Do you still want to be a professional poker player?

When the entire world suddenly became entranced with poker it was as if $100 bills were raining down on the people who had beat the rush and were already proficient poker players. The same could be said for people who got in on the ground floor of the poker boom (from about 2003 to early 2006); basically, it didn’t take very much time and effort to become a winning poker player in these early days of the poker boom.

The same cannot be said for poker players getting started in today’s poker world. The road is much tougher for today’s poker players; overall the skill level of the average player is exponentially higher, and the good players, the pros, in today’s poker world can be found even the lower limit games. A winning $2/$4 NLHE player in today’s game would likely have crushed the $25/$50 games of a few years ago -that’s how much of a difference the poker world has undergone in the past few years.

Now, part of the problem stems from the US market simply not producing new players in the same numbers they were back before UIGEA legislation passed in 2006 –while players were still capable of playing online poker after UIGEA passed, it was such a hassle to get money on and off the online poker sites that only winning players and total degenerates were willing to jump through the hoops the US government had setup. But this was only part of the problem.

The bigger problem, the more long-term problem was that information accelerated across the Internet. A new player entering a simple Google search of “Poker + Strategy” will be met with mountains of free, highly detailed, strategic information; there are even free online poker videos produced by the online poker sites themselves to make sure you have the basic strategies of the game down. Players slightly more proficient with Google will be able to find free trials to online poker training sites, insightful threads on poker forums, and all sorts of other goodies as well.

Players can also invest a little bit of their own money (that same $30 players use to spend on a poker strategy book that contained information that can now be found online for free) and join an online poker training site or purchase software like PokerTracker or Holdem Manager, any of which will vastly improve their gamed in a very short period of time.

Some would say that becoming a professional poker player in today’s game (with the current kerfuffle the online poker world is in) is a daunting undertaking, and they are precisely right. It’s not impossible, but people need to understand that it’s not 2005 -they also need to understand that it’s not 1998 either. To become a winning poker player in today’s poker world requires a big investment early on (usually coaching and lots of studying) and a continued reinvestment of their profits, since the game is constantly evolving.