As usual, very entertaining trip report. Thanks for keeping your fans in the loop

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Thank you for the update. I enjoyed reading it.

Thanks for posting, enjoyed the perceptive analysis as always- and I wouldn't give up on june poker in vegas if I were you

thanks for the update! glad the year's going well. too bad our WSOP time won't overlap.

Thanks for popping in, all. I'm glad this PGC hasn't been totally forgotten.

bob, I hear you, I had seen in your thread a few weeks back you wouldn't be there during the beginning of WSOP. Definitely a bummer after the previous two summers. There's some % chance I go back out this summer, in which case I'll hit you up. Glad things are going well on your end.

Anyone have resources (either books or individual vids/series) they can recommend for improving at fixed limit o8? I'm becoming more and more confident that I'm simply not that good at it. I've read the Hwang FL08 chapter a few times, the Ray Zee book, the o8 chapter in SS2, etc. and watched some RIO 8 game vids way back when, but didn't find any of those resources particularly great albeit they were indeed helpful. Feel free to PM me if you'd rather not post in here. Thanks for any help.

If you haven't already, you should check out Andrew Barber's well.

Obviously the strategic commentary is not nearly as detailed as a book/video, but he touches on some interesting concepts challenging the conventional wisdom of the resources you mentioned.

Longtime fan of the thread, hope you keep it up.

Not sure how but I wasn't aware anyone had responded until now; thanks a lot for the post, kind words, and feedback!

I read Andrew's well around the time he was doing it, but I think giving it another look is a good idea. Will probably check it out after I post this.


QUICK UPDATE: Things have been going fine post-wsop. Games locally over the summer haven't been great per annual tradition, but I've had a decently profitable stretch since coming home. Despite the losing wsop experience, I feel free of any kind of downswing type mentality, which is an upgrade over this point the last couple of summers. Best of all, I've been making more of an effort to grind a certain minimum amount of hours/week and my volume has actually been respectable the last few weeks.

On the life front, things are still very far from where I'd like to them to be but I'm at least in good spirits. One thing that's helped is making more of an effort to be social. Not sure whether it's actually been doing anything, but I've also been taking a multivitamin pill from GNC as well as a fish oil tablet every day for the last few weeks and I do feel a bit better physically.

I had an idea for a business recently that I thought was a really good idea but after doing additional research ultimately concluded that it's probably not worth pursuing. I don't really want to elaborate further as I haven't completely ruled it out yet. Even though it looks like it's not going to happen, the whole experience of mapping out what the business would look like was very energizing and fun and it provided even further reinforcement of how eager I am to move on to something beyond poker.

Some recommendations:
Book: Walk Through Walls by Marina Abramovic, an autobiography of one of the greatest performance artists ever
TV: The Handmaid's Tale (Hulu original, I got a free Hulu trial just so I could watch it)
Documentary: Lo and Behold (on Netflix)

I've started a new quasi-PGC (i.e, not actually a "p"gc at all) for fun re: my adventures in the game Overwatch and streaming the same on twitch: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/7...-wsop-1706171/

If you lack interest in video games, you may not find it interesting at all, but given the format I figured at least some people in here might find it worth checking out. In the unlikely event I start streaming poker as well, I'll post here again.

The mods of 2p2 have decided my thread referenced immediately above is fit for neither the Video Games forum nor the House of Blogs forum, so it's been deleted. Carry on, crickets.

Your thread about a video game isn't allowed in the forum about video games? Interesting.

Sick thread! Any update on the search for a career outside of poker?

I was a bit surprised that it wasn't allowed anywhere on 2p2. It would have been fun and an opportunity for me to write some more on here. I'm not upset about it, though.

Thanks for the kind words and for checking out the thread. Re: post-poker, I haven't made much progress but am still eager to be doing something else with my life. I'm pretty bored with poker, especially the local scene, and more often than not when I've been playing over the last few months I've felt like I'd rather be doing something else. That scenario was unfathomable to me in 2013 when I quit my job, as I was worried at the time I would spend the rest of my life obsessed with poker. I've been changing it up lately by playing more mixed games, but I'm struggling to reach the same level of competency with them I have in big bet games while also not taking them nearly as seriously. I would love to be doing something other than poker for a career, but I don't find any options particularly compelling right now and it's been difficult to motivate myself to pursue or even think much about other things when this life has been so "easy."

Anyways, not much of an update, I know, but not much has changed since I stopped posting regularly in here. Inertia is a difficult force to overcome.

what kind of mix games run in your area? unfortunately i find it's usually either way too small of a game or a decent bit bigger of a game than a 5/10nl equiv.

Weekly 10-20 WHK (15-30) O8, weekly 10-20 THORSE, an occasional 10-20 WHK (15-30) OE game, and sporadic 20-40 or 30-60 with a larger mixed rotation (adding in games like super stud and limit big o and omaha hi).

yeah unfortunately although fun, that's a big pay cut from your 5/10 plo game

What is THORSE? I googled it and got nothing. Is the "T" 2-7 triple draw?

yes

Thanks for the update. It's definitely hard to change habits, especially when you don't absolutely need to.

Here's to hoping we can all find our passions be it poker or some other pursuit.

Late to the party, obviously, but am quite happy that i still discover quality threads like these on 2 + 2

Quite the journey that you had there karamazonk, with PLO, books, self-developping insights etc., but darn, those WSOP trips I must say though, as a Canadian that will definitely not make the summer trip anytime soon - ehhhhh, that 30% withhold, combined with the summer heat , I think not -, it has been fun to live vicariously through your annual venture And I do hope, for strictly selfish reasons, that you once again make the trip next year.

GL friend with poker, but mainly life crushing and whatever the next step might be for you You never thought of making some European/Latin America trips to play tournament events and travel?

"T" is indeed deuce to seven triple draw and is one of my favorite games of that mix. I prefer the THOE games to the RS games.

Cheers to that! Thanks, jtitties.

Thanks for the kind words, dubnjoy! I am a longtime fan of yours and your threads.

I'm still unsure about whether I'll be heading to the WSOP this summer. To be honest, the cumulative psychological impact of the last few summers has been pretty severe, and, combined with the fact I now find myself in the worst 10 month stretch of results I've had since becoming a pro five years ago, I don't know if I want to put myself in a position mentally to potentially endure another bad summer.

Re: traveling, I never really considered doing it for the sake of playing tournaments, but not doing more of it has been one of my biggest regrets of how I've been spending my time as a pro. I'm hoping to at least do some traveling while I still have a lot of flexibility in my life.

UPDATE:

As I alluded to in my previous post, my poker results have been poor relative to my usual standards starting with the last WSOP. I’m still far from having had a losing eleven months, but this has to be the most demoralizing (almost) year of poker I’ve ever had. As a result, I found myself getting more and more frustrated and playing less and less poker and I may not even hit 1000 hours of live play over a twelve month span.

I’ve taken a lot of beats over the past year that have seemed especially cruel. To take a recent example, I was playing 2-5 NL about a month ago, the first extended no limit hold’em I’ve played in a long time. I’m +$300 after a few hours, pleased enough with my results given I am shaking rust off, and am about to leave because I’m tired. I grab racks and plan on leaving once the BB hits me. I’m UTG. I’m dealt pocket 8s. Someone BTN straddles ($10), the BB calls, I make it $55, BTN calls, and the BB calls. Flop J84 rainbow. BB leads $125 ($300 more behind). I call. The BTN calls. Turn 4x. BB instantly jams allin. I call. BTN folds. I instantly turn over my hand but then see the bad news: BB turns over the rarely fast-played quad fours. I leave the table with my profit gone and a pit in my stomach. I walk back to my car in utter disbelief at how poorly I’ve been running for so long.

This beat hit me harder than it should have because of the circumstances surrounding it. The background was that I had already had a frustrating week, and as alluded to a frustrating year in general. Getting back into NL, it felt good to book a winner my first session back after quite some time, and it felt like a rare victory for once in awhile. Then with racks ready to go, already having decided it’s my final hand, I set over set someone but then end up losing, and in a kind of darkly comical manner where the guy played his quads in a way most people wouldn’t.

This continued a mental narrative I’ve been struggling with where, many times I’ve started to make some kind of progress towards getting out of the rut of negativity, things just boomerang the other way again quickly. I’ve been going through this cycle over and over and over and over again the last year, with one single extended stretch of positive variance I can recall whereas I’ve had several extended stretches of negative variance.

To make matters worse for the year, a lot of my already low volume has not been quality volume. Frustrated and bored with PLO, I started playing a lot of mixed games after the WSOP. While these games have typically been smaller than the games I normally play and my winrate is definitely much higher in PLO, they’re still big enough I believe if I play very well I can make $35+/hr and possibly $50+/hr. In that sense, I would still consider these games to be quality games. However, I have not been playing well enough in them to make them quality games for myself.

The problem is, these games effectively became a way for me to play poker and tell myself I was putting in volume when in reality I was using them to have fun in poker again but in a way where I was prioritizing fun and straight gambling/chasing over solid play and profit. I don’t know why, but I’m a lot more disciplined in big bet games than limit games. I’m also more naturally skilled at big bet games and believe it will take a decent amount of study and experience before I’m similarly competent at limit games. Anyways, I now find myself in the awkward and inexcusable position of having devoted over 1/3 of my volume over the last year to these games while making minimal profit off of them. To put it mildly, this is problematic if I care about being a pro poker player and maximizing my earnings.

Over the last few months, I felt particularly miserable and unconfident. I found myself spending a massive amount of time playing video games to distract myself from the pain. Good habits I had developed, like reading, working out, and meditating, fell by the wayside. When I did play poker, in PLO games especially, I typically felt a mix of bored, anxious, and distracted, and felt more than ever like I was passing time just to check off a box as to some volume having been satisfied. While my PLO results have still been pretty solid despite estimating I’ve been running somewhere around $40k below EV in allin pots over the last year, I’ve been enjoying the game less than ever, finding local PLO extraordinarily boring and slow. As a result I haven’t been pushing myself to play it much and that’s part of why I wanted to start getting back into NL.

The day after the one outer with the set of eights described above, I headed to the poker club where I play the mixed games for their weekly O8 game. I missed getting a seat by less than a minute in a game where not getting a seat immediately is usually a recipe for at least a two hour wait to get into the game. Exasperated by that, I headed to the casino and played some 2-2 PLO (the only PLO running that night), where I managed to lose $600 in a soft game that had barely any money on the table. Again, things just continued to not go my way.

Something happened that night and I hit a kind of breaking point where I realized I needed to treat myself like I was in a crisis situation. So, I did. I didn’t play any poker for ten days and then played sparingly over the next couple of weeks until I went into full gear again last week. I started meditating 10 minutes/day. I started reading again. I worked out. I played less video games. I took a step back and realized how overwhelmingly negative my attitude about everything had become. I reread this thread and reminded myself of what I am capable of while being grateful for the better times I’ve had in my poker career. I did a lot of thinking about my life and what I want to accomplish and realized how little progress I’ve been making.

The last few weeks, I’ve felt a lot better. I realize now that I care more about making progress in my personal development than I do my success or improvement in poker; in fact, it’s been that way for a long time but I haven’t demanded myself to act accordingly until now. Poker used to be everything to me in life, quasi-involuntarily; it was all I could think about it and I treated it like my #1 priority in life whether I admitted that to myself or not. Around the time I started this thread that started to no longer be the case and I’m grateful for it. Sadly, this thread was intended to be about my transition away from poker but in reality it’s been more about my torrid love affair with poker and the hot and cold swings that have come along with it.

So I reaffirm to myself how important it is that I grow as a person. I want to do so much more in life that I haven’t been doing, and I’m not getting any younger. All that being said, funny enough I’ve been having more fun playing poker and have been feeling more intellectually interested in it the last couple of weeks than I’ve felt in over a year. Ultimately, I want to transition out of poker within a year or two, but I’m no longer feeling the same urgency to leave it. I am, however, feeling urgency to continue the efforts of the last couple of weeks and make my life better. I find myself with renewed vigor in approaching both my life and poker.

As Winston Churchill said, "If you're going through hell, keep going." Hang in there Kara.

Best,

Big Body

Nice post. I've experienced many of the same things you have RE: wanting to have fun in poker, being negative, not wanting to play, wanting to do something else with my life.

I think one of the biggest negatives of poker is that it's not truly a creative endeavor. Yes, we do make "creative" plays at the table and we feel good about finding another way to win a pot, but there's not that working with our hands and making something feel. We're not growing anything (except hopefully our cash reserves/bank accounts). We're not helping anybody. We're not making a positive impact on the world.

I think we all want to feel like we are growing or getting better at something. But in poker, after a while, the decisions more or less become automatic, standard. And then, it's up to variance. We have no real control over the cards that come out. And that's what gets us, I think. We want to feel like we are going in a good direction toward a better life, but the cards have no heart, no mind. Then we wonder why we are involved in something where we have no control.

Anyway, that was a bit of a rant. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Wishing you all the best in your endeavors.

Hardly any profession makes a positive impact on the world. Businessmen, lawyers, your local warehouse pickers, the fast food worker, the grocery workers. You take a lot of professions out of this world, and we become slightly inconvenienced. And a lot of the above just siphon money out of the economy for the profits of a few in exchange for unnecessary goods and services, not much different from a poker player. Once poker players realize this, imo, it becomes infinitely easier to accept being a poker player.

If one wants to make an impact, be a teacher, a doctor, a firefighter, a farmer. Or, volunteer time and donate to charities. At the end of the day, we can all want meaning in our professions, but the current world isn't structured as such.