play. Really only the most successful tournament players are able to cash enough to sustain an ROI as high as 10 or 20 percent (or more), with most who are profitable sitting in the 5-10 percent range.

That means when playing tournaments even good players lose money more often than they win money. But when they win they win enough to more than make up for the losses, sometimes hitting especially big scores when finishing at a final table or winning the entire tournament and getting back 10, 20, 50, or even 100 times the buy-in.

Cash games tend to be less volatile that way, although even there good players will frequently have losing sessions. They may even have more losing sessions than winning ones, although they manage to enjoy larger profits than losses, generally speaking, and thus have positive win rates. Even so, if you don't practice sound bankroll management, you can experience one very bad cash game session and lose everything you've won and then some.

Once you've figured out your win rate, you can think about how much you need to play in order to make a desired amount over a given period of time.

You should also try to gauge what is the best amount of time to play poker for you in order to increase your chances of remaining profitable. Some are better of playing, say, only 10-20 hours per week than 40-50 hours per week, or shorter sessions instead of long ones, because they have trouble focusing and thus playing well over longer periods. Meanwhile others can put in those extra hours and not suffer as a result.

3. What stakes are you playing (and are they right for you)?

Probably the most important question to answer when delving more deeply into whether or not you can make money at poker is to look at the stakes for which you are playing. And — importantly — whether you are choosing well when deciding upon your stakes and sitting down in games in which you can win and win consistently.

One common misconception among new players is that the best way to win more money at poker is to play for higher stakes. A player who wins consistently at the $1/$2 NLHE cash game might imagine simply picking up and moving over to the $10/$20 game will result in winning 10 times as much money, but more often than not such ideas turn out to be foolhardy.

Games of different stakes attract differently skilled players. While the lowest stakes games almost always include the least-skilled and least-experienced, they attract strong players sometimes, too. Similarly, many of the best players can be found in the higher stakes games, but there also will inexperienced or poor players sometimes sitting around the table.

On average, though, the higher the stakes the tougher the games. Thus do the profitable players' win rates actually go down as the buy-ins and/or stakes go up. In online cash games (just to cite one example), NLHE players of the lowest stakes including the 'micros' have been known to sustain win rates of as much as 20-40 BB/100 hands over large sample sizes, while the best players in the higher NLHE games online generally top out at around 3-8 BB/100 hands.

Make Money Online Poker

That's one reason to be realistic about moving up in stakes in poker — even if you're great and better than most in the games, you aren't going to win at the same rate you did at the lower stakes.

But you also need to be practical about your own ability as a poker player and recognize when the competition is too tough to beat. As you move around and test out which stakes work for you, continue keeping accurate records and note at which stakes (for cash games) or buy-ins (for tournaments) you are winning most consistently, and where you are winning less or losing.

What Percentage Of Poker Players Make Money

Sometimes you might find it hard to win in a lower stakes game than in one a notch or two above, simply because of your particular skill set and how well you respond to the styles and tendencies of others. More often, though, there will be a stakes 'threshold' (of sorts) above which you might take shots now and then but probably shouldn't go on a regular basis.

In any case, be honest with yourself and smart with your bankroll, and your chances of making money at poker will increase as a result.

How Many Poker Players Make Money

• Tags

  cash game strategytournament strategyno-limit hold’embankroll managementwin rateROIgame selectionmixed gameshome gamesvariancerecord-keeping

• Related Room

  Full Tilt

• Related Players

  Variance