If It Was Real: The NLOP 1,000

When you're looking for work, you have a lot of "free time" on your hands -- including time to play online poker, hoping to win money while waiting for the phone to ring.  So we've spent a lot of time since November 2009 at the National League of Poker website.  In fact, last week our count reached 1,000 full tournaments in 32 months -- an average of slightly more than one tournament a day.

Have we played well enough to make online poker a career -- assuming we moved to Canada or Monaco to do it, since the U.S. government still forbids such things?  Based on NLOP's payouts, the answer would be absolutely no.  Money normally is awarded to only a few players, even in the largest tournaments.  We've been blessed with cash only seven times in 1,000 games.

But would our success rate pay off at other websites, or at real poker rooms where the top ten percent in the standings tend to win money?  That might be a different story.  We've earned "NLOP points" in 238 of those 1,000 games (23.8%) -- but that's a bit misleading, because NLOP has changed the bar for gaining points a couple of times over the years.  (At one point, the top 150 earned points in tournaments with more than 500 players.)

The last time we computed NLOP points won versus our "buy-in," we determined we doubled our points in 2011 (137,000 to enter, 281,647 won).  We admittedly have not kept track of our buy-ins during 2012, but the point payoff looks like this:

January - 12,564
February - 8,988
March - 47,511
April - 94,969
May - 45,406
June 1-20 - 28,076 (we passed the 1,000 game point last Wednesday evening)
TOTAL - 237,514 points won

We've earned points in 55 of 205 full tournaments we've entered so far this year.  Our review of the records indicates we would have missed the "top ten percent" of the standings commonly used by casinos in 12 of those cases.  But 43 out of 205 is still a 21-percent payout record.  (In "No-river Hold 'em", our 2011 record stands at 3 point wins in 18 tournaments - 16.7%.)

The buy-in amount varies from game to game -- from 750 for a monthly qualifying tournament to 50,000 for a Sunday night weekly championship.  And currently, NLOP tends to award points above the buy-in only to the top 15 players in a big tournament.  But the math from the "total" line above computes to 1,159 points won per tournament.


(The total could have been even higher, but our 13th-place finish in the 1,045-player January Senior Championship was a "cash-only" event with no points awarded.)

After crunching all these numbers, we're still led to conclude we could make a decent living at online poker -- if we played at a website with payouts similar to real casinos or poker rooms.  Oh, and it would have to be legal.  Any suggestions?