The Daily Collegian

This editorial is in response to the April 27 article by Jill Bergeron, which was entitled "Students are turning to poker for income." A great deal of the information contained therein is misleading, and could be potentially dangerous to the naïve reader.

One of the individuals was quoted as saying, "I usually make $120-$140 each week." As a professional player, I am very familiar with what types of income are possible for players in various games. An average-to-good player can manage to beat a no-limit Texas Hold 'Em game for roughly 10 big bets (in no-limit, twice the size of the big blind) for every 100 hands played.

We'll be generous and assume that the individual in question plays in a 50-cent/one dollar game. For every 100 hands played in this game, our average-to-good winning player will make, on average, $20. In order to generate $120 a week, the player would have to play 600 hands a week.

Online poker, which moves fast, allows an individual to play approximately 80 hands per hour (at least this has been the case in my now four-year career of playing at UMass). Our average-to-good player would therefore need to play 20 hours a week to make an average of $120.

According to Bergeron's article, the individual quoted plays "two to three nights a week." That comes out to about eight to 10 hours of playing on each of those nights. To assume that the individual plays this many hours a night does not seem plausible.

Furthermore, 600 hands is an incredibly small sample of hands. That same average-to-good player would experience a standard deviation of roughly 30 big bets for every 100 hands played. In other words, after playing 100 hands, our player is equally likely to be up $70 or down $50 or anywhere in between. With this kind of variance, the statistical probability of anyone on Earth being able to never have a losing week, let alone to make over $100 a week consistently, is nil.

Incidentally, world-class poker players can experience losing streaks of over 30,000 hands in duration. As such, to say that poker is a main source of income for many students is simply incorrect. To my knowledge, there are at least five and probably no more than 10 UMass students who are able to generate legitimate incomes from poker. The range of yearly average incomes among those that I am aware of is between $30,000-$250,000. They all pay federal income taxes on their winnings.

The danger inherent in Bergeron's article is, first, that it reinforces the delusion that the vast majority of poker players have; namely, that they are able to subsist on an income derived solely from poker. And secondly, it creates more and more of a rapidly growing number of young persons who start playing with money they cannot afford to gamble.

As a founding member of www.UmassPoker.com, a non-profit site home to a community of nearly 500 UMass poker players who share information, discuss theory and dispel "get-rich-quick" rumors, I hope that this editorial reveals the truth behind attempting to derive your income as a poker player.

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