When people think of a professional poker player, they think of someone who consistently wins money at the tables and dominates their competition on a regular basis. And by all means this is what a pro poker player should do since they obviously have to win money in the long run to call themselves a pro. 

However, many players who don’t win money at the tables and can’t dominate the competition are somehow finding a way make a living with poker. So you might wonder how in the world this is possible since a person has to be making a profit in order to pay the bills and keep playing poker. The answer lies in the new generation of online poker players who are taking the game by storm.

Back in the early 2000’s, virtually anyone with a solid playing background and a couple of poker strategy books under their belt could become a profitable online poker player. That’s because most of the general population knew very little about poker and were just starting to get acquainted with it online. 

Good players who played back in these days could make lots of cash at the tables by beating inexperienced players. Poker had yet to be dissected to the smallest detail, and many who played only needed to learn the rules before hopping on a computer to contribute their money to the pot. A lot of the poker stars today got their start by beating the soft Internet competition at the beginning of the millennium. 

Good things don’t last forever and they certainly didn’t last forever for the online poker grinders in the early 2000’s. In 2003, Chris Moneymaker proved that virtually anyone could make it big in poker as he won the WSOP Main Event and the $2.5 million prize that came along with it. He was instantly transformed into the poster boy for online poker and his story brought thousands and thousands of new players into the game.

For a while, most of these players were just fish who donated their money to veteran players. However, some of these fish stuck around the game and started improving their skills big-time thus widening the pool of good players. By time the UIGEA was signed into effect in 2006, many of the true fish had lost their money or were scared off by the new law.  Either way the percentage of bad player within online and live poker had dwindled while freely available strategy and forums helped everyone else improve.  

The Face of Poker Grinding Today

It’s obvious that poker is not the same game it was 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago for that matter. People are much better players now and it’s way harder for pro players to show a big profit at the tables. Amazingly, many professional online players don’t show any profit at the tables, and some may even be losing money. So this definitely begs the original question of how these people can call themselves professionals.

Well the answer to this question is that a lot of online pros are surviving off of rakeback and VIP programs offered by most poker rooms. Rakeback allows players to earn a percentage of their money back for every hand they play while VIP programs allow players to gain free entry into tournaments among other bonuses. So what many players do is sign up for these programs and then try to play as tight as possible in order to collect the rakeback and VIP bonuses.

Quite a few players will log 60 hours or more a week at the poker tables in order to collect as many bonuses as possible. And as long as one can play break-even, or even slightly losing poker, they can make a decent profit off of the game. Because of the generous rakeback and VIP bonuses, players no longer have to beat their opponents at the table. They need only survive and hang with their competition in order to be a professional poker player.