Five essentials for making online poker a side hustle

I used to play Zynga Poker on Facebook and loved it. There was essentially no way to make real money from it but the mechanics of the game fascinated me.

After playing that enough, I investigated how to play online for real money. It was a very different experience having actual cash on the line with each pot. It's something you just don't experience until you start doing it.

Fast forward a few years, and I'm reliably pulling out more than $50/month playing a few games a week.

It's not life-changing money, but it goes directly into my savings account each time, and I enjoy doing it!

Here are the five essential pieces I've worked out over time for turning this enjoyable game into cash with very little risk.

Table of Contents

1. I learned how to play in very small stakes

Below is a graph of my profit over the entire time I've played sit-and-go (knockout) tournaments:

my online poker profit record — My online poker profit record

The road to $1,000 profit took over 2,200 games. Almost all of those games had buy-ins of $2.20 or less, as shown in the bar chart below:

The stakes and games I've played with online poker

When I started, I played sit-and-go or multi-table tournaments with extremely low buy-ins, like 25 cents or even 11 cents. I could make a lot of mistakes and bust in these games without putting myself in financial jeopardy.

I've witnessed profit graphs from other online players that were horrendous. Down five figures over the course of a couple hundred games. Ouch!

I made sure that wasn't me by starting small and never, ever coming close to getting into something that I couldn't afford to lose everything. This was all discretionary money, basically like going to the movies. Call this ultra-conservative bankroll management.

2. I moved up in the stakes only after I had a substantial positive ROI

It's a bit hard to tell from the bar graphs but my return on investment (ROI) for the $0.25 games (shown as $0.23 games because of the $0.02 rake) is 17.1%.

After I started to win those more often, I moved up to the $0.55 games ($0.50 + $0.05 rake). My ROI for those games is 13.5%.

Now I mostly play $1.1 ($1.00 + $0.10) and some $2 games. I'm just about even in both of those at the moment (-0.1% for the $1.10 games and 1.2% for the $2 games).

The times I've ventured into the higher stakes as in $6 or $10, it hasn't gone well at all. I get my hand slapped and I go back to the $1 games. It's not my time for those games yet.

Increased stakes mean increased skill level of players.

3. I got into the right kinds of games

Aside from the stakes of the games and not getting in over my head, I chose games that I had a reasonable chance of cashing in.

Some of the games were “freerolls” which meant that it was free to enter. These attracted a lot of players because there was the potential to get something for nothing. Cashing in these games involved being one of the top 50 players, and there could be 900 or more players starting the tournament. Not good odds.

But for the price of playing some hands in ring games (they could even be “fake money” games) I could enter a $500 guaranteed tournament for $0.11. In these the top 20% or so cashed. Much better odds for a small price.

I've taken the approach that any cash is good in a tournament, even if it's just a little. It's money back in my pocket, and because I won the money it's money that I can eventually withdraw. (One of the rules on the poker site I use is that you have to wager at least once before you can withdraw the money.)

4. I took advantage of incentives from the site

This is what let me bring the risk of profiting down basically to zero.

After I validated my account, I could claim free in-game cash simply by signing in and clicking a button.

Free. Money. Every. Day.

On normal weeks the daily bonus would be anywhere between $0.25 and $1.00. During big tournament after-parties the site would boost these bonuses. I think one week the bonus was over $30! More recently the bonus has been around $17.

If I'm playing $0.11 games and $0.25 games and $1.00 games, the site is basically paying me to play. If I lose, it's with the house's money.

Of course, they're keeping me on the site so that I'll potentially make bigger deposits with them. And I may … if I get a lot better. But I'm not there yet, so I'm happy letting them pay me to play. 🙂

5. I didn't chase wins or profits

I'm not of the mind that poker is gambling. It's a game of skill that has a very high variance of outcomes.

There is very much a tendency to treat it like gambling, though, and it gets people into trouble. In fact, it's this tendency that make poker profitable for people who know how to play. Over time, a skilled player will know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em, whereas an unskilled player will play two-card bingo and get played by real players.

Here's an example. The freerolls (free-entry) allow unlimited rebuys (re-entry for a fee) before a certain time in the tournament. One such tournament had a player at my table who rebought about six times in a row. I watched him shove (put all of his chips in the pot) and lose, over and over again, and he kept coming back for more. Eventually I said in the chat: “I hope you win at least one hand with your buy-in” and he laughed. But he had taken a free tournament and turned it into a not-insignificant loss before the first break.

I was just playing a freeroll for fun, and had ace-queen. One of the loose players at the table shoved. I called. He turned over four-eight. I was a two-to-one favorite, and he hit a four on the flop. I lost my chips on a bad beat.

But I just said “oh well” and didn't buy back in. Buying back in would have been silly. And a downward spiral that would cost me.

Not life-changing money, but I get paid for having fun

To my mind there are worse ways to spend time in the evening than playing poker and making a bit of money over time.

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