maybe the judges were bought by the gaming industry. Corrupt politicians are everywhere. Is Tom Delay from Texas? Folks in Texas are capable of everything.
Please just compare poker with trading. You on a table with six others vs. you on your desk with millions. You bluff vs. you bluff and nobody cares. Read books, talk to expert (don't take them to serious neither), try demo accounts, work on your emotions (you're an intelligent computer script). I trade a small amount of my positions manually. A lot of the work are scripts or autotrader. My EA at the moment is Buru and my broker since long is IBFX Australia. I tried FXCM, eToro and Alpari as well. Don't worry to much. As your mother probably said: get sleep, eat healthy and do some sport Poker is fun.
One major similarity between poker and trading is being patient and very selective.For instance with poker you don't have to stay in every game and keep contributing to the pot if you have a weak hand to begin with.It can become boring but wait until you get a great draw from the begining and then be more aggressive.This will probably yield much better results.Same with trading.Have the patience to not even trade if necessary until you get that great set up.No one is forcing you to trade and take lousy hands. This is one area I'm putting more focus on and seeing improved results.
From just reading the first post I couldn't win a poker game for the life of me although been a consistent profitable trader for the past few years. I don't think one has to do with the other but there are similarities such as discipline, patience, etc. I would recommend getting away from the gambling world and diving into trading it's the only way you will know for sure.
Learning any card game, bridge,poker or black jack, all teach logic, odds, Risk reward. All very important for making money trading, month after month. You need to find a way to put the odds IN you favor to make money.
Good to see you making sweeping generalizations about professional poker players with no figures to back yourself up. I've played poker professionally for more than four years, and I do not self-identify as a gambler, nor do I enjoy any form of gambling outside of poker. No blackjack, no roulette, no craps, no sports betting, nothing. Furthermore, I do not "take risks large enough to result in ruin"; I keep a very large bankroll relative to the stakes I play and have never been anywhere close to busting out. I've met other professional poker players, and most of them did not seem to be big gamblers either. I'm not saying that there aren't degen gambler poker pros out there, but to say that they encompass 90% of all players is ridiculous. Also, judging by your unique style of writing, I'm guessing you're RedManPlus from 2+2?
I appreciate your opinion. I don't think we are talking about the same skills. I'm talking about becoming the "house." Putting the odds in your favor and only making trades were you have an edge. I made most of the money in my career with delta neutral option trading. Some of the best traders I've ever meet are world class bridge players. They understand odds and risk reward. To me, they were not gambling, even though there was always risk. Good traders do "run a business." If you can find a way to put trading even 1% in your favor, every $100K to put toward a trade on average will produce $1K in profits. You won't make money on every trade. You find a way to play the odds. I traded for 25 years. I'm not claiming to know more than you, but I've seen a lot. I've gone as long as 7 years without a losing month. Twenty five years profitable. I'm not a "great" trader, I just looked for ways to have an edge. To place larger "bets" when the trade had the risk reward and as little as possible when it did not. Cheers,
For what it's worth, this is how poker works for a lot of professionals as well. You know you have an edge in the game, you just have to grind it out without putting too much of your bankroll at risk. The guys you see at the poker table who go ballistic on every all-in aren't the pros; it's the guys who get their money in the middle and don't even blink, win or lose, that you need to watch out for.
The thing about poker though is doesn't your edge change dramatically depending on your opponent and so if you don't know your opponent you don't know if you have an edge? Since poker is a game played against 3,5,9 guys or whatever the players have a dramatic effect on your likeliness to succeed. In the markets, there are thousands upon thousands of players all with there own unique time frames and strategies and so your edge is more likely to hold day after day because of the smoothing effect of so many players. That's why i would think poker players have a much harder time, its like trading a couple thin illiquid stocks.
You're right in that your edge does depend on your opponent, however it's not as big of a deal as one would think. It generally doesn't take more than a few dozen hands to get a pretty good rough idea of how somebody plays, and in a lot of cases you end up having tens of thousands of hands of history with some of the regulars you run into on a daily basis. Furthermore, you can make pretty accurate broad generalizations about the strength of a table full of players as a whole: for example, the players in a $25 buyin game will generally be weak, while the players in a $5000 buyin game will generally be very strong. What I think makes poker quite difficult relative to trading (and take this with a grain of salt, because I'm a total newbie to trading) is the difficulty of moving up. A person who can profitably trade $10,000 can probably profitably trade $100,000 with more or less the same system. A person who can make a profit in $100 poker games almost certainly cannot make a profit in $1000 poker games using the same strategies; the skill level of your opposition ramps up dramatically as the stakes rise. That's one of my primary motivations for trying to learn trading; I certainly make pretty decent money from poker right now, but it gets harder and harder to make smaller and smaller improvements to my winrate as time goes on. However, with trading, it seems as though the sky's the limit for the truly elite traders. A poker player who can consistently pull in a million dollars in profit year in and year out is a rockstar, while a trader pulling in a million dollars a year, although certainly no slouch, is nowhere near the top tier of what can be achieved.