How Much Money Can I Expect to Make with Online Poker
Many want-to-be poker players are a bit skeptical of playing online poker. Maybe you’ve found yourself asking the question – “How much money can I expect to make with online poker?”
For the whimsical player, there is no answer. A poker player who uses no strategy, but relies on luck alone, could win any amount or lose the entire amount they’re willing to drop into an online poker account. Odds are, though, that this type of player will lose everything eventually, if not within the first day or week of playing.
If you’re serious about playing and winning online poker, you can not only win a substantial amount of money, you can make an entire, lucrative career out of it! There are many professional online poker players. A lot of people start out online and find such monumental success that they go on to play the most prestigious live poker events as well, such as the World Series of Poker. Others prefer to stick to their online poker game, where they experienced so much success in the first place.
Career online poker players aren’t just extremely lucky, as some would stand to believe. Like any form of work, it’s takes time and effort to become a good poker player. Experience has a lot to do with it, as that is where most poker strategies are developed. You can speed up the process by due diligence; taking the time to study online poker strategies and form them around your own style of poker play, as well as learning the tendencies of different player types so you can pick up on your opponents game more quickly.
Cash Games or Tournaments?
Another common question is what is more profitable in online poker; cash games or tournaments? That answer lies within yourself, and the online poker room at which you play. One could argue that cash games are faster and less restrictive. Then again, some online poker tournaments can be worth more than $250,000 to the 1st place winner alone.
Online Poker Cash Games
The profitability of cash games depends on your skill level and bankroll. If you play micro-limit stakes, you will generally win more often, but less money. The higher the stakes, the harder it will be to win as your competitors will be more experienced as well. Then again, with a proper strategy and enough patience, you can stand to win a great deal of cash in higher stakes games of $5/$10 NL Hold’em, up to $100/$200.
If you want to lay down some serious cash, try Full Tilt Poker’s $2k/$4k tables, where the competition is fierce and often involves real professional poker players like Phil Ivey, Patrik Antonius and online poker phenomenon Tom “durrrr” Dwan.
Online Poker Tournament
Tournaments can be very profitable online poker games for those who consistently finish in the money bubble, but if you find yourself spending more on buy-ins than you’re making overall, you may need to adjust your online poker tournament strategy accordingly.
Online poker tournaments can pay anywhere from $1 to $250,000+ to the first place finisher. The buy-in will obviously be respective of the prize pool and the number of competitors involved, so don’t get too excited at the thought of a quarter of a million dollars – you’ll have to defeat 8,000 players or so (more than play the WSOP Main Event) to scoop that kind of prize! [Referring to PokerStars weekly Sunday Million $1.5m GTD.]
Biggest Online Poker Wins
The largest single hand pot ever awarded in the online poker industry occurred at Full Tilt Poker in November of 2009 when Patrik Antonius raked in a whopping $1,356,946 pot against “Isildur1”.
The are several massive online poker tournaments hosted each year by the largest online poker sites, most notably PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker.
The biggest online poker tournament in the world is PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP). The 2005 WCOOP attracted nearly 20,000 entrants (19,727 to be exact) and generated an awesome prize pool of $12,783,900; originally guaranteed at $10 million.
Some would argue that Full Tilt Poker’s FTOPS (Full Tilt Online Poker Series) is better than the WCOOP because of its frequency. The WCOOP is an annual event while FTOPS is seasonal. The guaranteed prize for the main event of each FTOPS is also $10,000,000, though the entries have never been high enough to bolster the prize pool beyond that.
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