Great final post to top off an astonishing career. Probably the most successful Scottish cash game player of all time? I guess if I want to be like you I'm going to have to start journaling now

Thanks for sharing Donald.

GL with things.

Beautiful post. I've read through this thread multiple times for inspiration.

The last bullet point hit me in the feels. Massive ggwpwp.

I'll take the offer and ask a couple questions. Thank you for you time btw.

1. Advice on being more consistent? I've been playing professionally for about 1.5 years and I can't seem to get out of what I call my boom and bust cycle. I go through periods of extreme motivation where I'm living and breathing poker 24/7 and then it will stop in an instant and I'm generally depressed for days or weeks and the thought of poker disgusts me and then eventually the boom cycle starts again, rinse and repeat.

2. Best tip for improving winrate? I've been floundering around 3-4bb for the year and I feel like there is 1-2bb of winrate that I'm missing somewhere but I can't figure it out. I feel like my BB wr should be lower than it is (-30) and my CO(18) seems super low compared to my BTN(30). I have a feeling this answer is going to be different for everybody but doesn't hurt to ask

Sick mic drop. Honored and flattered to make the shout out list.

Totally resonates that poker is a great job as a broke young adult and kinda meh as time goes on. It's blue collar, we operate our hot dog stands and clock in and out on our own schedules with limited growth (and income) potential. It is what it is, but a relatively stress free 100k-250k (or more) as your own boss with low/no overhead is nothing to sneeze at. Especially if you're in a gambling tax free jurisdiction.

Happy to hear life is going well, wishing you the best

Insane ending post to an insane thread, probably one of the best blogs here on 2p2. I started playing poker seriously relatively late (2019) and I always go back reading yours/linus/bbb/makeboi/ymb/stefans blogs for some motivation when having tough times during my grind through midstakes (still cant beat 500nl after 2years).

1. What advice would you give to someone whos, oppositely to you, working full time as a Computer Scientist and is beating midstakes decently(not crushing) on the side niy wants to pursue poker as a career? Is it worth making the switch given what you said about upper limits being lower in Poker? I ofcourse enjoy grinding poker more than working a regular CS job.
   
2. How should one start about his mental health when you have days feeling very positive about life etc and then feeling like **** and wanting to just sleep throughout the day the very next day?

Great end to a successful journey. Wish you all the best in your future endeavours Donald!

Great update/final entry to a great blog and poker career. You also had a super positive impact on my life, poker game, football trophy cabinet and bankroll due to prop bets over the past 10ish(?) years.

Just cos something doesn't work out (which i'm sure it will - you generally excel at everything you touch, except maybe call of duty), doesn't make it a mistake. I think it's awesome you're pursuing the things you wanna do and I wish you nothing but the best.

Settle down Dods, do your work.

<3

gg's d7, hope you remain in happiness, buddy.

what a banging post. truly a great ending to a fantastic career, but also notably the start of something new and exciting.

gl moving forward and stay in touch <3

V inspiring thread gl on ur next journey

was wondering if you had any advice on how to avoid just mindlessly trying to copy pio outputs and build your game effectively

great stuff donald, good luck with everything next

Thanks man

Hmm, not sure. He was kinda on his way out as I started, but maybe JackRich or someone like that?

Top 5 top 5 top 5

Cheers man

1. Yea this is a super common and super costly mindset. One of the things we hammer into our guys is that consistency beats intensity every time. I think it all comes down to balance - probably what's happening is that you're burning yourself out during the boom, such that some part of you eventually just says no. Then you feel guilty about the time off and feel the need to 'catch up' by going full bore, etc etc.

My advice would be to treat it a little more like a job - decide what a good day/week looks like for you, tick the things off and consider that a job well done. Even if that means leaving a little in the tank sometimes. You need time away from the screen with your loved ones, you need time off (at least 1 day/week) etc etc - so budget for these things and try to design a routine you can stick with long term.

2. First off - realise that there is almost exactly 0 info to be gained by looking at your positional winrates. It's a weird little wrinkle - people understand that 100k hands at 4bb doesn't mean a winrate is 4bb, but forget that when looking at *JUST* e.g. CO winrate, over obviously smaller sample.

Obviously "it depends" but most guys at small and midstakes are playing too conservatively (folding too much especially on later streets, and not bluffing enough against the other guys doing the same) and too linearly through the main lines (i.e. thinking 'is this hand good enough to bet?', and so betting their X% strongest hands and main x/f'ing the rest).

I think most guys spend too much time studying pio and not enough time studying who they're playing against and what *makes money* in their games. You are almost never playing against the nemesis.

GL

Thanks man - you were my first ever coach and it had a massive impression on me at the time when I really wasn't sure if I could make a thing of it or not. Much appreciated

1. Tough to say - on the one hand life is too short to just be $EV maximising all the time, and if you want to follow your dream there will never be a perfect time to do it. On the other hand, I think objectively poker is getting tougher and will continue to do so. I've seen some of the latest generation solver training tools and they're pretty sick, it's quite hard to imagine these tools get worse over the next couple years. Also, kinda sucks to say but I think it depends quite a lot now on your jurisdiction - if you can play in very soft regulated pools (that might join together relatively soon) then there's a decent shot you can make big bucks for a few years. Luckily with your CS background there will always be a job waiting for you aswel, so perhaps your downside is pretty limited.

2. Like I mentioned in my post, the key is to do the right things BEFORE it feels super urgent. If you're anything like me, I don't particularly feel like it when everything is gravy, but I've realised it's important I tick them off anyway so that the mechanisms are in place when I really need them. It's really just a discipline thing. I feel like we live in an age of distraction now, where it's never been more commonly known how to live a steady, happy life, but in a sense it's never been more difficult to execute now that we all carry such a highly optimised distraction machine in our pockets.

Thanks very much Ted!

The few months I spent in your CFP definitely the fattest value I've ever really got from a coaching setup. Gave me the confidence to take a shot moving up to 400nl immediately after, with $16k to my name (in the early days of scripting). IIRC I had two 30k months back to back, which basically sent me on my way to HS. Was at a difficult time for me personally aswel, so made a huge difference to my life situation and self confidence. Much appreciated man

Thanks very much brother.

I maintain that on a different day I'd have smashed that rice-eating propbet, lmfao.

Cheers dude

Cheers kidder! Talking of something new and exciting, you guys out in Aus now??

Good question!

I kinda touched on this above, but you've got to realise you're definitely NOT playing against pio at the tables. Therefore trying to mimic pio outputs is clearly not the maxEV strategy. Lots of people wind up in circles thinking that they either need to max exploit (in the case they're playing someone bad) or 0 exploit (if it's someone good), without realising that it's a continuum.

Imagine a toy game where player 1's correct strategy is to bet all their value, plus X% of their bluffs. Vs that strategy, player 2 (who has only bluffcatchers) should call Y% and fold the rest.

If player 1 bluffs slightly too often, player 2's maxEV response is to call always, fold never. Is player 1 bluffs slightly too little, player 2 'should' fold always call never.

However, if player 2 just thinks that maaaybe player 1 is bluffing sliiiightly too little, it's also a perfectly valid response to just call slightly less than Y% and not sweat it too much. No, it's not the maxEV response in either case, but it is a 'good enough' response in a world where player 2 can't be 100% sure about player 1's strategy. This I think is the key point a lot of guys who get stuck at 100 and 200nl are missing.

When making a decision, you should have an idea of how the equilibrium situation looks, an idea about how your opponent MIGHT be playing suboptimally, and therefore make what I call 'soft' adjustments based on that assumption. Hard exploits (like dramatic, T high calldown territory) are also fine/have their place, I just prefer to put together my strategies with the caveat that I might be wrong.

Thanks very much man

=======================

Appreciate the questions guys, keep them coming

Congrats on the great career and gl in the future!

What was the biggest mistakes you saw students you coached throughout the years make that ended up with them not seeing success / potential that you thought they maybe could've reached?

Great post and best of luck for the future.

Do you ever see yourself working as an 'employee' (shudder) again or do you plan to always be self-employed? I think for many folks it would be difficult going back to working for someone else after so long being a poker pro.

A few things.

Firstly, in 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' they talk about how humans need to 'win' much more often than they 'lose' in order to feel neutral. For most people, they need to feel the feeling of winning between 2 and 3 times as often as they feel the sensation of losing in order to emotionally break even. I think this explains a lot of what you typically see from mediocre players. For example, calling a small bet with a bad hand on the river is a situation where you're typically gonna lose 60% of the time. Therefore it's easier to do some mental gymnastics and justify a fold than it is to take your +$EV and -emotionalEV. Bluffing needing to get it through <50% also falls into this category of situation.

I also think this explains why a lot of the time, our students report a huge decrease in poker-related stress when the decide to intentionally blind themselves from their results. Conditional of having a reasonable bankroll management strategy, it's objectively better to look at your results as infrequently as possible. It will also help you to place the results in their proper context - of course you should care about the outcome, but it's actually quite far out of your control.

Another big thing is self-belief. Lots of guys (arguably myself included) cost themselves massive amounts of EV by not moving up quickly enough. Kinda traces back to results-orientation yet again, but basically I see the job of someone playing less than $1kNL is just to get the hell out of small-midstakes as quickly as possible.

Which ties into a third big one - lots of guys show a lot of resistance to game-selecting. Another spot where from the outside view, if you're playing poker to make money, the obvious thing to do is to play in the games that make you the most money. I've seen credible sounding arguments from guys who say they are also playing to be the best, which is admirable, but even if that's genuinely your goal, you should still take the most direct route through small and midstakes so you can start playing with the actually good guys.

Last thing is consistency. I'd say it's actually really not hard to execute a day where you improve drastically faster than the average. What's very hard is to keep that up for the ~2-3 years it takes for that to translate into being one of the best in the world. Lots of guys unfortunately get stuck in the boom/bust cycle another poster described above, very hard to sustain the type of progress needed to really make it in poker without mastering yourself and figuring out how to put in that effort consistently. I'd recommend 'Atomic Habits' for anyone struggling with this.

I've thought about this a bit in the last while - basically I think programming is a skill where one person can be 1,000x as valuable as another, I'm quite objectively on the lower end of that scale just now. Therefore, it might be a decent strategy for me to take a job (probably remote? idk) where I can basically drastically increase me skills, earn a decent wage etc, then leave once my value catches up.

IDK though, you're definitely right that the freedom of being your own boss is addictive, definitely one of the things I'm most grateful for.

Glad we got to have the time together that we did. I'm sure you will be successful at whatever you apply yourself too. Hope to see you again sometime soon, much love

Cant remember the last time I read a post this good on 2p2

Thanks for the read and best of luck for the future !

Thanks and gl d7

Would you say that you/the team at bitb have everything figured out in regard to poker theory?