There's no money in poker, everyone is solid/playing GTO/too strong/destroyed by the rake and so forth. No clearly, that's not the case at all. Yeah time has changed, right now you cannot aspire to make millions per year, but you can achieve hundreds of thousands, which is still pretty good for a job. Right now I'm playing the midstakes but I'm running bad for about 4 months and I lost the drive to play. So, why don't start a challenge to fire up motivation? Also, I'm not the most social guy ever lived so, this is a good opportunity to find friends a share.
So what's the challenge then? I deposited 1500$ and I'm going to climb the stakes pretty aggressively, starting from NL 25, in order to earn 100k (with RB). When the roll grows up I will playing on different rooms, looking for fishes, because that's all the game is all about. I'm pretty confident in my skills and hopefully, I would be able to crush the micros and the small stakes in a short amount of time. I need to recover some confidence and I want to enjoy the game like before.
Also, I'm sick of view the umpteenth thread about the death of online poker, every morning, I wake up and there's some new thread going on regarding the bad state of the games. Certainly, the games could be better, but guess what? After Black Friday, after country segregation, after other gambling laws what are did you expect? What about the absurd rake in PLO games? Well BOTs thrived for years winning millions pre rakeback, without regs noticed anything; this means the games are still pretty beatable. Sure, rake is high, RB is decreasing but if you are a true (professional) poker player you need to adapt right? So your jobs became more competitive then before, now know the rules isn't sufficient anymore, you have to sweat and a lot. 5 years ago, poker was easy while right now is much harder for a beginner, but I'm pretty confident that any newbie who takes the game seriously is going to make a lot of money. I'm not a newbie but I'm here to demonstrate that climb the stakes is still achieveable and you could have fun doing that.
Oh yeah I forget about the games are unbeatable because players are playing GTO. This statement is the funniest thing I'm reading on poker forums, that's why I thought it may be a good screenname. First no one is playing GTO, currently the softwares requires to put in A LOT of assumpions and the abstraction is based on that, so if you fail to set it up correcly, the solution will be far off. Second, we are taking money from the fish, not from strong regs, most of players forget this and against a fish, playing exploitably is better. I do understand what GTO is and how its discover would be groundbreaking, but what I'd like to point out is, instead of using solvers, 99% of players should work on exploit the fish, imho.
In the end, if you are a beginner, don't lose hope in your poker dream, you only have to put in hours of grind and study, but you won't fail, even if most of the guys will say so.
I hope I will get many readers, and I also hope to fire up some good discussion, in the meantime, have a good run.