In my mind then the best players in online poker games are the ones who make the most money. However the jury is out at the moment as to who that will be in twenty, thirty or forty years’ time and for one very important reason. This is because it is a mere 13 years since the inception of online poker. So when it comes to seeing your poker profits making you money by investing them then unless you have made phenomenal amounts of money then you are not going to see huge returns very quickly.
A half decent player with a bog standard 4bb/100 at say NL100 could be clearing a safe $500/week working twenty hours. This is $25k per year but if you have other sources of income that mean that you could reinvest 100% of this money then online poker could make you financially comfortable within ten years. That is at least $250,000 plus all accrued interest and if you put your winnings into safe bonds that pay around 5% then by year three or the end of year three then you would be making as much money in interest than you would make playing online for an entire month given this example earn rate.
$250k is often touted as a “life changing sum” of money but yet it can be amassed if you are careful enough and play solidly against players who you can beat. It is simply committing to a process and making sure that you play weak players. This is how I essentially make my money and it isn’t hard to see that after twenty years of doing this then making a million dollars from poker despite being quite a mediocre winning player is possible. When you start to feel the effects of compounded interest in the later years then and only then do you begin to see what poker can do for you.
In terms of re-investing then you also need to do that in other areas as well. Luckily these days we have excellent software items like the no limit and pot limit packages at www.acespade.com that allow you to make that vital jump between learning theory and actually playing as problem free as possible. You can play against almost real opponents and get a good angle on just how strong your playing style is.
The good thing about this software is that it allows you to have a rough ball park earn rate figure for the games that you play in at the lower levels and the opponent categories are more life like than other software packages of their type. You just need to spend money to make money these days playing online poker.
Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays at http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/promotions/rafa-nadal/
