Return on Investment

So, a few weeks back, I contacted Martin Harris (aka “Short-Stacked Shamus”), the editor at PokerNews’ LearnPoker site about doing a revamp of my recent post following up a Card Player article by Bryan Devonshire (behind a paywall). Martin was about to head off to EPT Deauville at the time and didn’t have anything in the budget for me, but I’d already written a long piece for nothing, to be read by virtually no-one, so re-writing it to get a wider audience was not a problem for me. By the time he got back to the States, I’d finished the piece that ended up on PokerNews a couple of weeks back.

The day after it went up, I got an inquiry from Kyle Wagner at Deadspin about re-publishing the longer original piece, which ended up with the title “Why You’ll Never Make a Living Playing Live Poker Tournaments.” I would have thrown a “Probably” in there, but I’m just a writer, not an editor (in this case).

That spawned a Reddit and a 2+2 NVG thread, in addition to the comments at LearnPoker and Deadspin, which I’ve tried to address to the extent I can. Then Tuesday, the Deadspin article was mentioned by the hosts of the 2+2 Pokercast, at the 29:00 point in the same episode where they’re interviewing Daniel Negreanu, so I expect that will get some more attention.

Thanks to Martin and Kyle for picking up the pieces, and for everyone who responded (either way) in various forums. Thanks to a load of new followers and readers. If I’ve missed any points, please drop me a line on Twitter @pokermutant.

Just as a follow-up, I’d like to point folks to some statistical analysis from 2011 by Noah Stephens-Davidowitz, who used a “1,000 Shaun Deebs” model to determine a range of results from online play. Part I, Part II, and several subsequent posts where he predicts results for HU, STT, and 6-Max online tournament players.