This is one of the biggest and longest running debates amongst poker players and it’s not a very easy one to answer objectively.

The reality is that it largely depends on the individual, the standard of games available, whether you are a semi-professional or professional player or just a serious recreational player.

Ok, let’s examine it more closely. Take someone who is a newbie to poker, who are likely to be the familiar names to this new poker player? Big name poker players like Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu, Joe Hachem perhaps. This newbie player knows of these players because they are famous tournament players, then surely as a logical deduction then tournament play is where all the professionals are at and hence where all the profit is at? Wrong!

There is certainly huge money to be won in some of these prestigious worldwide and online major events, but the reality is no matter how good you are you need a hell of a lot of luck to finish on the final table where the big prizes are to be won, and with only 10 to 15% of players typically even finishing in the money, the vast majority of the time even the best players fail to even cash in the majority of the events they enter. It’s not difficult to see that over any given year that there is no guarantee that even these top pros will finish in profit solely from the multi-table tournaments they play.

The reality is most of those who rely on poker for a living are doing so playing cash games. In cash games during a session, you don’t need to finish in the top 10% of the players, in fact it can happen that just one player on the table is the fish who feeds the other players. So Cash Games are more profitable then? Well maybe, but maybe not!

The reality is that cash games because of the lesser variance and the better opportunity to provide a living for your normal poker professional attract certainly at the medium stakes and higher a far larger percentage of serious players than mtts, even small stakes games these days are attracting multi-tabling grinders, many of whom are pro or semi-pro players. So to make a living in cash games you typically need to be a very dedicated solid player.  Not forgetting that you can grind out the occasional online poker bonus playing cash a lot easier than playing tourneys.

Whereas in large online tournaments, even some of the high buy-in tournaments attract a large amount of recreational players. These fun poker players attracted to the lure of the big prizes can make these poker events  EV+ for merely a good but not great player. So a pretty good poker player may find that tournament play offers his best chance of making a profit, whereas said player might not be able to beat even a small stakes cash game.