How much money do I need to start a career as a poker pro ?

Question

How much money do I need to start a career as a poker pro ?

Answer 1

Assuming both of your kneecaps are still breakable you can start with nothing

Answer 2

If you have to ask, you aren't ready.  

Most pros will tell you that until you can consistently crush a very low-limit game, then move up and crush the next level, etc...you won't be ready to make a living at it.  And from my trips to Vegas, I tend to believe them.   My best advice if you're considering poker as a profession...buy "Ace on the River" by Barry Greenstein.  

But if you want to skip a few levels and find out how you'd fare, and you have some loot...  take 10 grand to a casino.... buy $1000 per day into a 4-8 or 5-10 game.  If those games wipe you out, you weren't ready.

FInd the game you're comfortable with...and the one you're able to take 100 big blinds worth of chips to the table...and have at it...good luck.

Answer 3

The lowest limit game you could reasonably support yourself at without any other job is a $5-10 limit game. You need a $1,000 bankroll per session and 10 session buy ins backing it up. So you need a minimum $10,000 bankroll to "go pro," and that's assuming you actually have the proven skill to win.

FYI, if your game is no limit, you need 5 max buy-ins per session for a $1-2 table, which is $1,000 ($200 times 5) and 10 single session bankrolls backing it up. So you still need at least $10,000.

Answer 4

Becoming a poker pro isn't about starting with a certain amount of money.  It takes years and years and years of play.  Poker pros are poker pros because of experience.  Not because of a dollar amount.  Some people have a little faster paced success rate, but most are students of experience.

Answer 5

andre akkari did it through freerolls. he built up to like $500, took it to vegas, won a tourney for 4k, used that 4k to win 20k.

Answer 6

Well,

I would very strongly recommend AGAINST trying to become a live poker pro (a "live" pro is a pro who makes his money by playing poker in casinos or home games etc, hence "live").  This is because you will only be able to see approximately 35 hands per hour in the long run.  This is simply not enough hands per hour.  The problem is that if you are only playing 35 hands per hour, then even if you put in a 40 hour work week, playing 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, thats only about 1,300 hands per week, which is about 50,000-60,000 hands per year.

Here's the problem though.  Even the very best players in the world commonly have stretches of well over 50,000 hands (sometimes closer to 200,000 hands) of breakeven or losing.  The reason I know this is that I've seen the graphs of some very strongly winning players (players that earned over a million dollars per year, playing over a million hands a year on the internet, and on these graphs you can see the multiple 100,000+ hand stretches of breakeven or losing on the graph, even though overall, over the course of the full 1million+ hands, they come out winning a lot of money.  So there is basically quite a bit more "variance" than you might expect in poker, and this is what makes live poker a poor option.  There is simple too big a risk (10-20%) that even if you are an outstaning, world class poker pro, you could have one or two losing YEARS in a row playing live.

Now, if you play online on the other hand, this is no longer the case.

First of all, even if you were to play only 1 table online, you are ALREADY playing 3 times as many hands per hour, since an online table runs at more like 100 hands per hour, not 35.  However, if you are playing professionally online, you will not be playing just 1 table at a time, unless you strictly play heads up poker (1-on-1 poker).  The lowest amount of tables you will play will be 4 tables at a time.  This is extraordinarily easy to do.  You simply open 4 tables, sit at the 4 of them, and click "tile tables" in the viewing options.  This will set up a nice view of the 4 tables you are sitting at, where you can see all of the 4 tables in front of you at the same time.  This allows you to play 12 times as many hands per hour as if you were playing live poker.  

So now, playing 4 tables at a time on the internet, if you put in a 40 hour work week (8 hours a day 5 days a week) you are playing more like 500,000-700,000 hands per year.  This means that if you play very strongly winning poker, there is nearly a 0% chance that you will have a losing year (although you will still mathematically speaking be likely to have 1 or 2 losing months throughout the course of the year).

If on the other hand you get used to 4 tabling, and feel very comfortable, after say a month or two of doing this, and notice that you are able to make your decision much faster than when you first started out, generally knowing exactly what you want to do within 1 or 2 seconds of action being on you, you can start 12-tabling.  To do this you simply go to "advanced multi-tabling options" and check the "auto pop up tables demanding action" option.  This will make it so that when action is on you at a table or table(s), then the table demanding action will pop up to the front, for you, on your computer screen, once you have finished completing action on whichever table is currently demanding action.  Or if there are 2 or 3 tables demanding action, they will pop up one after the other, as soon as you finish completing an action on each of them, one after the other.  THis makes it so that you will never have trouble "timing out" (running out of time) at any of the 12 tables you are playing at.

Once you have set this up in the advanced multitabling options, you simple open up 12 tables that you want to play at, and sit at them, and then go to viewing options and click "cascade."  This will make a staircase out of the tables you are sitting at, allowing them to all fit on your screen, even if you are on a small laptop screen.  

You will now be playing over 1,000 hands per hour, so about 10,000 hands per day, and 50,000 hands per week in a 40 hour work week, 12-tabling online.  This is 200,000 hands a month, and over 2 million hands per year.  You will likely have either zero, or occasionally one breakeven or losing month, throughout the course of the entire year, usually zero losing months, and will never have anything close to a losing year, if you play very good strong winning poker, playing 2 million hands per year.

Given how many hands per year you are playing (2 million), you can earn a decent living even at very low stakes, and EVEN if you aren't a world class player, but just a good, but not excellent player.

On the internet, the way they judge how good you are is by measuring your longterm winrate.  They measure this in terms of big bets earned in profit per 100 hands played on average, over the course of your career.  There is no such thing as a "big bet" in no limit hold'em, as a big bet is a limit holdem term, but everyone uses a software program known as "pokertracker" to keep track of their hands that play professionally online, and since poker was originally (many years ago) designed for limit hold'em players, they still use the big bet term (a big bet equals 2 big blinds).  So if you play 2 million hands, and over the course of that 2 million hand sample, are averaging 12 big blinds of profit per 100 hands played, this would be written as a winrate of "6ptbb/100" (6 pokertracker bigbets per 100).  Typically, a world class player is able to maintain a longterm winrate of more than 5ptbb/100, even when multitabling 12 tables.  A very good player can maintain 3 or more ptbb/100 longterm winrate when multitabling 12 tables, an a good player can maintain a ptbb/100 of greater than 1 ptbb/100 when multitabling 12 tables.  So depending on how good you are, as a pro (not all pros are equally good), this will determine how much you earn per year by about a factor of 5.

So let's say you are a very good (not good, and not world class, but inbetween, earning a longterm winrate of 2.5ptbb/100 over the course of a 2 million hand per year sample.  This is 5 big blinds per 100 hands on average.

So if you were playing let's say $0.50/$1.00nl (which has a maximum buyin of $100 on the internet) and playing 12 tables of it, 40 hours a week, so 2 million hands per year, you would be making $5 per 100 hands so $5,000 per 100,000 hands so $50,000 per 1,000,000 hands so approximately $100,000 a year, playing at the measly stakes of just $0.50/$1.00 blinds no limit hold'em.  This is already a decent living, and is achieved at very low stakes.  The trick is that you are getting to play SOOOOO many more hands per hour than a live poker player, which is what makes something like this possible.

The best part is that to have a very minimal (far less than 1% chance) of going broke, just due to variance, at $0.50/1.00nl, you would only need a starting  bankroll of 50 maximum buyins, so five thousand bucks.

So if you are trying to earn $100,000 a year as an online poker pro, you would need a starting bankroll of $5,000.

To make $200,000 a year (12-tabling $1/$2nl) you would need a starting bankroll of $10,000

To make $400,000 a year (12-tabling $2/$4nl) you would need a starting bankroll of $20,000...  

you get the idea...

Anyway, that should thoroughly answer your question I hope.

Answer 7

You do not need anything, make use of free bankrolls to start your bankroll from nothing.

http://free-bankroll.co.uk

Also if you find out that you are rubbish then you haven't lost anything!