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The truth about brick and mortar poker. [ return to main articles page ]

By: Fox
Published on Oct 28th, 2005
I pride myself on being honest in this blog, and I've always done my best to stay focused on the money and how to help people make more of it. You may not like it because I'm not going to say very nice things about brick and mortar poker in general, and more specifically about large tournaments. The fact is they aren't a very good value, even for an excellent player.

Last week I played in the $1,000 buy-in main event at the Canterbury Park Fall Poker Classic.

"It's our home tournament, you have to play" Beanie said. <READMORE>I wasn't planning on playing until the night before when my conversation with Beanie (and some thinking about the huge prize pool) changed my mind. Here's a breakdown of why that was a bad choice.

Taxes. Taxes are the biggest problem with B&M poker. Sure I pay taxes on my online play, but I can average the whole thing out for the year and save myself a lot of money. If you win a big B&M tournament you pay the full taxes on the win.

Fees. You pay much larger fees in a B&M tournament than you pay online. You pay the house fee as well as a percentage of the prize pool for dealers, and often the winner gives the dealer a tip as well.

Time. A B&M tournament takes much longer than it's online counterpart.

Variance. No matter how good the structure is you will see less hands per level than you see online. The event I mentioned earlier had 50 minute rounds which is very generous. Given the starting stacks, blind structure, and round times the tournemant was about the same structure as a tournament on Party, which is the fastest structure of the major sites.

My partner Hatfield won a $300+30 event during the Fall Poker Classic, so I'm going to use that as an example. There was a deal made, but for simplicity we'll assume that there was no deal.

His win would have been $32,000 without a deal. Taxes would be about $8,000 and they take 4% for tournament staff, which is another $1,280. This leaves our hero with about 23k after an investment of about 13 hours of his time, for an hourly rate of $1,747 per hour.

If he had played online his 32k goes right into his account and any losses for the year can be claimed against it on his tax forms. When the whole year is considered for taxes as a professional gambler the taxes are lower and there is no 4% fee. a tournament with 300 entries online would have taken about 4 hours and included no driving time. His expectation after taxes for his online win would be about 25k. This makes his hourly rate about $6,250 per hour.

The variance online might be lower if he played at a site like UB with a better structure or if he played more than one tournament at a time, and his time investment was much lower. I firmly believe his win rate would be higher as well considering the much stronger play I have seen in the live tournaments when the buy-in is above $100.

When you move up to events like the World Poker Tour you see an even larger difference in the hourly rate vs. playing a few large online events. The WPT would be a lot of fun, and being on TV would certainly be neat, but remember our mantra - "It's about the money, that's how we keep score."
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