Dusty 'Leatherass' Schmidt is the money making machine behind a poker screen and the author of "Poker like business". Yesterday in his blog he published a piece on how mass multi-tabling can damage your brain.

• He is not quitting poker, but going to play 5-10 hours a week
• He is going to write a golf book.
• The people concerning are mass multi-tablers playing 8+ hours a day, 15+ tables at once
• It is advisable to play 2 hours of poker in the morning and 2 hours in the evening
• Schmidt is not a doctor, so Anyways, here is the blog post. it's a long one.

Interesting but

Come on, really? Poker isn't the only stressful high-intensity mental job out there. Air traffic controller springs to mind. Do they all die of strokes before 50? That sounds like a big stretch.

Edit: I have perhaps isolated one quote when Dusty does qualify it at some length, I do recommend reading the whole thing.

Surprised this is not getting more coverage, very interesting blog.

Not peer reviewed with a sample size of 1? Yeah, going to take this with the entire EU salt mountain. Or, more likely, laugh and utterly ignore it.

It makes sense that mass multi tabling for long sessions, being constantly focused all the time will fry your brain, but as if everything practice makes perfect, your brain is the most powerfull PC we know of and if you learn it it'll handle tasks better over time.
Tough moving up tables will eventually always come with stress, even if you think you handle it fine there is going to be a level of stress involved, and stress is never a good thing.
So far goes my opinion.

I'll read the blog in the evening.

gr. Daikie

just wrote an article about it and i guess some other sites will follow (from 'Dusty's brain got rusty' to 'poker will kill you!!! you hear me, you will die die die')


but seriously @bonfied and matt

did you read the whole text? the damage results not from stress, but a change in the brain, that allows a faster processing of information. and dusty says explicit, that only some people would be affected and that everyone who is concerned should seek medical advice since he is no expert.

This guy is the most self absorbed narcissist of all time. No matter what he writes he always includes a list of all things everyone else can do to change their lives all the while he does the opposite. Add in every blog includes that he's made over a million dollars, wrote a poker book and was almost pro golfer, oh and don't forget he had a heart attack. Guy is worse than Phil Helmuth

He is not an expert, unless this is peer reviewed it is as worthless as my opinion that eating lots of avocado reduces cancer. Because I eat a lot of avocado, and I have never had cancer.

Nice.

This guy smokes pot heavily, drinks alcohol heavily, goofs around with different combinations of Zoloft... and then worries that ONLINE POKER is going to kill him... because it CHANGES HIS BRAIN!!1!!!!!!!!!!!!

All because some head-shrinker noticed some subtle (as both parties admit) changes in some "innovative" brain scan that almost nobody else bothers to use, despite its apparently magical properties.

Also LOL that these subtle changes can apparently confirm with 100% certainty that the subject will have a stroke by a certain age.

Actually, LOL at the whole thing.

Next.

makes sense, bus as he has been playing poker since the dawn of time and moreover, he does not suggest changing everything radically but simply be cautious about the time you spend mass multi-tabling.

but seriously @you

did you read what I wrote at all? This is not based on peer-reviewed science but instead the opinion of one person proclaimed an expert. If there is a body of peer-reviewed evidence that constant use of a high-functioning processing loop greatly increases your chances of strokes then it is potentially a reasonable conclusion to draw (assuming you also had sufficient evidence that mass multi-tabling causes the creation of said loop, which would require scans of more than just Dusty Schmidt, controls etc) but absolutely none of this has been offered.

This blog and the opinions backing it are close to worthless. All they provide is an idea for a potentially interesting study.

Needs more love, the imagery is brilliant.

He claims that he was feeling great after several months of taking Zoloft, but a somewhat recent meta-analysis of SSRI class antidepressants found they are actually not much better than a placebo for all but severely depressed individuals.

I'm not saying his advice about limiting mass multi-tabling sessions is necessarily bad, i'm saying that he has no peer reviewed evidence that it will kill you early via stroke caused by stress or whatever

I did read the whole thing but the quote I have isolated is very dogmatic, particularly

At a minimum I think he should have phrased that differently. Poker may well be a factor in the diagnosis but so might life stress, the medication he was taking or any existing condition that wasn't previously apparent.

And that's the "best" srhink (hollywood) in the whole wide world? I'm impressed! He can look at some minimally abnormal brain function and associates it with whatever the hypochondriac patient wants the cause to be. geez, leatherass should be smart enough at least to suspect that there is no way of knowing how his brain was before he started playing poker, decided to retire and went to that doctor. And now that he's going through menopause and is hysteric, he thinks he's not sexy anymore and will die tomorrow, and everyone should know about it.

This and nothing else.

thats the case with everyone that has a great passion for something not just poker

talking about brain capacity n evolution is too much
it's 2013 n brain still seems very alien even to best scientists out there

sure we can debate about it but..

has he ever had an avg job with 5hours of sleep top and having to listen to your stupid boss for 10 hours every day - talk about health problems


dumbest honest poker blog attempt i've ever read

gg

I mass multi-tabled pre black friday, I suffered from anxiety (and later depression) as soon as I got into poker, which at the time was playing 4 tables max of low stakes tourneys.

By the time BF came around I was playing 15-20 tables/8+ hours a day, of all types of games (nlhe, plo, plo8, stud, stud8, mixed, etc).
After BF a small brain lesion caused me to lose sight in my right eye (optic neuritis), I'm pretty sure that wasn't poker related, even though stress is related to brain lesions, the reason I bring this up is because my main problem now is insomnia, memory loss and concentration, I don't know if it's poker related, anxiety/depression related or the brain lesion, but I have a hard time remembering things that happened hours ago and concentrating on things that at one time were pretty simple, like counting.
The doctors I've been to (psychiatrists, neurologists, neuro-eye doctors, therapists, psychologists) all have different opinions, but they all agree on something, the anxiety is what's causing the memory loss/poor concentration, which I think was caused by poker.

If your brain is healthy and have never had a history of anxiety/depression I don't think mass-multitableing will affect you in any way, it has been proven by other successful poker players, isildur1 for example.
Just like Dusty I would pay any amount to go back to my lifestyle prior to playing poker, but that was the choice I made.

what a joke, there are much more stressful jobs. Maybe his brain was already damaged before.. didn't he have a heart attack in his early 20s or something..?

I'm sorry to hear about your experiences but again they don't constitute proof of an effect from mass-multitabling regardless of anxiety/depression status.

That is a stunningly stupid blog making ridiculous claims without any scientific basis at all.

I agree, I think the anxiety/depression was caused by stressors that come with professional gambling, but it is limited to people that are in high risk of a mental illness.

go @you yourself, mkay

i just think both comments i @ddressed are kinda exaggerated

yes and i have to admit it was funny



i just don't get it, why most ppl write that he's no expert, it's a special case, yada yada ... because it is basically the same he wrote

Nice post Silvio. Have you taken corrective measures to improve your memory? Memory exercises and such?