How Poker Players Make Money

This isn't as simple as you might think.  We just don't sit down at the table, real or virtual, and start playing.  It's more complicated than that.

Think of it this way.  How do you go to college?  First, you have to pick a major, or at least, what you're interested in.  But what class or classes do you take, and on what basis do you choose?  When it meets?  Who the professor is?  Whether it's a day or night class?

And what about a class that's not in a classroom?  Colleges have classroom settings, online courses, correspondence courses, or even classes that are a combination of one or more of these.

You get the idea.

Poker is the same.  There are lots of options.  Do you want to play cash games, where you buy chips and play until you're broke, the table breaks, or you quit?.  Or do you want to play tournaments, where the strategic elements are different, the tournament goes until someone wins, and the top 10% or so of finishers divide the prize pool?

Say you pick tournaments.  Do you want to play against a few people, hundreds, or thousands?  Live or online?  Do you want a fast structure, or a slow one?  Do you want to play No Limit Hold 'em, or one of the many other poker variants (Limit Hold 'em, Pot Limit Ohama, Razz, Stud, Draw Poker, and others)?  There are even mixed games, where the game being played changes with every new orbit of the table.
There are also variants of the variants.  No Limit Hold 'em (NLHE) can be played with a double or nothing prize structure where at a table of 10 players, the first 5 who are knocked out get nothing, play stops, and the remaining 5 each get roughly twice their buy-in.

NLHE satellites are also popular.  Winning a satellite is a popular way to win a spot in an expensive tournament.  In satellites, the top X% of players get a spot in the bigger tournaments.There are even satellites to satellites, where a player might win a satellite to a bigger satellite, keep moving up to bigger satellites, and win a free spot to a $10,000 buy-in tournament at the World Series of Poker with a relatively small investment.  Accountant Chris Moneymaker won over a million dollars at the World Series of Poker Main event, which was a $10,000 buy-in tournament.  It cost him $200.

There is one more thing that poker players have to consider.  You can actually win money by the act of playing itself.  Like brick-and-mortar casinos, most online poker sites have VIP reward systems.  If you play a lot, there are a lot of different ways to profit.  On americascardroom.com, I am playing for VIP bonuses that I can exchange for cash, free tournament entries, or merchandise.  I am also playing for an initial deposit bonus, which means that after a certain amount of play, the amount of my initial $50 rental deposit is given back to me in increments, $1 at a time (my next tournament will be worth an extra $1), as I put in a certain amount of play at a certain level.

Some players play so much that they find it more profitable to play a lot than to worry about how much they win at the tables.  There is a German player who has played 100 tables at a time!  This was documented by a member of the PokerStars staff who went to his house and watched him play.  He barely broke even at the tables, but he got some big bonuses for his VIP level.  An Italian player was the first to win a Porsche, in addition to what he actually won at the tables, for his PokerStars VIP play.

So it's not as simple as just sitting down to play.  I specialize in certain types of tournaments, and I usually know what I'm looking for.  Even so, when I play online I check the tournament line-up every time I sit down, to see whether there is anything new.