Doesn't work in no limit hold'em especially tournaments. You succeed or fail based on your best results which requires taking educated risks at the right time. If you often limp into the money ( or just miss ) it's -EV long term. In addition, overly conservative play is time consuming and can lead to impatience. The best players are mostly smart aggressive. Some of the best opportunities are when most of the field are playing conservatively.
I am pretty sure no limit holdem has simply been marketed extremely well by casinos the past 15 years. You can't even begin to converge on a full ring cash game win rate until you have played 20,000 hands and even that is really suspect. So even if playing full time at 30 hands per hour, you have no idea until you have been playing 40 hours a week for 4 months of cash games. To really converge though to a true win rate you would need to play 400-500k hands or so. That would take playing for around 7-8 years as a full time job of live cash games. It is practically the perfect casino game for the house because it is so hard for any one person to figure out what rake they can't beat and at the same time captures a market of people who largely think themselves too smart to "gamble" on other casino games. "It is not gambling, it is a game of skill!". I suspect it is not physically possible to play enough in-person tournaments to converge to any meaningful win rate and that is exactly a reason it is popular with both casinos and players.
"Professional" poker player here. Professional in quotes because I am a student who played to support myself, but took it seriously with pio training and made over 6 figures during my time playing both 200 and 500nl zoom. I would definitely say poker seems easier and more intuitive than day trading as someone who is looking to try and get into day trading. The thing that attracts poker players to trading is that in poker, at best you have about 80 EV for the money in the pot, but in trading there is really no theoretical ceiling that caps your EV. (My trading knowledge is limited). Poker is a game in the sense that the win conditions and the parameters that effect the outcomes have been defined well enough to formulate a solution. Where as in day trading or trading in general, at least it seems to a novice like me, the parameters are so obtuse or large in number that I still am not sure if people who are profitable traders are lucky and superstitious or legitimately have some insight.
Poker and day trading both require strong risk management, understanding of probabilities, and emotional discipline. In each, you make decisions with incomplete information, whether it’s hidden cards or unpredictable markets. Success hinges on strategic thinking, adaptability, and a long-term perspective, as short-term wins don’t guarantee overall success. The market is P2P, you are competing against everyone else.
I can see where you're coming from, but I think there's more nuance to it. While it's true that no-limit hold'em is tough to master and requires a lot of hands to get a meaningful win rate, I don't know if I'd call it purely a "casino game for the house." The skill element is real, especially in live games Yes, I agree with you. Poker and trading are similar, yet different. In poker you have to compete against other players, while traders compete against the broader market. For me poker is more complicated mentally.