I’ve modeled the potential profits and losses for a player with the statistics I just described. The bands in the chart show the plausible range of wins and losses for the player, enough to cover 95 percent of all possible cases. After he plays 60,000 hands—about as many as he’d get in if he played forty hours a week in a casino every week for a full year—the player could plausibly have made $275,000 or have lost $35,000. In essence, this player could go to work every day for a year and still lose money. This is why it is sometimes said that poker is a hard way to make an easy living.
