Examine your reasons for playing the Ultimate Addictive game.

There are several reasons why people play poker and different people have different reasons, goals and aspirations.

The hobby or part time player plays for fun.

They are not so much concerned with consistently winning as long as they get a good game and it gets to pass their time then everyone is happy.

If that’s you then get outta here!

Not for any other reason than we want you to stay the bad player you are.

If there were no bad players to beat then it wouldn’t be at all fun for the next type of player who is:

The Player who wants to make some extra money.

Unfortunately the poker player who starts out with this idea has absolutely no idea how difficult it is to achieve this.

It can take a long time learning a ten player ring game before a player becomes a break even player.

Probably six months of solid playing is required to take a beginner from continually reloading their bankroll through to never having to do it again.

And that’s if they have the dedication to read the books and study the game. It’s just not easy to do.

Let's run some numbers so that you get an idea of how difficult it actually is to rise up through the limits.

Let's say that you're a solid limit hold 'em player, and your ultimate goal is to reach the $10/$20 tables.

Your average win rate, if you play premium hands and read all of the books you can get your hands on, will be somewhere around two big bets per 100 hands played.

Your original investment was to take out $300 from your savings account and deposit it into a poker site, and you use a fairly standard rule of keeping a 300 big bet bankroll, meaning that you will not move up until you've built up 300 big bets of the next rank among limits.

Your starting capital will let you play at $.50/$1 tables. How many hands will it take you to reach $10/$20, if you can truly sustain a win rate of 2 big bets per 100 hands all the way up?

You need to win 300 big bets at $.50/$1, which is simply 300 x 100 hands (you win two bets per 100 hands) = 15,000 hands.

A single table deals about 80 hands per hour; meaning that you're looking at 187 hours of time at the table. If you study one hour for every four played you are looking at 230 hours spent on poker.

That's about four weeks, assuming you play 40 hours per week and don't have any losing sessions, which it's fair to say even the best players have.

And that's just to get from $0.50/$1 to the $1/$2 level

So this is not easy by any means. Don't think that you are going to shoot up through the limits and start earning a massive income from playing poker. It just ain't going to happen.

Excellent Poker requires focus.

Last update: 20-06-2008 12:30