Quote Originally Posted by buonafide View Post
Pretty sure there's a bunch of winning medium-stakes PO players, but obviously once you get past microstakes the competition gets much tougher. The only newbs playing medium and high stakes are either totally new to the game or have some money to blow away. At microstakes, many people can't take a tourney seriously when the prize is worse than minimum wage.
Logically, I would think that you are right about a bunch of winning medium-stakes players at PO and elsewhere, but I can't find them any more. Even the number 1 player on the bronze list out of 8,810 (last 120 days), who maintains an ROI of 133% on bronze is a loser/break even on silver...which makes no sense at all because in years past he was one of the great online players at all stakes including a win at a $500 buy-in Bovada tourney for $75K and numerous other big wins. This same player makes about $4K a month 10-tabling $1.10 and $2.20 buy-ins, which to me seems pretty good, but if there's no hope for advancement, it's kind of discouraging. Is it possible that on Merge, players have become so good that once you get past $5 buy-ins there are really no winners at all, just great and super-great players at the top who still can't make money at that level? And if this is true on Merge, can the other sites be very far behind?

Can anyone give me the Merge screen name of someone who has an ROI of at least 40% over at least 200 tourneys at the silver level or higher? I'm wondering if poker is even beatable any more. From my limited experience on Bovada, my opinion is that as of now, it's probably beatable, but eventually the discouraged Merge players will join up there and kill the opportunities that might exist there today.