I was asked something today by Richard at Top15Poker regarding the validity of earn rates. This is a fascinating topic because what exactly is an earn rate and how can we establish one in online poker games? Well let me put it this way, let us say that you made 10ptbb/100 at NL50 over 1 million hands……how conclusive is this? Well I have mentioned this before in a previous post but it is very instructive in one very key way. This is because the online landscape shifts constantly and so we need to be careful trying to ascertain what is likely to happen in the future to what has happened in the past.
All that earn rate establishes is that the earn rate has been pretty conclusive for that one million hands. However if that sample size was played out over a year then one year is not an awful lot of time. I have spent nine years in the online poker industry and have seen many changes in that time. What this means of course is that strategies that have proven to be successful previously have become stale and players who were making money are no longer making money.
I wished I had a thousand dollars in my pocket for every online player who I either knew or heard about between 2002-2005 who could no longer make the game pay! If the environment shifts then in many cases the player needs to shift with it. Remember it was Charles Darwin who said that the species that was most likely to survive wouldn’t be the most intelligent or the strongest but the most adaptive. I was having a discussion on a major forum a while back about the hand reading capabilities of players like Doyle Brunson and Phil Hellmuth.
I championed their case because when you skilfully mix playing poker with business then you no longer need to be a world class poker player in the modern sense. It is quite amusing really because some of the best live game players look at online players with disdain and the same happens in many cases the other way around……I wonder who is right?
Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk
